For quite a while now I’ve been looking for a solution to sync iCal and Google Calender. I’ve even though of giving up on iCal and using Gcal.app (an application) full time. However Plaxo 3 was released the other day and it syncs calendars for free.

Running a few tests, it indeed does sync my iCal and Google Calendar. However, it’s not instant. When I make an update to one calendar, it’s a bit of time before it shows on another. I’m not sure the exact amount of time, but it’s more like once an hour or two. Even by hitting the sync button in the Plaxo menubar icon, the changes don’t seem to take effect on Google Calendar right away.

If you’ve upgraded to Thunderbrid 2.0 you can now run the Provider extension that will sync Google Calendar and Thunderbird running the calendar extension.

It’s very easy to setup thanks to bfish.xaedalus.net’s instructions. I tested it out this morning and it worked flawlessly. Ok, maybe one minor issue. It seems that it ‘automagically’ populated my Google username and it wasn’t correct. I had to switch it. But other than that, the directions are dead on and easy to follow.

I’ve been using Google Calendar for a while now and it’s been working out quite well. Since it’s web based, it’s everywhere I am and since it works off .ics files, it can be subscribed to in iCal. It’s almost perfect.

Two of the features I miss the most are being able to edit a Google calendar in iCal and when I subscribe to a calender, the alarms get removed.

So, with a little digging, I found Alarm-It, a small script that re-inserts iCal alarms.

Humm… much like most of my problems, once I complain about them, they get solved. So here is what I learned about Google Calendar.

My public WebDEV calendar just needed time to refresh. A good hour or two and Google loaded it no problem.

My FTP calendars loaded just fine once I removed the robots.txt file. I was was protecting them from search engines as I don’t need my calendars showing up in search results, but, I now realize that it also blocks the Google calendar bot from picking up my ics files.

I’m not sure if it’s just me or not, but I can’t seem to get Google Calendar to work well with Apple’s iCal. I have FTPed my calendars up to a folder on my website, pointed Google Calendar to those ics files and yet, nothing shows. I’ve even published my iCal calendars on a public WebDAV server, then put the URL into Google Calendar and nothing shows.

What gives? Is Google calendar and Apple’s iCal not compatible?

No, it’s not official, but there are strong rumors that Google Calendar (code name CL2) will work with iCal as they use the same file format.

CL2 is closely, very closely, integrated with Gmail. It includes now-standard web 2.0 features - Ajax, suscription feeds for integration with iCal and other desktop calendars, event creation, search, sharing, notifications (including SMS) and more. - TechCrunch (with screen shots)

This is good news as I use iCal more and more every day. If I could sync iCal and Google Calendar I’d be great as I don’t have a WebDAV server to publish to currently.