During dinner with a geeky couple the other day, I mentioned my lack of calendar syncing with Google Calendar. I had tried to do this many times before but never got it working well. They professed total amazement, as they claimed it had been a total breeze to set up. Turns out we probably have different use cases and different expectations.
When you think about the personal information you typically want to have synced on your devices, many people will think of the functionality Microsoft Outlook:
- Contacts
- Calendar
- To-dos/tasks
I currently have basic syncing set up between my iPhone and my Mac, but no syncing with any stuff from my work computer. I am not happy with this, but I am looking for a solution, and that solution seems to be Google.
Mail is really a breeze if you keep all of it on servers and simply access everything with IMAP. Contacts are synced pretty easily on the Mac with Address Book’s support for syncing with Google Contacts. Infuriatingly, there is no standard support for To-dos on the iPhone, so that’s not going to happen. The thing that remains is calendar support. This seems like it should work, but there are some problems.
The big problem appears to be that I have multiple calendars (10) set up in iCal. My workflow so far this morning has been as follows:
- In iCal, select each calendar one by one and export to a .ics file
- In Google calendar, create a calendar with that name one by one
- One by one, import the .ics file to the calendar with the corresponding name
- Add the gmail account, wait for syncing and then select all the calendars as “delegates”
Note: These calendars show up as totally different calendars, so I would have to delete my current calendars on my actual mac, and the new ones appear in this strange nested directory structure as shown in the picture below (the “On my Mac” calendars are the original ones, and the grey ones under “Deligates” are the mac ones):
That’s it for the iCal setup. Not entirely transparent, but at least I can see all my calendars and access them with sync. So far, so good.
Now for the iPhone. No joy.
I have tried both the gmail account and using the exchange support of gmail. Neither of them allow me to see all my calendars on the iPhone. I only see what is known as the primary calendar, which means I now have two choices:
- Combine all of the calendars into one calendar, which means I lose fine-grained control of what stuff to share with my wife and other people (does she want to see all my appointments with students, do my students want to see all my appointments with my wife?)
- Undo all the work I’ve done this morning and go back to syncing my phone and my mac using iTunes, and forget about having access to my calendars online.
So now I am frustrated. Regardless of where the blame lies (many people have pointed out that this is really an iPhone problem), if I can’t access all my calendars on my iPhone it’s basically game over for the whole idea.