If this works and it’s already there, right there, in Google, why the f*ck are there softwares to pay for?!

I’m like the most technologically illiterate person I know and this took all of 5 minutes to figure out and it’s amazing.

THANK YOU

You certainly don’t have to get a .Mac account to use calendars. You do have to have a Google Calendar account, which is the master copy of your calendars. Here’s a bisic rundown of what you’d do:
1. Set up a calendar in Google Calendar.
2. In iCal (using Mac OS X 10.6) go to Preferences->Accounts and hit the little plus sign in the lower left corner to add an account.
3. In the “Account Type” dropdown choose “Google.”
4. Fill out the rest of the screens and follow the instructions.
NOTE: If you have many Google Calendars, you can specify which ones you see under the Delegates tab of the Accounts preference pane in iCal.

This will get you set up for iCal. From here on out you can make changes to this calendar in iCal or in a web browser at Google Calender. The changes will propagate everywhere. It may not be immediate, but it will happen, within a few minutes.

To connect your iPhone to the Google Calendar, just set up a Gmail account (under Settings->Mail, Contacts, Calendars) and make sure that the “Calendars” switch is set to “ON.”

Same deal here: events scheduled on the iPhone get sent to the calendar and everything —- including iCal — stays in sync.

I’ve been using this setup for over a year now, and it works great. Give it a try and let me know if it works for you.

Again, I’ll try to make a full post about all this.

-systemsboy

I would like the functionality of adding events from my iphone when traveling and I when traveling I am unable to access my home computer to log in to google. Am I doing something wrong or do I have to bite the bullet and get a .mac account?

thanks

Actually, the way this works is different than publishing your iCal calendars. This method stores all your calendars on Google’s service — in the cloud, as it were — and you can subscribe to these calendars in iCal from any computer you want.

If you follow the Big Giant Google Calendar Sharing Link in the article you’ll see very explicit instructions on how to get your Google Calendars into iCal.

Remember, you’ll need to have set up some calendars in Google Calendar first. If you already have calendars set up in iCal, and you want to get them into Google Calendar, you can export them from iCal (File->Export->Export…). This will create an ICS file, which can then be imported to Google Calendar using their import tools. Then you’d simply subscribe to the new Google version of the calendar in iCal.

Seems a bit roundabout, I know. Why would anyone do this? The basic idea is that you’re moving your calendars off your computer and onto globally accessible servers. These servers can be accessed from any computer with an Internet connection, and this gives you the ability to see your calendars from any Internet-enabled computer in the world. This means that friends and family can see them (if you grant them access); you can sync them to multiple computers; you can sync them to your phone; to name a few. It’s extremely useful.

So here’s a quick step-by-step:
1. Get some calendars set up in Google Calendar (you can transfer existing calendars using iCal’s export function).
2. Subscribe to the new/transferred Google calendars in iCal (using the instructions in the Big Giant Google Calendar Sharing Link).

That’s it!

After re-reading this article I realize that it’s not particularly clear how to do all this or why one might want to. If I find the time I may post a follow-up to clarify things.

Meantime, let me know if you have any problems and I’ll see if I can help you out.

-systemsboy

thanks so much for you help and time, cheers, Lexi