GCal+-+iCal+Sync

=[|Syncing Google Calendar With iCal]=

[|Google calendar] can be a great tool for organizing your life. Sure, it’s not as powerful as other desktop-based calendar applications or even personal digital assistants. But it’s free and it works on just about any Web browser. You can even use it across multiple computers–you don’t need to stick to one machine, as most other desktop-based calendaring applications are limited to. However, sometimes you would still want to use your own desktop application. Google Calendar does have limitations. For one, there’s no internal means to handle tasks or to-do lists. And the interface can be a bit slow when you’re working on slow connections. Fortunately, Google Calendar allows for syncing with external applications, by virtue of SyncML, and through one-way syncing via XML. For instance Apple’s iCal, which is built-into Mac OS X, can be used to subscribe to your Google Calendar, and will automatically check Google Calendar every few minutes to check for new items. If you’re using iCal, here’s how to subscribe to your Google Calendar. First, login to your [|Google Calendar], and look for the **Manage Calendars** link. Then click the name of the calendar you want to subscribe to. Then under the settings list, look for the sharing buttons. There are two sets. One is for public calendar subscription, which lets you share the calendar with other users. The other is the private subscription, which is supposed to be for you only. The private subscription includes all calendar items, including those marked private. The one for sharing, meanwhile, will only include items marked public. Be sure not to share these links with other people unless you really want them to see events in your calendar. Copy the iCal URL by Control-clicking (or by holding the mouse button for a while, or right-clicking if you have a multi-button mouse) on the green iCal button. Now open iCal, then click **Calendar** on the menu bar, and then **Subscribe**. You can then paste in the URL from Google Calendar into the subscription URL text box. iCal will then create a calendar for you. You can rename the calendar as you please, and you can define the refresh interval. You can even remove the alarms and notifications if you wish. When your Google Calendar is updated, you can either manually tell iCal to sync the calendar with the online version, or it will automatically download updates according to your defined frequency. Of course, this is one-way syncing only. For now, Google Calendar does not support two-way syncing with iCal, but third-party applications are being developed for this purpose (more on this soon).