Calendars 5 for iOS: how to use Apple Contacts to complete attendee list

Calendars 5 for iOS makes Google Calendar useable -- at a fraction of the cost of Fantastical. It reminds me of PalmOS DateBk 5 and 6.

For me the main flaw is that it uses Google Contacts for the attendee names and emails. I keep my Contacts in Apple Contacts.

Turns out that if you include at least 1 local Calendar it will also use Apple Contacts. Birthdays works for this. So I included that.

This should be a setting, but I'm glad to to know of the workaround via Calendars tech support.

Calendar sharing between Google and iCloud is very confusing: webcal vs http vs. https

A book project forced me to dig into a perennially painful topic — Calendar sharing and subscription in iOS and OS X (MacOS Yosemite) for Google and Apple.

I discovered:

• iCloud uses Webcal protocol links to share public calendars among iCloud users. Google can parse these, but it in my tests no events appeared. Old web pages say Apple blocks Google access to public iCloud calendars (robots.txt).
• Google uses https links to an ICS file to share public calendars. Yosemite Calendar.app can use these links and iOS Calendar.app can use these URLs [1], but iCloud.com Calendar can’t. At least in my testing, with Yosemite, Calendar.app on MacOS and Calendar.app on iOS don’t share these calendar subscriptions.
• Safari.app on iOS will pass an iCloud webcal URL link to Calendar.app and this will trigger a calendar subscription. Google ICS file (https) links won’t work, renaming them to webcal doesn’t work either (I think it might have in the past).

This confusing situation is reminiscent of the complex hoops required to support CalDAV sync for multiple Google Calendars in iOS and MacOS. Apple and Google have very different models for calendaring and they also appear to have different approaches to implementing CalDAV (and they’re probably on different CalDAV versions too).

 

On balance I much prefer Google’s approach to managing Calendars. On the other hand, if one stays entirely within iCloud and ignores Google calendar sharing, then Apple’s Calendars are simpler to use and understand and are better documented.

 

Don’t bother trying to share a public iCloud Calendar to the world, when Apple says “public” they really mean “iCloud”. If you do want to subscribe to a Google Calendar on your iPhone or MacOS, you will have to do it separately on every device you use (it my testing these subscriptions do not sync, I do hope they are backed up).

 

If you are sharing a Google Calendar, you’ll want to provide directions for iOS and MacOS users and you’ll need to explain that they won’t be able to see the calendar using iCloud.com.

 

Sample links used in my testing:

iCloud Public Calendar Share link:

• webcal://p32-calendars.icloud.com/published/2/5ti02pRya1_rzpjcGlbr6DG8IOGsbgGKgWeeQsd6LJUi4Gck7Bqt8kyitXCNeVGJLFzY_0DshIikKkgevKPAffxkcAr_SBrL_63VWujM5I4 

Google Public Calendar Share link:

• https://www.google.com/calendar/ical/kateva.org_7fnk4q97156l5rqdgvd3mshpis%40group.calendar.google.com/public/basic.ics

- fn -

[1] Documentation: Subscribe to a calendar. Go to Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars, then tap Add Account. Tap Other, then tap Add Subscribed Calendar. Enter the server and filename of the .ics file to subscribe to. You can also subscribe to an iCalendar (.ics) calendar published on the web, by tapping a link to the calendar. The second part of this documentation is incorrect, you can only subscribe for a webcal URL and only iCloud seems to produce the “right” ones.

See also (references)

• Gordon’s Tech: Google’s Calendar Sync with Mountain Lion through Yosemite Calendar.app is a flaming mess 10/2013
• Use multiple calendars - iPhone - 12/2015
• Subscribe to calendar by link does not work in ... | Apple Support Communities
• Techniques to Share Apple and Google Calendars - Envato Tuts+ Computer Skills Tutorial
• iCalendar - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• Webcal - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• How to share or make iCloud calendars public on iPhone and iPad | iMore
• iCloud: Calendar sharing overview
• iCloud: Share a calendar with others
• iCloud Calendar sharing to iCal4 or CalDAV client | Physics Computing Services
• Gordon's Tech: MobileMe vs. Google Calendars 10/2010

Yosemite Mac Calendar.app travel time feature isn't compatible with Google Calendar

Travel Time for Appointments in Apple Calendar (Yosemite) is a nice feature, but it’s not compatible with Google Calendar. I suspect travel time is an attribute of the appointment, not a separate appointment, and it’s not a standard CalDAV feature.

