Ok, how do I keep a set of Calendars in sync between my iPhone, Mac and Google?

I just enabled the Google calendar today, but have previously been using iCal and the iOS calendar, so they have events in them right now.

I thought that these events would sync to Google, but they haven't. On my iOS device I have multiple calendars, and the previous ones are separate from the new Google one.

My main goal here is to have over the air calendar syncing so that I don't have to remember to connect the iPhone to iTunes and have the freedom of entering events in either iOS or Mac OS. Or even though the Google Calendar web UI if need be.

If I can get this figured out I'd love to do the same thing to Contacts.

Currently Contacts and Calendar are selected as the only two options for a an account profile I set up for Exchange, as instructed by Google.

I'd previously looked into running my own CalDAV server to accomplish this, but it was a nightmare going through all the stuff on the web and ending up nowhere. Apple really should have had this part of sync work wirelessly between your Mac and iOS device.

From my Android experience last summer, the key thing is to transition off any local iCal calendars, and use CalDav to talk to your calendars on Google.

Once you get the initial setup done for the first calendar, additional calendars must created on the Google Calendar site. For some reason, the CalDav interface will always throw an error when you try to create a new calendar in iCal. I'm guessing Google didn't implement that feature. Once added on the web site, go back into iCal, under accounts, then the Delegation tab. Any new calendars from the web will show there and can be checked to appear in iCal.

I now seem to have calendars syncing. Contacts doesn't seem viable at this time as it misses fields when synching. I can do a manual import to get the fields in both Google and my Mac OS address book, but any later edits to those fields won't be propagated. I really don't want to use a third-party service for this.

In all this I've noticed one glaring thing. Everything from Google is clunky as hell. Of course, Apple could to a LOT better as well. Maybe we'll see how it goes with the supposed revamp and potentially free MobileMe coming down the pipe.

There us the alternative of Nuevasync. They operate their own Exchange->Google proxy. I don't know how it compares to Google's as I was using it before Google had their own.

We only sync calendars as our experiences with contacts have been the same. The addresses are the killer, they don't survive the round trip intact as Googles addresses are free form.

I wish I could find a workable way of syncing contacts between iOS devices. That said I haven't tried MobileMe or my own Exchange server yet.

I agree that this is currently very clunky out of the box. But I am now very happy with SyncInABlink for my Google<->Iphone contact synching.

Although occassionally something odd will happen, such as Google suddenly decides that one of my contact's phone numbers isn't there any more, and thus will try to erase it on the iPhone, the beauty of SyncInABlink is that it SHOWS me, in excruciating detail, exactly what changes got made in that last sync and gives me a permanent history of every change it has ever made. And if the change is a genuine conflict, it gives me a chance to resolve the conflict right there in the UI. All in all, very nice and convenient. Plus it can automatically email me a CSV backup of the contact list whenever I ask it to.

MobileMe has been mostly reliable for me. I only do OS X -> OS X and OS X -> iOS though for contacts and calendars, so I can't comment on the reliability if Windows is involved. The few hiccups I have had tend to be with iDisk offline syncing.

Similar trick with contacts, which I never bothered with until I had an Android phone and it became mandatory. I went through a bit of pain, once, to get my contacts out of Apple Address Book and loaded into Google. I then spent a solid afternoon merging duplicates and cleaning up the mess. Now, I have all my contacts in Google, seamlessly showing up in my Android phone. Similarly, all my calendar stuff lives in Google and shows up nicely in iCal.

Now that it's done, I never touch Apple's Address Book any more and I rarely touch iCal. I mostly just use the Google web site.

My goal was to use Google as only the conduit. I never want to touch the Google web interface if I have the option. For the "family" calendar, my wife can use the web interface if she prefers, but I want to use iCal and Address Book on the Mac along with the iOS equivalents.

The only reason I'm not doing contacts is because the sync misses data. If I didn't care about that extra data, I'd be on it.

I've never really used a calendar with any sort of consistency before, so I'm going to try really hard to make it part of my lifestyle. As hard as I can anyway. My contact list comes in handy all the time because I don't remember any phone numbers except my home line. It's also great for tracking birthdays which I can't seem to remember outside a few people.

You still have a home line? How quaint.

VOIP, since 2004. It costs a fraction of an old-school contract-based mobile line. Then I also have a PAYG voice SIM and an iPad data SIM (250MB/mo) for my iPhone.

Does anyone know how to change the email address that calendar reminders and invitations are sent from? I can't find a preference for doing this.

