Can Icloud sync with google calendar and gmail?

ithos wrote:

If you subscribe to an external (e.g. Google) calendar in iCal on Lion, you can choose to have that subscription "located" on iCloud or on your Mac. If on iCloud, that (read-only) subscription will propogate to all of your other devices that are linked to your iCloud account. That is a huge bonus of iCloud over Google calendars (imo). With Google, I had to manually subscribe to a calendar on each of my devices. The one downside is that these subscriptions cannot be viewed on the icloud.com website. I believe Google will display external subscriptions on their web interface. But hontestly, I rarely use a web interface for my calendars. Do you?

To grant read/write access to an iCloud calendar, the other user needs to have an iCloud account. This is no different than Google calendar. If I want to share a Google calendar with another user and grant read/write access, that user also needs a Google account.

In practical use, there is very little difference between the two.

Can you explain how?

Google makes it's calendars compatible with iCloud. iCloud doesn't return the favor? Doesn't anyone here have a band or a sales team or a church choir where one guy inputs calendar info and everyone else just looks at it on whatever device they own? We used to do that with iCal, bu iCloud's robots.txt won't let Google sync to it, locking out all non-iCloud users from seeing anything. It's not that it can't, it's that it won't.

The end result is either a) everyone on the little league team buys an Apple product (The Beverly Hills Red Sox, maybe) or b) the iCloud user gets fired from calendar duty for overpromising and underdelivering after wasting everyone's time on this "great new thing." That'd be me.

Precisely, what people seem to be missing here is that before with mobile me... a single user could update his calender using mobile me, and everyone else could sync to it using any calender, google included. icloud no longer supports this. It's worth noting however, it does sync with yahoo calender 🙂 You just have to refresh it manually from the web browser.

Thank you. Thank you. I only did step 9 also, and it worked! My calendar notifications are back! I called tech support at Apple to share your brilliant information.

iCloud prevents access to it's robots.xml file from a google calendar which in effect means no access to iCloud calendar.

I tried looking into sharing an iPad calendar with google calendars a long time ago and dropped it. Goes only one way (access to google cals is easy on the iPad, not the other way around)...
Now I know what the reality of this is.

APPLE IS SELFISH AND GREEDY AND ONLY CARES ABOUT SELLING THEIR OWN PRODUCTS ALL THE WHILE DENYING ACCESS TO THIRD PARTIES.

This is turning into a rant but I am growing sick and tired of this attitude(many companies are guilty of this, but Apple is a champ in being bad).
We already own your products and you forbid us sharing the content produced/managed on them?

My father is a pastor and uses his iPad all the time as his workhorse. Calendar sharing is not an option.

I am now looking into alternative calendaring apps which will operate through google calendar, meaning more money spent (not that it's an outrageous expense either) for something that I should in essence already be capable of doing.

APPLE FIX THIS! Where's the seamless technology?

Csound1 wrote:

ithos wrote:

If you subscribe to an external (e.g. Google) calendar in iCal on Lion, you can choose to have that subscription "located" on iCloud or on your Mac. If on iCloud, that (read-only) subscription will propogate to all of your other devices that are linked to your iCloud account.

Can you explain how?

Log into Google Calendar using Safari. To the right of the calendar name you want to share, click on the little triangle and choose "Calendar settings". If it is a public calendar, get the public ICAL address of the calendar. Copy it to the clipboard. Otherwise, if it's only for your use, copy the private ICAL address to the clipboard.

Open iCal (in Lion). Click Calendar->Subscribe... Paste the address you copied in the previous step into the "Calendar URL" field. Click Subscribe. In the sheet that appears, choose "iCloud" in the "Location" pop-up menu. Set other settings as you see fit. Then click "OK". iCal should report (in the title bar) that it is updating.

Now go to any of your iOS 5 devices that are associated with the same iCloud account (Apple ID). Open the Calendar app. Click the "Calendar" button in the upper left to view your list of calendars. The calendar you subscribed to on your Mac will appear as a subscribed calendar in your list of "iCloud" calendars.