So if you’re using iOS or OS X Calendar.app with a Google Calendar back end don’t bother with this feature. 

Is kind of nifty I admit.

Subscription to Facebook Events calendar now possible, including Google Calendar - for the moment

I just added a subscription to my Facebook calendar to my Google Calendar.

Is this new?

I can't say, but knowing how it works I found documentation updated in Sept 2014. So it might be new. I briefly scanned Facebook's marketing infested 'newsroom' and didn't see any notification there.

Parenthetically, this kind of discovery is a real Facebook issue. I've looked for this feature several times over the past few years. The last time I looked I found several old hacks that were either obsolete or insanely high risk.

Why is Facebook such a mystery? Partly it's lack of documentation and feature churn, but, more importantly, geeks ignore Facebook. So my usual notification systems fail.

Anyway, this is something I've really wanted. Look for the cryptic three dot icon next to a Facebook event:

Choose "Export Event". You can email a .ICS for the event, but, more importantly, you'll see webcal URL with an embedded unique identifier (token).

Copy that URL and paste it into Google Calendar "Add by URL".

Suddenly Facebook Calendar is useful.

Force Chrome to remember iCloud password - how I ended up with LastPass

I don’t use iCloud for much - Apple’s cloud functionality is almost as lacking as its reliability. Our family has used Google Calendar for 7 years [1], I use Simplenote and nvAlt [3] as an information store, Gmail for email [4] and Toodledo/Todo.app for tasks. [5]

That leaves Contacts in Apple’s badlands — they’re too tightly coupled to iOS and OS X to readily migrate. So Contacts are the only bit of iCloud I use; I have to admit that they have been relatively reliable.

Hang on — this does get to the part about forcing Chrome to remember an iCloud password. But first I need a bit of setup. I have to explain something about corporate life and personal data.

Fifteen years ago many employees mixed their personal and corporate data on business laptops and workstations. It wasn’t unusual to use a single email for both work and personal use. Ever since then the two worlds have been dividing - driven by legal and security concerns. Even thumb drives are encrypted on insertion now; data on the increasingly locked down corporate laptop belongs to the corporation.

Which is fine for email and work documents - they should belong to my employer. Contacts though — they’re a problem. They don’t divide neatly between work and personal — and my work Contacts are pretty important for my future employment and family food. So, when it came time to decide where my Contacts should live, I moved them entirely into the personal sphere.

Which is why I need to use a corporate browser (Chrome [6]) to access iCloud — that’s where all of my Contacts live. I need ‘em when I work. 

Ok, so we’ve established I need to use Chrome to access iCloud. Now the problem — it makes me enter my password way too often. And my passwords aren’t easy to type or remember. There are extensions that once forced Chrome to store this password, but they don’t work any more.

So today I broke down. LastPass has a freemium model for online credential storage; the web app and Chrome extension are free. (LastPass charges for mobile services.) Unlike 1Password, which I use on iOS and OS X, there’s no need to buy a Windows client — and I don’t want to put all my credentials in the Cloud anyway. So I signed up for free LastPass, and created an account with a single stored credential - my iCloud ID and password.

It works fine. So one of my longstanding annoyances has been fixed — I can quickly bring up iCloud Contacts.

- fn - 

[1] Calendars 5.app is essential for the Google Calendar power user — we have it on every phone [2]. My native iOS Calendar syncs to my corporate calendar, Calendars 5 reads the iOS calendar database so it appears inline with my other 17 calendars, including 1 for each family member and one ‘all family’ calendar. Our family grandfathered into free Google Apps accounts, but if we didn’t I’d probably pay for the business service. Free has been nice though.

[2] It’s $7 a user. Since it’s not funded by in app purchases I believe iOS family sharing would allow one purchase to support five users. If it did use in app purchases that wouldn’t work. FWIW we still share a single Apple Store only AppleID, I use a different AppleID with iCloud.

[3] nvAlt is in maintenance mode for now — but so is Notational Velocity. Brett has a commercial replacement in the queue, as of today “it’s amazing and will probably be released”.