Google's different apps don't seem well integrated at all, which is something I've mentioned before. For instance, I added an alternate email address to my "account" and responded to the verification email. Then I noticed it didn't show up in my Google Mail. So I added it there. And had to reply to ANOTHER verification email. Lame. I set that account as primary so that "all mail" would be sent using it. That doesn't apply to anything outside the Google Mail UI it seems.

I have both a regular Google account as well as a Google domain account - they are very different. The Google domain account is not a "Google account" and I can't use its login to sign in to any Google account login page. I have to go to a specific page at Google for my domain to do anything.

So far I've tried creating Calendars at both and am unable to use an alternate email address. The Google domain account I have is for one of my secondary domains, but I'd like to use my primary corporate email address since that's the address I actually give out to people.


EDIT. Screw it. I've signed up for yet ANOTHER Google domain account, adding docs and calendar to my primary corporate domain.

Even Calendar sync isn't the greatest, and I don't know who to blame.

If I invite people from my iPhone contact list their name appear properly and I see a nice graphic check-box net to them. After a round of sync through Google, the names become email addresses which have no connection to my address book and the graphical check-box is now a pair of text square brackets with a question mark in the middle "[?]" - I also get the name of my non-primary calendar as one of the invitees if that's where I put the event.

With the default setup at Google, my non-primary calendar was set to send me email notifications for pretty much everything. I gave my wife access to this calendar as I was setting it up as "family" one. When she added events to it, I got emails, and without touching those emails, those events started appearing also in my personal calendar. So I was left with duplicate events for everything she was adding. This seems to have gone away when I turned off email notification - which doesn't make any sense because it's not documented in the least at Google.

In iCal you can't seem to move items from one Calendar to another with it doing a destroy and then re-schedule, in the process also sending out all invitation emails again and losing all previous responses - that's bloody lame.

On the iPhone you have no control over calendar colours. I had to manually edit the calendar SQLite file. Again, totally lame.

iPhone has no provision for the URL field of a scheduled event as seen in iCal. Good job Apple, more proof that you really don't have any attention to detail. You're better than everyone else, but just proof that the software industry of big players really has its head up its ass.

Now I have things workable, but still far from ideal. Thankfully I also have a jailbroken iOS so I can fix certain things, and display calendar events on my Lock Screen.

Bloody damn iPhone calendar colours just changed on me tonight all of a sudden. All by themselves. I added something one of the calendars via the iphone and sometime after that the colour changed from orange to purple.

Apple, you suck.

The color changing aspect always pissed me off. If you're using the Google Calendar app on Android, they get this right.

I haven't seen the colors change on iCal or my iPhone, and the iPhone is matched to the colors on my desktop. Looks like this is something that is handled fine if MobileMe is in the mix. I am seeing lots of old reports of complaints about the color issue when syncing from iTunes, but nothing recent, so I'm not sure if that is fixed, or if no one has written about it recently.

I'm not using iCal to sync with the iPhone though. If you do that, all indication is that the iPhone will use iCal's colours. Google calendar with Exchange sync doesn't support colour sync - it's not part of the Active Sync protocol. So iPhone assigns its own colours. The issue I'm seeing now is that even after manually changing the colours, the iPhone changes them again when something is added to the calendar directly on the phone.

Apparently using CalDAV sets everything straight. But it doesn't support PUSH, so you're stuck setting a schedule for the iPhone to ping Google, which will eat more battery power. Or leave it set to manual, in which case you'll have to remember to open the Calendar app to see updates, and they won't show up on my lock screen automatically.

CalDAV seems to solve the color issue, but there's another huge problem with colors when you add iCalendar calendars (i.e. a url to a .ics file). When you add an iCalendar calendar, the iPhone apparently just picks a random color to assign to it. I have to view several of those on my phone, and with each of my calendars, I had to add the calendar, open the calendar app to see what color it got, curse when I saw it had the wrong color, then go back to settings and delete the calendar and try again. Multiply that by several calendars and I had a whole evening of work. The worst part is that the iPhone doesn't recognize Apple's own X-APPLE-CALENDAR-COLOR header that sets colors in iCal.

At least there are only 5 possible calendar colors that it will randomly pick, IIRC. Also, I've never had the colors spontaneously change before. If it did that, knowing what I went through to get the colors right, I'd probably throw the phone through a wall.

The colours have not shifted again since re-editing them manually in the sqlite calendar file, thankfully.

At this point I'm not sure if replies to meeting invitations are working though. It could just be that the last person to reply did so to a previous request that wasn't reflected in the new meeting. Which is the other issue, a number of changes require essentially the calendar app to treat the update as a brand new event, with all new invitations and approvals.