Hope this helps.

By the way... If you want to subscribe to a Google calendar on only one iOS device, take the link you copied in the above step, paste it into an e-mail, and send it to yourself. (There are other ways to get the link to your iOS device, but this is probably the easiest.) On the iOS device, open the mail, click on the link, and Calendar will ask if you want to subscribe to the shared calendar. This type of sharing has been there for a long time, and still exists. But if you want to have a calendar subscription on all of your (multiple) iOS devices, you have to repeat the subscription step on every device. Locating the subscription on iCloud (as described above) eliminates this issue.

atjaywalker wrote:

All I had to do is Step 9. go to http://www.google.com/calendar/iphoneselect

Once there, sign-in and checkmark the existing calendars you want to see on your iphone/touch.

I don't recall having to do this prior to OSX Lion / IOS 5 and totally agree, it was a colossal waste of time looking for this simple solution. Google or Apple would do well to highlight this. Thanks!

I have always had to do this, even prior to iOS 5. This is required because Google only pushes your primary calendar to other devices syncing through the Exchange protocol (by default). If I recall, the link used to be named something different, but it's always been required for anything other than your primary calendar.

I view this as an error on Google's part, not Apple's.

The robots.txt file is simply a file that instructs web crawlers (i.e. search engines) to not index particular parts of your site, perhaps because those parts change often and search data would not be useful. (Think "calendars".) This file in no way prevents access to a particular resource. In fact, bad web crawlers are free to ignore the robots.txt file and scavange your web site for e-mail addresses and other information.

When you try to subscribe to an iCloud calendar on Google, it should simply subscribe to it. The robots.txt file is not relevant in this case and should be ignored. As I stated above, robots.txt is not an access control mechanism at all. The fact that Google is honoring it in this case is a bug. It may even be intentional to create ill will among iOS users, since Google sells a competing platform.

The blame falls on Google, not Apple.

ithos wrote:

Csound1 wrote:

ithos wrote:

If you subscribe to an external (e.g. Google) calendar in iCal on Lion, you can choose to have that subscription "located" on iCloud or on your Mac. If on iCloud, that (read-only) subscription will propogate to all of your other devices that are linked to your iCloud account.

Can you explain how?

Log into Google Calendar using Safari. To the right of the calendar name you want to share, click on the little triangle and choose "Calendar settings". If it is a public calendar, get the public ICAL address of the calendar. Copy it to the clipboard. Otherwise, if it's only for your use, copy the private ICAL address to the clipboard.

Open iCal (in Lion). Click Calendar->Subscribe... Paste the address you copied in the previous step into the "Calendar URL" field. Click Subscribe. In the sheet that appears, choose "iCloud" in the "Location" pop-up menu. Set other settings as you see fit. Then click "OK". iCal should report (in the title bar) that it is updating.

Now go to any of your iOS 5 devices that are associated with the same iCloud account (Apple ID). Open the Calendar app. Click the "Calendar" button in the upper left to view your list of calendars. The calendar you subscribed to on your Mac will appear as a subscribed calendar in your list of "iCloud" calendars.

Hope this helps.

By the way... If you want to subscribe to a Google calendar on only one iOS device, take the link you copied in the above step, paste it into an e-mail, and send it to yourself. (There are other ways to get the link to your iOS device, but this is probably the easiest.) On the iOS device, open the mail, click on the link, and Calendar will ask if you want to subscribe to the shared calendar. This type of sharing has been there for a long time, and still exists. But if you want to have a calendar subscription on all of your (multiple) iOS devices, you have to repeat the subscription step on every device. Locating the subscription on iCloud (as described above) eliminates this issue.

There is no sync in your method, you are simply viewing 2 different calendars in the same app, add an event to the Google Calendar and it will not appear in the iCloud Calendar. Thanks anyway.