[4] Google’s broke Gmail usability with their last UI redo. I use Mail.app on iOS and sometimes Airmail on Mac, but mostly I gnash my teeth and weep and use Gmail.

[5] Nobody would do this by choice. Is a legacy choice.  Works and I hate to change things that work.

[6] The corporate standard is IE 9 — thanks to legacy apps. So IE for corporate apps, Chrome elsewhere.

Calendars 5.app for iOS - don't break my heart.

I've only been using Calendars 5 for a few hours and I'm in love.

I'm sure I'll hate it eventually, but I usually do my hating faster than this. Calendars 5 is the best calendar app I've used since DateBk 5; it gives me hope I can survive Johnny ("The Designer") Ive's kneecapping of iOS 7 Calendar.app.

This is what we've needed. No #$@$@ wasted white space. This is a Calendar app that lets us actually, you know, see the friggin' appointments.

It synchronizes with any one or more of Google Calendars, Google Tasks, and the "native" iOS Calendar apps. I think the Google Calendar sync is using Google's native APIs; I didn't have to use Google's odd web page to setup CalDAV sync for multiple Google Calendars. i had only to enter my Google credentials and all my 15 or so Google personal, family, and subscribed calendars were immediately available.

But what about my Corporate Exchange Calendar? I figured that wouldn't work - but I was wrong! I enabled 'Native'/'Local' Calendars as well as Google (when I first connected it seemed I could do only one or the other, that's wrong) and I picked up my corporate calendar that way [1]. (Calendar.app on my phone also has my Google Calendars, but native support is much nicer than CalDAV support so I disabled those.)

I don't use Google Tasks, but Emily has been reluctant to add the complexity of a separate task manager to her Calendaring. With Calendar 5 there's only one place to look.

List, Day, Week and Month view in vertical and horizontal layout are all effective on my iPhone 5. Did I mention Search in List view? Fast!

This is the Calendar app I've been waiting for. Not Cue, not Fantastical, not Agenda -- this one.

[1] I didn't try to edit that Exchange Calendar, that barely works at the best of times on Calendar.app.

Google's Calendar Sync with Mountain Lion through Yosemite Calendar.app is a flaming mess

[This is unchanged in Yosemite and I suspect is also true of El Capitan.]

This is what Mountain Lion shows as my Calendars as of August 2013 after standard setup against my Gmail account:

The accounts I see under "Google" are the set of Calendars my Gmail account has access too that are also checked in the web page that controls Google CalDAV access for iOS Calendar.app: https://calendar.google.com/calendar/syncselect

The Delegate list is what appears based on my selections in Calendar:Preferences:Accounts:Delegation, where options include ALL calendars known to Google, not just those selected in https://www.google.com/calendar/syncselect.

If I check all of the calendars in Calendar.app (Mac) I'll get duplicate entries. If I disable "delegation", which appears to be Google's undocumented recommendation I get a neat list, but any changes I make in Calendar.app do not appear in Google Calendar (sync is broken, or, if you prefer, it's "one-way" from Google to Calendar.app).

If I uncheck Calendars under the 'Google' tree in Mountain Lion Calendar.app "Calendar List" and just use the Delegates sync is more-or-less bidirectional (not broken). That's what I'm doing for now.

I once thought Google was responsible for this mess, but given Apple’s software bungling over the past 4-5 years I think it’s more likely their issue.

Strangest sync error ever - Google Calendar

This is very strange.

I use Google Calendar Sync to sync an Outlook/Exchange calendar to Google Calendar.

On that machine I authenticate with two Google accounts, one has two factor authentication.

It looks like Google Calendar Sync is posting transactions to both accounts even though it has only one account's password.

At least, that's the best explanation I have so far.

Again - one of the weirdest things I've seen in a while, even allowing that sync is fraught with weird errors.

Google Calendar assigning wrong times on CSV import? Here's one fix for the time zone bug.

I can get pretty disgusted with Google Calendar, but then I make myself remember how bad Apple's iCal is. By comparison, gCal is a ruddy gem.

I had to remind myself of that today, because gCal was particularly disgusting.

It started when I tried importing my son's baseball team schedule into a public calendar using my old (best on the web!) import directions ...

