Why and How to Sync Google Calendar – iCal – iPhone
Why?
I’m always on the go and I need to have access to my calendar/s from wherever I am and whenever I need it. More than calendars I consider them as sets of data related to the projects I’m working on. Through the years I’ve tested a good number of tools but I got the best out of the ‘Google Calendar - iCal -iPhone or iPod touch‘ combo.
How?
- Enable Google Calendar in Apple’s iCal (this will work only on Mac OS X v10.5… or newer)
- Sync your Google Calendar with your iPhone/iPod Touch (by default only your primary calendar will be synced to your device. To sync additional calendars see next point…)
- Sync your additional calendars with your iPhone/iPod Touch by visiting https://www.google.com/calendar/iphoneselect from any browser (via desktop or mobile device) or For Google Apps users: https://www.google.com/calendar/hosted/YOUR DOMAIN NAME/iphoneselect
- When you sync your iPhone/iPod Touch on iTunes make sure to select the calendars you want to sync (in the screen-shot below I synced all my calendars). iTunes > iPhone/iPod Touch > Info > Calendars
Advantages?
Your data doesn’t live anymore on single devices like your computer or you mobile phone, it lives in the cloud. Devices are used to simply edit or interact with your data. This means that…
- after you edit one of the calendars (iCal, Google Calendar or iPhone) the changes will reflect in realt-time on all the others. Basically you use ‘one ring to rule them all’.
Tip: If you are using an iPod Touch and you don’t have wifi connection when you are on the go…no worries. Keep updating you calendar and the when you’ll find a connection (or when you’ll plug your iPod to your computer > iTunes) your calendar updates will sync automatically!
- you always have an online backup of all your data. So there’s no problem if you lose your phone or your computer crashes.
- if you don’t have with you or you can’t use your phone or computer, you can still access your data from any other device connected to the internet. (I’ve been in this situation once… and this literally ’saved me’)
What appears to be a simple synchronization actually opens up a huge number of new doors on how you can better organize and manage your work and projects. Test out this sync process in the next couple of days, so you’ll be ready to play around with it when I’ll go deeper into what you can actually do with it in a series of upcoming posts.
If you liked this post you might be interested in also checking out:
Smart Use of Google Calendar
How to use Google Calendar as Project Management Tool
Meanwhile… Do you have any related tips you want to share? What advantages you find syncing with the cloud? Questions? Ideas? Special requests? Feel free to share them in the comments or directly via Twitter @vascellari (don’t forget to link back to this post so it’s going to be easier for everyone to follow the conversation!)
Andrea
Author: Andrea Vascellari
Andrea Vascellari is the CEO of itive.net. All thoughts and opinions on this blog are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of his employer or clients; neither past or present. If you liked this post feel free to follow him on Twitter, Facebook, or subscribe to this blog.
Some tips that some can find useful !
Hello !
My homepage is always set on IGoogle so I can see immediately my calendar, you can also add your Google Reader on this page too : http://www.google.com/ig
On Google Chrome there is a really nice extension called Google Calendar Popout that you may find useful : https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/emambmpgicpidmncfacjkeicobamadod
For Firefox I highly recommend Meeting scheduler for Google Calendar 1.3 : https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/12871
Hope this help !
This comment was originally posted on Andrea Vascellari
@lionel: Nice chrome extension! Thanks for sharing!
This comment was originally posted on Andrea Vascellari
“one ring to rule them all.” perfect analogy.
This blog write-up is merely out of the box. Quite a few other posts i have witnessed on this topic but this will be the 1 i was searching for. I would like to subscribe in your feed for my streaming movies weblog and also bookmarking this web page now.