Sync calendars, the free and easy way

I’ve been trying to figure out how I can sync my calendars on to more than one machine. Since switching to a Mac a couple of years ago, I’ve been using iCal. What I hate though is having to pay for a .Mac account (now know as Mobile Me) every year. It’s $100 annually but the only feature I use is the calendar and contact syncing. I already have my own website so I don’t need that from the service.

So I started to use Google calendar a couple of years ago to avoid having to pay for Apple’s service. It works perfect! I can be on any computer with an internet connection and have access to my calendar. I recently found an app that Mozilla created that does calendar management – Sunbird. It’s been out for awhile but an add-on was recently created that “Allows bidirectional access to Google Calendar”. Great! It makes my solution of using Google calendar easier. With this add-on, you can now connect to your Google calendars and have full access. Prior to this, you only had read-only access (which my iCal currently is doing :( ).

So now I can use Sunbird to fully manage my Google calendars without having to use my browser. Then my iCal will continue to do it’s one-way sync from Google, then syncs with my iPhone.

Now the only thing that’s left is my Address Book.

New Address Book sync options in 10.5.3

Apple recently released 10.5.3 update for Leopard. One of the updates I’m excited about is the ability to sync Address Book with Google and Yahoo!. If you want to set up a sync with Yahoo!, view this pageĀ http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/addressbook/autosync/autosync-20.html. For Google, visit this pageĀ http://googlemac.blogspot.com/2008/05/mac-os-x-1053-sync-google-contacts.html. The only problem I found so far is with Google and contacts that have “Company” checked on your Address Book. These contacts seem to show up as blank in the contacts list (http://www.google.com/support/contactsync/#anchor_link_9). But if you click on it in Gmail, it will display the information.