I recently posted a blog entry regarding Calendar Syncing. Therein, I addressed my need to sync iCal on my Macbook with Google Calendar in order to force it to sync with other calendars since Google Calendar can be synced with so very many things.

I successfully used CalGoo Connect for this. It was quite easy and I haven’t noticed any problems, but after writing that post, I learned that OS X Leopard’s (10.5.x) iCal actually supports CalDAV out of the box. (Thanks for the tip John!) And if you’re wondering what CalDAV is, like I was, wonder no more. It’s a protocol for talking about calendar events (big surprise!); see Wikipedia for more info.

Since I prefer to keep as many fingers out of my pie as possible, it was a no brainer that I was going to have to figure out how to link my iCal to my Google Calendar using this handy new standard. It took only a couple of minutes to pull my Google Calendars into iCal after adding a CalDAV account to iCal as described on Google’s CalDAV support page. My primary Google Calendar came into iCal first and I then selected my Work Google Calendar under Delegation. All the calendars a CalDAV account has access to are listed under Delegation on the Accounts page of iCal’s Preferences dialog.

Now, since I had previously synced iCal with Google via CalGoo Connect, using CalDAV to import my Google Calendars into iCal was redundant and all my entries were apparently duplicated. This was easily remedied by deleting the native calendars from iCal, leaving only the Google Calendars. It was easily remedied without any problems because… I synced one last time via my old sync tool before adding a CalDAV account. The Google Calendars now available in iCal are stored locally on my Macbook and available whenever I’m offline. By default, iCal’s preferences will sync with Google every 15 minutes if internet access is available.

Then, I dragged CalGoo Connect (and the CalGoo Connect folder I found in the root folder of my hard drive) to the trash. Of course, if you’re not on Leopard yet, your Mac doesn’t have native support for CalDAV, so CalGoo Connect or some other option will still be necessary.

When I next looked at my iPhone’s native calendar app, I noticed that everything was gone. This is because MobileMe removed everything from my iPhone when I deleted the native calendars from iCal on my Macbook. MobileMe does not push CalDAV calendars from iCal on my Macbook to my iPhone. Boo! But the iPhone also supports CalDAV. Yea! But it only brings over your primary CalDAV calendar, no delegates. Boo! So the native calendar app on my iPhone now displays my primary Google Calendar. And that’s fine because I’m actually using Pocket Informant’s calendar on the iPhone.

To set up a CalDAV account on your iPhone, you must have firmware version 3.0. Open the Settings App, select “Mail, Contacts, Calendars” and click the “Add Account…” option. Select “Other” from the next screen, and then “Add CalDAV Account” from the screen after that. For a Google Calendar, use “google.com” as the server name and then your Google Account username and password. That’s it.

Copyright © 2009 Brian O’Dell