Archive for category Calendar sync
Subscribable calendar/ical generator
Posted by LAV in Calendar sync on April 10th, 2010
There are lots of subscribable calenders out there, but somehow they always seem to be missing some more obscure but still important days. For example, you wouldn’t want to miss the start of Daylight saving time, or valentines day.
So I’ve made my own calender generator (admittedly inspired by ical.oops.se)! For now it will be most accurate for Swedish and Swiss holidays, but more will be added later. Try the subscribable calendar/ical generator here!
GMail adds holiday (and sports) calendars
Posted by LAV in Calendar sync on September 4th, 2009
GMail recently added a feature that makes it easy to subscribe to official holiday calendars for a variety of countries. Also included are sports schedules, star dates, and (maybe more interestingly) an automatic birthday calender based on your contacts.
I can’t say I really care so much about the Swedish holiday calendar though, it doesn’t even include Midsummer Eve or Christmas Eve, arguably the two most important days in Sweden. Sure they are only de facto holidays, but still. I’ll stick to the nice iCal holiday generator over at oops.se for the time being.
Staying in sync with SpanningSync
Posted by LAV in Calendar sync, Contact sync on May 5th, 2009
Two weeks ago I decided that I really needed a way to enable over-the-air sync of calendar and contact data to my iPhone (after having missed a couple of meetings because I had forgotten to sync manually :P). I basically had three options:
- Subscribe to Apple’s MobileMe service (99 USD / 795 SEK per year).
- Put all my calendar and contact data on Google/GMail and sync with their Exchange interface.
- Start syncing using my company’s Exchange server.
Well, I’m not about to put all my private data on my employer’s Exchange server, so number 3 is out. I was seriously considering MobileMe, but the price tag really puts me off.. They do offer more services than just calendar and contact sync, but I already have working solutions in place for most of those things. Also Apple seems to be doing evil things to customers who cancel their MobileMe accounts.
So, I’m left with option number 2. So how do I get all my data to Google, and how do I keep it synced with iCal and Address Book? Well, Address Book actually has built in Google sync (at least if you have an iPhone), and the Google Calendars can be accessed via Webdav. But there also seemed to be many potential issues… How to trigger the Address Book if you never actually sync your iPhone? Will the webdav-calendars remain editable? Honestly I’d had enough with all “semi working” calender sync solutions, and was prepared to pay to get something that “just works”. Plaxo had been doing a good job of keeping my different Macs in sync, but could not help me with my iPhone, so it was time to find some other solution.
So I found SpanningSync. SpanningSync does exactly what I wanted, i.e. sync OSX calendars and contacts with Google/Gmail. After some initial problems, where repeating events seemed to get infinitely duplicated, most things seem to be running smoothly now. Basically I only have two issues: 1) reminders don’t get synced, but instead get the default value for the given calendar (woke me up at 2am once!), 2) you can’t choose the color of the calendars on the iPhone (issue with iPhone, not Google or SpanningSync). But besides this, my data stays in sync across 3 different Macs and one iPhone (but don’t enable PUSH on the iPhone, it will drain your battery in less than a day!).
Today my 15 day free trial was (almost) over, so I went ahead and coughed up $20 (after the $5 discount) to get a one year subscription. I am, however, quietly hoping that Exchange will be naively supported in the next OSX version, so I won’t have to continue paying for this… 
PS: If anyone reading this is planning to buy SpanningSync, feel free to use my referral code VHKESR and we’ll both earn $5.
Two iCal feeds you need
Posted by LAV in Calendar sync on February 18th, 2009
iCal in OSX makes it easy subscribing to external calenders, and two such feeds you will definitely want to have are holidays, and (at least if you live in Sweden) week numbers! However, it turns out that at least most Swedish holiday calenders over at icalshare.com were pretty crappy, as none of them seemed to have been updated for 2009 yet…
But luckily I stumbled upon this nice feed generator over at Oops.se! They have customizable holiday feeds for Finland, England, Denmark, France, Sweden, US and Norway, as well as week number feeds for Sweden and US. Best thing is, they are automatically updated so next year you will automatically get next years holidays! (Remember to set iCal auto-refresh feature to Weekly.)
(For the lazy swedes out there, here is the current Swedish holidays iCal feed as well as the week number iCal feed.)