Gordon's Tech: Import Calendar data into Google Calendar via CSV files

Here's the header and first row of the CSV file that I was finally able to import. It looks like you need the bloody seconds in the date. I worked with Excel for Mac, used the convert functions to turn text into numbers, then chose the precise format, then exported. Subject,Start Date,Start Time,End Date,End Time,All Day Event,Description,Location,Private Edgumbe Peewee Hockey,10/24/09,2:10:00 PM,10/24/09,3:10:00 PM,FALSE,Practice, Highland North,FALSE

This time I did necessary concatenations of strings and type transforms using Apple's excellent (and under-appreciated) and inexpensive Numbers.app spreadsheet.

The good news is that gCal no longer requires "seconds" in the time fields, and, although I don't think it's documented, it will even work with "military" time (14:20 instead of 2:20 PM).

The bad news is that time zone support is flaky. After I imported all of my calendar entries were off by about 3 hours, even though my time zone (general calendar settings) and the calendar's time zone were both CST.

I made several tries at fixing it, but this is what worked.

1. Switch to Calender Settings:General
2. Change your time zone to something different.
3. Save.
4. Change it back to the correct setting.
5. Save.

After I did that my next import worked.

Fortunately I know to always do imports into a unique calendar; there's no way to undo an import and repetitively deleting 50 bad calendar items is a good source of Google hate [1]. I created and deleted test calendars until I figured a workaround for the bug. (If you do get bit by a bad import sync to the (abominable) OS X iCal and repair there.)

See also:

• Using OS X 10.5 iCal with Google CalDAV - cleaning up import disasters
• Adding events to Google Calendar: generating quick add statements
• Import Calendar data into Google Calendar via CSV files

[1] Why are calendar apps so awful? My theory is that they are quite hard to do well, but management doesn't value them. So they never receive sufficient investment.

Doodle:schedule a group activity

Doodle isn't yet another calendaring service. That's good, because it would take a crowbar to get my family off Google Calendar.

Doodle augments calendaring systems. It helps with negotiating a common meeting time between multiple participants on diverse platforms. Our local HIMSS chapter has used it for a year or more and it's been working well.

Doodle solves a problem I have, and it has a track record. So it's worth my time to test Doodle against Gordon's Laws for software and service use.

First I'll start with the fundamentals. Doodle is a Swiss company (Zurich) and revenue is a mixture of ads (yech) and premium services:

• solo - mobile support (web site), calendar connect (but this comes with free service too), ad free: $30/year
• business: solo + branding and encryption + 20 users: $350/year
• enterprise: negotiable

That's encouraging -- they have a plausible way to make money that doesn't require them selling me out. On the other hand, I don't see a lot of value to the 'solo' account since Calendar Connect comes with a free account.

Next I'll look at account setup and revocation. It's not obvious, but if you look at the login at the top of Doodle pages the Doodle icon is a drop down. Click it and you'll see how to link Doodle to your (two-factor protected) Google account using OpenID. That, of course, can be revoked from Google. I'm willing to give them my Gmail address -- it's hardly secret and already gets vast amounts of (largely filtered out) spam.

Next I tried the Google Calendar integration. I don't like that they want my Google Contacts. So that's a negative; I decided not to provide that access for now. I may give them access to one of my Google Apps accounts that has no significant Contacts exposure.

Overall Doodle gets a B+. No data lock, easy exit, plausible business model, good credentials handling. They miss the A because they insist on access to my Google Contacts rather than Calendar alone.

I'll give them a try.

PS. Extra points for having a $3 iPhone app and an Android app. Non-free is a very good sign for an iPhone app. Almost takes them to A-.

Update: As per comments, Doodle allows one to drop access to Contacts after an initial privileges grant. So they do get an A- which is pretty good. Best would be if Content access was always optional.

In practice Calendar access isn't very useful for me -- very few events of mine show up on my personal gmail calendar. They show up on calendars I subscribe to, such as my corporate calendar, the family calendar, my wife and kids calendars, etc. (Dog does not have her own calendar yet.)

So to know my true free/busy time Doodle would need access to an API that doesn't exist yet. On the other hand, subscribing to the Doodle calendar feed lets me visualize Doodle controlled appointments within my Google Calendar. That's useful now.