I think we need to clarify what is meant by "iCloud Calendar". If you mean the calendar you can view on icloud.com, then no, subscribed calendars do not show up there.

But if you mean iCloud calendars on a Mac or iOS device, then yes, there is a sync. But the frequency depends on your settings. In my setup below, I have "Auto-refresh" set to once a week. If you have it set to never, it won't sync.

I just did a test and added an event (using Google Calendar) to the softball calendar shown below. I then went into iCal (on my Mac) and forced a refresh (Calendar -> Refresh All) and the event appeared just fine. (I wasn't going to wait a week.)

On my iPhone, there isn't an easy way to force an immediate refresh. I'll concede that. But I was able to force a refresh by going to my Calendar list, disabling the softball calendar, and then re-enabling it.

My only real issue is that syncing through iCloud is slower than syncing through Google Calendar. But then again, I am now up to 18 calendars.

Yes, you are viewing 2 seperate calendars through the same Window, but they are not synchronized. Try for yourself, enter an event on the icloud.com calendar, then go to Google and see if t is on the Google calendar, it will not be.

I have 2 books, I put them on my desk, I see 2 books, they are seperate books.

Huh?

No. I have one calendar, called "WAA Wildcats Softball" that is hosted on Google's servers. iCal on my Mac, and the Calendar app on my iPhone, sychronize with that (single) calendar at least once a week, and I can view (read-only) the calendar data. This is an extremely common model for calendar subscriptions. You cannot edit a subscribed calendar on either service unless you are an owner.

If you are talking about a single calendar that multiple users can edit, then that is a different situaton. Both Google and Apple require that all users have an account on their service (or share a common username and password) in order to edit a calendar on that service.

If you have created two separate calendars, each hosted by a different service, then of course they won't synchronize. They are two separate calendars (books). You've done nothing to relate one to the other.

Other than recommending that you look up the word Synchronize, I'm done.

ithos wrote:

Huh?

No. I have one calendar, called "WAA Wildcats Softball" that is hosted on Google's servers. iCal on my Mac, and the Calendar app on my iPhone, sychronize with that (single) calendar at least once a week, and I can view (read-only) the calendar data. This is an extremely common model for calendar subscriptions. You cannot edit a subscribed calendar on either service unless you are an owner.

If you are talking about a single calendar that multiple users can edit, then that is a different situaton. Both Google and Apple require that all users have an account on their service (or share a common username and password) in order to edit a calendar on that service.

If you have created two separate calendars, each hosted by a different service, then of course they won't synchronize. They are two separate calendars (books). You've done nothing to relate one to the other.

Wow. That's rude.

I have a very clear understanding of how synchronization works, how the CalDAV protocol works, what an ical file is, how that relates to subscriptions, and the distinction between one-way and two-way synchronization. I have 18 calendars distributed across an Exchange server, Google calendars, and iCloud, and they are all synchronizing between two MacBook Pros (both running 10.6), a MacBook Air, a Mac mini, a Mac Pro, an iMac, two iPhones, and two iPod touches. When I make changes on one device, those changes propagate to all others.

I'm sorry this does not work for you.

ithos wrote:

Wow. That's rude.

I have a very clear understanding of how synchronization works, how the CalDAV protocol works, what an ical file is, how that relates to subscriptions, and the distinction between one-way and two-way synchronization. I have 18 calendars distributed across an Exchange server, Google calendars, and iCloud, and they are all synchronizing between two MacBook Pros (both running 10.6), a MacBook Air, a Mac mini, a Mac Pro, an iMac, two iPhones, and two iPod touches. When I make changes on one device, those changes propagate to all others.

I'm sorry this does not work for you.

I'm sorry but clearly you do not understand synchronization at all, you have independent subscribed calendars which you view in combination, if they were synchronized you would only need to view one, because they would be the same.

Do this

Put an event on the iCloud calendar, go to the Google calendar only and see if it is there, viewing the iCloud calendar in Google is not the same as viewing the Google calendar!