Surprising news today. Google integrates the online Calendar with iCal. After what has been years of one way action between iCal and Google Calendars, Google finally supports the CalDAV protocol and brings in a tool ‘Calaboration’ for adding calendars to iCal. From the Google Mac Blog:
The Google Calendar team is proud to announce the public release of our support for the CalDAV protocol. You can now use Apple iCal with your Google Calendar, so you can work even when you’re offline, sync almost instantly, respond to invitations from others and see the free/busy data of your friends and coworkers.
I immediately downloaded the little applet “Calaboration”, which lets you add calendars to iCal. After providing your Google ID and password, it shows you a list of available calendars and you can then add them to iCal. Once added Calaboration will offer to open up iCal for you.
Inside iCal, the calendars come under a separate section for “Google:Calendars”. I added an event and instantly I could see the spinner syncing data. Refreshing the online calendar showed that it did in fact transfer that data. The calendar will refresh every 5 minutes on its own, so if you add any events online, they will be synced right up.
This is great news for Mac users who don’t want to stray into MobileMe territory. Download the applet and give it a spin.
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
Personal use is mildly interesting, however especially for small businesses already using Google email for their domain and Google Apps, this could provide shared calendaring with sync right to iCal, the desktop, and the iPhone. There are other sync tools, and some work OK, but this native support from Google really closes the loop.
How is this different than using CalDav to sync iCal with Google Calendar (Settings-Accounts)?
Will this work any differently or better than BusySync? Which I already own and use. I set it up once, never touch it, and it works perfectly.
@John: I am pretty sure this could not be done before. I tried to do two way sync and the only way possible was to use SpanningSync possibly BusySync as Jason mentions.
@Jason: I’d suggest you stick to your current solution. If it works good, why change!
Now it’s time to do an iPhone app for that!
Sweet timing Google. I just bought BusySync last week.
Once you have the calendars added to Calendar, though, how the heck do you get the out of Calendar?
Calendar disables the Delete command for Google calendars added using Calaborate. <:(
calaborate creates new categories in ical. The Problem is that you can’t delete the last calendar in a category and you neither can’t delete the category.
Is there a solution out there?