Contacts access would be useful within Doodle, but as noted above I'm cautious about allowing that.

Adding events to Google Calendar: generating quick add statements

Some parts of Google Calendar are pretty cool. Event import ain't one of 'em. I've gotten CSV import to work, but it's more than ugly. It's dumb [4]. Worst of all, if you make a mistake you can hose your calendar. There's event undo, but not import undo [1].

So when I had to enter 15 games from my son's calendar, I tried typing them in. That got tedious fast. I'm no good at data entry; I get bored. I make too many mistakes.

Instead I tried a middle-ground that worked pretty well. I dumped the event list into Numbers.app [2], then I wrote a simple Concatenate function [3] to construct Quick Add friendly statements like:

Baseball: LINWOOD MONROE - HIGHLAND PARK at HIGHLAND PARK on May 17, 2011 at 4:15 PM for 2 hours

I then pasted the statements into Quick Add one after the other [4]. Unfortunately Quick Add doesn't allow one to specify a target calendar, so they all went into my personal calendar. I had to do a search on "Baseball: " to find them all, then edit each one to move it to the shared family calendar. Even with that quirk it was relatively painless to enter data this way.

Which says something about how bad CSV import is!

[1] I though I'd read that Google was introducing a rollback option for calendars, but I can't find it. Must have been my imagination. 
[2] I bought it on the app store for a pittance, and I'm getting quite fond of it.  The font display is surprisingly bad, but that's not unusual in OS X (Mac Classic fonts were better, and Win 7 is best). Where it bests Excel is layout -- you can put as many table/spreadsheets on the work surface as you want.
[3] This doesn't work very well in Excel. In Excel a reference to date produces a date serial number in Concatenate. I believe this is a defect, and it's probably as old as time. I'm glad Numbers.app goes its own way. The function looked like this: =CONCATENATE("Baseball: ",E3," at ",F3," on ", C3 ," at ",D3," for 2 hours")
[4] A smart import function would use quick add style NLP to process any number of lines into events, then it would allow a user to correct the list, then it would import. With an undo option of course.

The multi-iPhone family - two approaches

What's the best way to manage multiple iPhones in a single family?

There are at least two broad approaches, and combinations of them. We've tried 'em all. At the moment we manage 3 iPhones (parents and one child) and 1 iTouch as well as several iPods.

I'll share our experiences here.

Apple's preference is for every family member to have at least a separate OS X user account, if not a separate computer. Each person should have a companion MobileMe that manages synchronization across multiple machines. Apple would probably prefer that each family member have their own iTunes (.mac) account for media purchases, so DRMd material would only play on one device.

This approach does have advantages, but there are obvious disadvantages. It's an expensive and complex approach with a lot of management needs and there are issues with sharing apps and movies.

We've used a variant of the "Apple approach" with two user accounts on one machine, and all purchases through a single iTunes account (mine). One account owns iTunes and apps, the second subscribes to App updates through "family sharing" [1]. This does enable each account to have its own Address Book and it aligns well with using MobileMe on phone and multiple OS X machines.

This "classic" multi-user approach blows up completely when you add Parental Controls. Among other problems, MobileMe is violently incompatible with Parental Controls. I wasted hours trying to make it work before I retreated to a much simpler Google approach.

The Google Approach [2] is relatively painless. I use it with my son's iPhone. I sync it in my user account for media access and app installation, but I use Google Sync (Exchange server/ActiveSync) against his account on our family Google Apps domain for the phone's email, contacts and calendar. He could access the Google Calendar and Mail through a Parental Controlled account using OS Mail and iCal but in practice he just uses his phone [3].

There are some downsides since iTunes is designed for a single user with a single set of "last played" values and ratings, but in practice the confusion is modest and the pain reduction is immense. It's also much cheaper than the "Apple approach".

So, going forward, we're making less use of the OS X desktop, more use of Google (alternative is MobileMe) cloud services. This gets around the sharing/identity problems of iPhone synchronization.
--
[1] We go through some geeky maneuvers so that my wife can have full access to all media from her user account without replicating files. See links below for tips. In short; set iTunes to not import, then media library into client iTunes. Incredibly iTunes creates links to media.

