Anyone using CalDAV? ical, gcal, and the iPhone

duncanapple · Nov 3, 2008

Hi all,

I am trying to configure my ical, gcal accounts, and iphone to sync together with modest success. Here is what I have;

A) A google calendar account with my online calendar, as well as my fiances shared calendar.

B) An ical on my alum macbook.

C) My iphone

I followed these instructions http://www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/answer.py?answer=99358# and have only been moderately successful.

First off, my calendars are a mess - for whatever reason none of the color coding is consistent with any of the three devices (gcal, ical, and iphone).

Second, I have figured out from INSIDE ical, if I want the update to show up in all three places, i can only update the google calendar account - if I update the regular calendar account it will not feed back to gcal.

Third, (having figured out #2) if i make an update to my iphone calendar, I cant get it to push back to gcal after syncing to the mac. It goes to ical just fine, but from the iphone I cant update the gcal accounts that WILL push back to the online gcal itself.

I am pretty sure the above sounds confusing as h3ll and it sort of is. Has anyone successfully gotten all three devices to talk to each other? Meaning you have made a new event in each device and had it show up in each place after a sync?

This is all so painful its almost not worth it... good grief... Is it too much to ask in 2009 to be able to share a calendar with someone and view it on the fly via the internet, a desktop app, and a mobile device?

Any help is appreciated.... Thanks - Chris

efice32 · Nov 3, 2008

Yeah I'm having the same issue you are. I've gotten iCal to auto-sync with gCal and vice versa, but the phone won't sync unless I actually plug it in and sync it with my computer.

I mainly look at my calendar through the phone though, so it's not as big of an issue.

I guess if you want to shell out the cash, MobileMe would be a viable solution to your problem. $100 a year is a bit much though if you ask me.

Sorry I couldn't be more helpful haha.

duncanapple · Nov 4, 2008

Thanks for the reply -

I knew the phone wouldnt sync wirelessly but I couldn't get the iphone changes to feed via ical to gcal even after a sync. I ave downloaded a trial of spanning synce and thus far it is FAR better than the google only solution... but then, I guess you get what you pay for. Does anyone else have any tips before I drop the $60 on spanning sync?

- Chris

chriswitt · Nov 4, 2008

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/5F136 Safari/525.20)

try out nuevasync.com. It's free, so if u don't like it u don't lose anything for trying.

It mashes all your calendars together, which I hated. In the end, I went with mobileme, and have been happy.

Lastly, test out busysync. I think that is better than spanning sync.

Good luck.

Luciano123 · Jun 6, 2009

In my oppinion all of the above-mentioned apps are useless. I had to try a bunch of apps until I found an adequate solution. It's called remote calendar. This app is quite cheap and can sync a variety of calendars on the basis of CalDAV. What is probably most important. I couldn't find any bug by now, whil NemusSync or others produced wrong colours in my calendar, etc.
By the way, I think that "remote calendar" is way easier to handle.

paulsalter · Jun 6, 2009

Luciano123 said:
In my oppinion all of the above-mentioned apps are useless. I had to try a bunch of apps until I found an adequate solution. It's called remote calendar. This app is quite cheap and can sync a variety of calendars on the basis of CalDAV. What is probably most important. I couldn't find any bug by now, whil NemusSync or others produced wrong colours in my calendar, etc.
By the way, I think that "remote calendar" is way easier to handle.

Was remote calendar available when this thread was created ?

brian doherty · Jun 6, 2009

Now bear with me here. I'm wondering if this will work.

I tried exporting all my iCal calendars and importing them into gCal. I then used Googles collaboration tool (calaboration/ to subscribe to the gCal calendars from iCal. At that point I had a 2 way syncing solution between iCal and gCal. Fine, good.

However after I synced my iPhone with my new iCal calendars (that are actually gCal that have been subscribed to) I couldn't add events on my phone. Bummer. So I went back to just using iCal.

However, a thought hit me. What if I follow the same steps as above, but also set up Googles Calendar & Contacts sync (Google Sync which uses exchange to "push" sync calendar events with my phone.

So basically, have calendars in gCal (that originated as calendar exports from iCal), subscribe to the new gCal calendars in iCal using calaboration. Than set up an exchange account on my iPhone to sync calendar data from gCal (and hopefully actually be able to add events). Instead of going through all the work to do this first, I was wondering if anyone else had luck using this method?

QCassidy352 · Jun 6, 2009

efice32 said:
Yeah I'm having the same issue you are. I've gotten iCal to auto-sync with gCal and vice versa, but the phone won't sync unless I actually plug it in and sync it with my computer.

I mainly look at my calendar through the phone though, so it's not as big of an issue.

I guess if you want to shell out the cash, MobileMe would be a viable solution to your problem. $100 a year is a bit much though if you ask me.

Sorry I couldn't be more helpful haha.

