CTO Lab

As we are big Apple fans here at Voxeo, I was delighted to see in The Unofficial Apple Weblog this morning that Google has officially supported the CalDAV/iCal sync mechanism that lets your Google Calendar appear in your iCal on your Mac (along with other mechanisms outlined in the Google blog post). I’ve been using this sync mechanism for a while now and it does work great on my MacBook Pro laptop. In iCal on my local system, I can see all the appointments in my Google Calendar. I can edit them. I can delete them. I can create new appointments in iCal that then propagate up to Google Calendar. All in all, it works great.

There’s just this one wee little problem…

It doesn’t really work with the iPhone!

It sort of works… in that you can see your Google Calendar down on your iPhone… but that’s all you can do – see your GCal – and only when you sync your iPhone to your Mac.

So if I want to keep connecting my iPhone to my Mac, I can keep getting a read-only version of my Google Calendar on my iPhone. Yep… no editing… no deleting… no creating new appointments in my Google Calendar… and no updates to the calendar between syncs to the Mac. In other words, it is pretty much:

Useless.

Especially because the iPhone is typically where I most want to see and modify my calendar. It’s often when I’m out and about – or meeting someone at an event – that I want my most up-to-date calendar, and I want the ability to insert appointments right then that could be seen by others through Google Calendar.

Now iPhones can work with Apple’s MobileMe to do “Over-The-Air” (OTA) syncing of iCal calendars to the iPhone. However, MobileMe seems to only let you sync “local” iCal calendars to your iPhone (and yes, I tried it). There was no way that I could see to configure MobileMe to let you sync a calendar that was not locally created in iCal.

I want OTA syncing and I want full editing/creating of my calendar on my iPhone. It’s that simple.

To this end, several colleagues have recommended (and they use) SpanningSync which will apparently enable Google Calendar to work via MobileMe with my iPhone. So that is definitely on my list to consider…

In the meantime, I do completely applaud Google opening up Google Calendar so that it can sync with iCal (and other calendar systems). I just wish it could go the next step and get down to my mobile device.

Any other solutions that you all have found?

Technorati Tags: google, google calendar, gcal, ical, caldav, apple, iphone, mac