[2] You can do this with MobileMe on the iPhone and the MobileMe web interface, but without the Parental Controls-incompatible desktop you lose a lot of the value of MM. For various reasons we've gone the Google approach.

[3] Google web browser access is (yet again) OS X Parental Control hell. You can't enable web access to a Google Apps domain without enabling access to Google search.

See also:

• The flaw in iTunes: 2 users, 2 iPods - and our brain locked future (2005, introducing BrainLock with Palladium Inside, aka the RetinaChip)
• iTunes 9 home sharing is mediocre (2009)
• The ultimate AirTunes, iPhone Remote, iTunes setup
• Working around iTunes lack of multi-user support
• Sync iTunes Libraries Between Two Macs

Google Calendar vs. iPhone: My reminders are gone

It's been a while since I've had a good Synchronization is Hell story. This one is just a small reminder of the nastiness of divergent application and data models.

The reminders on some of my yearly recurring (birthday) Google Calendar events are gone. The Reminder heading shows up, but there are no choices beneath it.

Google Calendar syncs with my iPhone using the CalDAV standard (built on iCalendar data model, so really iCalendar is what I care about) [1]. If I inspect the same event on my iPhone I see reminders set for 2 days and 14 days.

The 2 day reminder is a valid choice on the iPhone. The 14 day reminder is not [2] - it is supported only on Google Calendar. If I edit the event on iPhone I lose the 14 day reminder (probably doesn't work anyway).

No big deal. I'm sure my relatives understand why I don't get their 80th birthday cards to them on time.

Not.

Sigh. One more reminder that synchronization really is hellish.

[1] The Wikipedia page on CalDAV is ancient. At this time ActiveSync works better with Google/iPhone than CalDAV/iCalendar , but with OS 3 there's only one ActiveSync source per phone. That one is taken by work/Exchange Server.

[2] I do so miss the power of 13 yo Palm Calendaring with DateBk.

See also:

• Synchronization is Hell
• What the iPhone needs is Gorilla Haven’s DateBk6
• Gordon's Notes: The descent of the PDA: Newton, Palm, Blackberry and iPhone

--My Google Reader Shared items (feed)

Sync heck: CalDAV vs Exchange Server - a Google Apple review

Two years after writing "Synchronization is Hell" I'm pleased to report it's been only a bit heckish of late for my iPhone and our family Calendar.

Three months ago I switched my iPhone sync to

• CalDAV to multiple Google Calendars, including my wife's family calendar, my personal calendar, and various school and sport and social calendars all shared via Google. (iCal also subscribes to these. It's useful when I want to see the most data, but it's not essential.)
• MobileMe for Personal Contacts. MobileMe manages Contacts sync for me across multiple OS X machines.
• Microsoft's "Exchange" (ActiveSync) for my corporate Contacts, Calendar and email.
• Gmail for my personal mail.

Yes, it's rather complicated. Life would be easier if the iPhone could handle multiple ActiveSync accounts - then I could also sync to Google using ActiveSync. I lost access to my Google Contacts when I switched my single iPhone ActiveSync client to the corporate server. I think I'm now ready to retry Spanning Sync, which I gave up on about a year ago and take another stab and "Project Contacts".

Despite the Contacts loss and some quirks, it's been a miracle to finally have work and personal and other calendars all in one place. I have a fairly full and complicated life, and being able to coordinate calendars this way has been genuine progress.

There are a few limitations with this I never see mentioned elsewhere -- so here's the exclusive list:

1. On my iPhone I can't move an appointment between calendars after I've created it
2. Exception handling is quirky. I can set an appointment in Google to workweek only, but it may not stay that way on my iPhone.
3. I can't invite people to appointments created on the iPhone CalDAV account, even though Google supports invitations. I can do invites with the ActiveSync account.

See also:

• iPhone sync to Google contacts - 3 methods and work/home implications
• Project Contacts: Now mixing Outlook/Exchange, PST file, Outlook/Home, MobileMe Sync, OS X Address Book and the iPhone.
• Using OS X 10.5 iCal with Google CalDAV - cleaning up import disasters
• Address book sharing with OS X and MobileMe
• Project Contacts: Integration across iPhone, Google and whatever
• Work home contact integration: Outlook to Google to OS X Address Book
• MobileMe: Integrating Work and Personal Contacts

Update 4/14/2010: Currently my iPhone can't edit CalDAV synced appointments that have invitations. Really annoying. iPhone OS 4 will support multiple Exchange connections so I'll try using ActiveSync instead when that's out. I don't know if this is a CalDAV, Apple or Google issue.