It's been enough of a pain that I've given up as well. The problem with mobile me as a solution is that it requires a newish version of firefox or safari. Sadly, my work PC is locked down and IE only.

So I just use iCal and the iPhone and skip gcal. I know that's not really the OP's goal here, but I found incorporating gcal more trouble than it was worth (I guess if you need a shared calendar you'll have to figure out something. If both computers can support mobile me you can get a copy for about $62 on amazon).

johnsmclean · Jun 6, 2009

Hi,
not sure if understanding this problem but could you not publish your calendar to something like http://www.icalx.com which is free ? iPhone 3.0 works with CalDav servers. I have this working with two Macs in different locations and my iphone.

John

AiralynRose · Jun 6, 2009

MobileMe works great for syncing calendars like this. And you can see them online too. This is the primary reason I got mobileme, definitely worth it to keep my macbook, imac, and iphone in sync all the time.

Also, I'm not sure, but i think if you don't use mobile me, the calendar colors don't sync to the phone. But if you do have MobileMe then the colors do sync correctly.

fleshman03 · Jun 6, 2009

Do you have a real need to sync live from your phone? I just add stuff to my iPod Touch or iCal and have iCal's built in sync tools match it up with gCal.

Pretty simple, actually. Just preferences -> accounts. You can add several different calendars too. I've got 4.

To get an additional via iPod to gCal, just sync your phone with your computer.

fa.ce · Jun 8, 2009

There's no way to sync iPhone calendar and Google cal ?

Acrually i need BusySync and MobileMe to syncronize between my iPhone calendar and google calendar.
There's a way to avoid BusySync and syncronize directly between MobileMe and google calendar ?
I see that the new firmware 3.0 (iPhone) support DevCal subscription, may it can help in some way ?

podsorcerer09 · Jun 11, 2009

if you're not using the exchange account on your iphone, you can set up google to push contacts and calendars to and from the phone. Here's what I did.
Ran google's colaboration tool on my mac so that I could sync my google calendar with my ical. Then i went to this site: http://www.google.com/support/mobile/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=138740 and followed all the directions there. Now when I add an event on my iPhone, it gets pushed up to google calendar, and then synced down to ical withing minutes. It works the same way for adding things to ical.

on another note, in the 3.0 release, you can have caldav accounts too, and i was wondering which you think would be better, exchange or caldav.

cheers

itsjustjoe · Jun 19, 2009

Think I have a solution.... if you're using 3.0

Follow the instructions here:
http://www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/answer.py?answer=99358

On how to get 2 way syncing between your GCal and iCal. Just use this one calendar and delete all but your Google Calendar you just set up.

Then all you need to do is set up CalDAv on your iphone (supported in the latest 3.0 software). This will allow you to sync with GCal.

I also sync Outlook with GCal.

So the solution is:
put something in iCal, Outlook or on your iPhone it goes to Gcal. Everything is synced to GCal, no double syncing.

If you are finding "duplicates" on your iphone as I was at first, at the top left of your Calendar, click on "Calendars" and just view your google one only. Anything you enter will get pushed to google and then shown in Outlook/iCal as desired.

First time poster, so hope I have been useful.

happydude · Aug 5, 2009

itsjustjoe said:
Follow the instructions here:
http://www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/answer.py?answer=99358

On how to get 2 way syncing between your GCal and iCal. Just use this one calendar and delete all but your Google Calendar you just set up.

Then all you need to do is set up CalDAv on your iphone (supported in the latest 3.0 software). This will allow you to sync with GCal.

I also sync Outlook with GCal.

So the solution is:
put something in iCal, Outlook or on your iPhone it goes to Gcal. Everything is synced to GCal, no double syncing.

If you are finding "duplicates" on your iphone as I was at first, at the top left of your Calendar, click on "Calendars" and just view your google one only. Anything you enter will get pushed to google and then shown in Outlook/iCal as desired.

First time poster, so hope I have been useful.

is there any way to get the delegation calendars (from google, now in ical as your above link describes) to sync with iphone?

daneoni · Aug 5, 2009

I'm confused by the OP's setup but i'm using GCal CALDAV/Google Sync to maintain my main calender between iCal/iPhone/GCal. Changes can be made on any of the 3 mediums and they sync back just fine.

Search

Search

Anyone using CalDAV? ical, gcal, and the iPhone

duncanapple

macrumors 6502

efice32

macrumors 6502

duncanapple

macrumors 6502

chriswitt

macrumors member

Luciano123

macrumors newbie

paulsalter

macrumors 68000

brian doherty

macrumors member

QCassidy352

macrumors G5

johnsmclean

macrumors regular

AiralynRose

macrumors 6502a

fleshman03

macrumors 68000

fa.ce

macrumors 6502

podsorcerer09

macrumors regular

itsjustjoe

macrumors newbie

happydude

macrumors 65816

daneoni

macrumors G4

Our Staff