A little while ago, Scott posted about Spanning Sync, a program for getting Google Calendar and iCal to do two-way syncing. Well, I managed to get my hands on the private beta of the app, and was able to check it out.
Spanning Sync installs not as an application, but a System Preferences panel. In it, you put in your Google Account username and password, and then select which iCal calendars to sync with which Google Calendars. You can also set at which interval to have the calendars sync (or you can just choose to sync only manually), and you can choose to sync alarms on each individual calendar. All of this can be set up very quickly, and once so, you can close System Preferences and, if automatic sync is enables, have your calendars sync in the background.
Unfortunately, things didn’t go so well. Using the first private beta, I was able to successfully sync all of my calendars, but all syncs after that resulted in duplicate events on my Google Calendars. The second private beta fixed this problem, and everything seemed to go perfectly. An annoyance is that iCal needs to be running for a successful sync to occur, but this is manageable. Still, for a private beta, this seems to be OK. I have not experienced any data loss, as warned against in the user guide.
Overall, Spanning Sync seems like a very good program, and has a promising start. It’s great to be able to use my Google Calendar on my PC, and use iCal at home, and then be able to sync my calendar to portable devices with iCal. The only thing I wish Spanning Sync had was for some way to sync my iCal to-do lists to Google Calendar. But, as Google Calendar doesn’t really have a to-do feature, this might be difficult.
I did not have any issues using the software. It easily synced between my Google Calendar and iCal.
I heard that ZYB has also launched integeration with GCal. Its pretty interesting to import your calendar from GCal to ZYB and then sync it with your phone.
The to do lists may be a null point for iCal once Leopard comes out. Didn't Steve say to do lists were being moved to Mail?
i just wish it was a public beta... i would love to be able to sync my calender in ical, with gcal... ohwell, i'll just have to wait
Other similar solution is the GCALDaemon on SourceForge...