A Google calendar with contact birthdays

It's a secret, but for some time there's been a Google Calendar with Contacts birthdays and events.

It's in Other Calendars:Add:Browse Interesting Calendars:More:Contacts birthdays and events.

No, I don't know what "events" means.

The Contacts Birthdays and Events is public by default. So if anyone knows the URL, they can add it. So you can share it with your spouse and vice-versa, in which case you'll want to give each distinct names.

Obviously it has only those birthdays you've added to Contacts information. This calendar will be more useful if I'm ever able to integrate my OS X/MobileMe address book with my Google Contacts (currently the data models are too dissimilar). So, for the moment, it's more curious than useful.

These published calendars can add up. With this one I have 20 calendars available to my account, though I display only about 5-6 at a time. The calendars I display vary by season.

--
My Google Reader Shared items (feed)

Using OS X 10.5 iCal with Google CalDAV - cleaning up import disasters

I don't have a rich enough vocabulary to fully express my opinion of OS X iCal. Can a worse calendar program exist anywhere or anywhen?

And yet ... Google lists iCal as one of precisely two products that will work with Google's CalDAV services. I now use CalDAV with my iPhone, and at the moment I prefer it to iPhone ActiveSync.

That's nice, but not enough to make me bother -- until a recent Google Calendar import misadventure. Google doesn't give users a way to remove all events from a Calendar without deleting the calendar. I need something more powerful than Google's anemic calendar interfaces.

I decided to give iCal CalDAV a try with Spanning Sync as my backup.

First I had to clean out the old calendars, now abandoned since I'd moved my calendaring to Google. It was easy to delete all but the Home Calendar. You can't remove the iCal Home calendar [SEE UPDATE: This was a bug, you should be able to remove it.], and there's no UI to delete all Home Calendar entries (the iCal List view, in particular, having been famously deleted in 10.5 and replaced with the bizarre "." workaround).

I tried the "search on ." method to find entries in a list view and delete them, but there were several undead entries. They returned after deletion. Besides, iCal is sickeningly slow at delete operations.

In the end I had to remove all data in iCal using the Finder:

... Navigate to the folder ~User/Library/Calendars
Delete the contents

Navigate to ~User/Library/Application Support/iCal
Delete the contents...

Once that was done I followed Google's CalDAV setup directions. I now have about five of my Google Calendars in iCal. It's a good way to view a lot of Calendar data in one place.

In early testing, things look promising. I can in fact edit and delete CalDAV entries and the changes are reflected back to Google -- at one time I believe that didn't work. Alarms, however, don't get set in Google even when they're set in iCal.

Update: The directions work for Google Apps domains as well as standard Google Accounts. See also.

Update 11/29/09: You should be able to delete your Home calendar. I found this out while setting up iCal on some of our other machines. When I right clicked on Home the Delete function was black, it had been gray on the first machine I worked with. I went back to the initial machine, my old G5 iMac, and I was able to delete it there as well. I think this was related to the "zombie" recurring appointments (dated 2002) that I couldn't remove. When I deleted all the Calendar data in the Finder I cleared up that problem -- and the problem of the unremovable "Home" calendar. The most likely cause? Permissions, of course. The OS X permissions model needs to be shot.

--
My Google Reader Shared items (feed)

When Google and Google Apps Collide

Most of our family Google Services are tied to our family domain and Google Apps. That doesn't work for Google Voice though, so I had to create "true" Google accounts for each family member with a GV number. I used our Google Apps emails as the user name.

Turns out, this has an interesting side-effect. Google binds calendars to a user name, so there's a calendar for emily@our_family_domain in Google Apps. So, you might wonder, what happens if you go to calendar.google.com when logged in to the standard Google Account with the Google Apps email?

Then you find your Null calendar ...

Get thee to the null calendar!

Google struggles with their Google Apps/Google Account dichotomies.

