Scott's Spiel

So for the last well…24 hours or so…I was thinking it would be really quite useful to have my calendar on my new phone (6500 classic) sync’d with the one on iCal. Even more useful would be having that also sync’d with my Google calendar. So began the hours of googling required to find out if it was possible. It is, with some very cool (yet geeky) results.

First thing’s first is getting the phone and Mac talking. Bluetooth is the way I’m going for that, cables are so last year. OS X also has iSync, which is pretty much what it sounds like – it syncs a large variety of devices with the Mac. Unfortunately mine wasn’t supported (it’s a new phone, perhaps that’s why?). Roll on Nova Media and their plugins. They had one which got my phone compatible with iSync. Unfortunately I had to fork out an, all be it small, fee for this.

This is then the easy bit where I click on the nice sync button and magically everything from iCal goes to my phone, all my phone calendar stuff to iCal and the address books sync as well just for giggles.

Sorted.

Set two of getting things from iCal -> gCal and also gCal -> iCal proved pretty difficult. You can quite easily subscribe to a feed in iCal which gets things from gCal. Unfortunately you can’t easy take things from iCal and automatically get them into gCal, unless you do it manually. I managed to find two hopefully looking pieces of software to help me out. GCALDaemon and Spanning Sync. GCALDaemon is freely available, whilst Spanning Sync gives 15 day trial followed by a $25 fee for a year.

At the moment I’ve went for the 15 day trial of Spanning Sync. I probably won’t keep it after the 15 days though when I’ll give GCAD a go and see if it does it just as good.

Spanning Sync was pretty easy to set up via system preferences and doesn’t need much explaining from me. I have it running every hour which is more than enough for me.

The last part of my puzzle was to try and get iSync to run without having to open it every time myself. After a long while of searching I came across a beta application knows as Home Zone. This simply performs actions whenever my Bluetooth device (phone) enters or leaves its detection. I have it set to run iSync (a built in option) when it enters the zone. This stops needless running of iSync when the phone isn’t around or Bluetooth is off.

Other software, such as Sailing Clicker exists and is perhaps a little more stable (as well as greatly more functional). Sadly this didn’t work with my phone and cost yet more of my limited cash funds.

So there you have it, phone < -> iCal < -> gCal. Just what I wanted and hopefully will be of some use to others.

I’ve took Home Zone a little further with some Actionscript so that when I leave my room iTunes pauses and the screen saver is activated. When I come back the screen saver drops, iTunes plays (there was no built-in unpause in Home Zone, Actionscript required) and iSync runs. Confused the hell out of my flatmate the first time I did it.