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Import Calendar data into Google Calendar via CSV files

You can import CSV files into an existing Google Calendar (but watch the time zones). Here's the format outline ...

About CSV files - Google Calendar Help

Subject,Start Date,Start Time,End Date,End Time,All Day Event,Description,Location,Private
Final Exam,05/12/08,07:10:00 PM,05/12/08,10:00:00 PM,False,Two essay questions that will cover topics covered throughout the semester,"Columbia, Schermerhorn 614",True

The above example omits the usual CSV quotes from most of the strings, but elsewhere we're told they're optional. (In practice you should use them for all strings.)

The documentation is unclear, but looking at my Google Calendar settings it looks like you import into an existing calendar. I don't know if it appends or replaces, I'm guessing append.

I expect to try this soon for our hockey org calendars.

Update 11/1/09: This was an absolute bugger to get to work. Google is pissily picky about the precise format and there are no useful error messages. During the times I was attempting this Google Calender went briefly AWOL -- something that happens far too often.

Here's the header and first row of the CSV file that I was finally able to import. It looks like you need the bloody seconds in the date. I worked with Excel for Mac, used the convert functions to turn text into numbers, then chose the precise format, then exported.

Subject,Start Date,Start Time,End Date,End Time,All Day Event,Description,Location,Private

Edgumbe Peewee Hockey,10/24/09,2:10:00 PM,10/24/09,3:10:00 PM,FALSE,Practice, Highland North,FALSE

Google must have given this chore to an intern who they hated. The feeling was evidently mutual.

Update 11/29/09: There is no way to correct a mistake. I imported 40 events into an existing calendar, and realized I'd made a mistake. I couldn't rapidly remove them, nor could I purge the calendar and reimport. I had to delete the calendar -- and all the subscriptions -- so I could start over. To think some people wonder why I hate the cloud ...

Update 11/29/09b: I'm now using iCal as a tool for faster editing and cleanup of my Google Calendar.

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MobileMe - Sharing Contacts and Calendars in a Family account

If you have a MobileMe Family Account you probably want to share your Contacts or Calendars among family members.

You can't.

Use Google Apps.

See: The MobileMe Massacre begins

My standard iPhone configuration

I've recently configured 3 iPhones - one for Emily, two for friends. So the configuration routine is fresh in my mind and ready to share.

I'll hopefully update this with some reference links, but here's the quick summary. The phones are configured around Google Services, except for Contacts which are a festering sore in Google-Land.

Basic setup

1. Check version (lately has been 3.1)
2. Turn off auto-ask WiFi
3. Picture of business card as wallpaper (so phone can be returned if found)
4. Google-phone configuration
5. Auto-lock to 2 minutes, show passcode lock
6. Mail: Show To/CC label, Signature, Default account (if needed),
7. Contacts: Sort and display order, Default account (if needed)
8. Calendars: Time Zone support Off, Default Calendar (if needed)
9. Demonstrate use of the Search screen

Google-phone configuration (calendar sharing)

1. Mail: Default iPhone Gmail setup (IMAP)
2. Google Calendar Configuration including Calendar subscription and sharing
3. Calendar and Google Contacts: Exchange Server ActiveSync then Google Sync so phone can display multiple Google Calendars selected from the primary Google Calendar collection (m.google.com and tap on "Sync") [1][2]. Warning: This setup tries HARD to get you to wipe out all other iPhone accounts. Be careful not to do so. In the setups I do people sometimes need to sync with an Outlook desktop calendar, and they almost always need to sync to a desktop Contacts collection. [2]
4. Desktop Contact synchronization (this is controlled by iTunes) [2]

Third party apps (install and configure)

1. Google Mobile (m.google.com)
2. Facebook
3. Optional: Appigo Tasks.app sync to Toodledo

Problems

1. No Google task sync solution
2. Google Contacts smell of squashed skunk
3. Only one Exchange Server account per phone (CalDAV?)

See also: My iPhone Home Screen

Footnotes

[1] For Google Apps setup see a recent Google Sync post of mine.

[2] The one substantial advantage of MobileMe for Mac users is the Contacts integration. If the Calendar sharing were not so pathetic and the data lock not stronger than Sauron's Ring it would be interesting.