Comments on: Update – Syncing iCal, Thunderbird and iPhones with Google Calendar

By: Ian

Ian — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 16:46:45 +0000

You beauty – just saved me spending £60 on mobileMe

By: iconfused

iconfused — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:31:24 +0000

YES YES YES! I have an itouch with OS 2.2.1, and I have looked for over 2 weeks trying to find the answer. Nothing has worked until I found the bottom of this page. Who would have thought that the way to syn my mac product with a google product would have been a microsoft product? This works beautifully, and I didn’t need the mac solution (just buy our brand new operating system and everything will be fine), the google solution (use mac’s new operating system and then our thing will work), the external solution (install our program to overcome their shortcomings) or the hacking solution. Thank you very much, this works so well and was so simple.

By: Cliff

Cliff — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 02:39:36 +0000

Clearing Safari’s cookie and cache did it! Everything appears to have synced now; thanks for all your help David.

By: David Balogh

David Balogh — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 11:24:52 +0000

Hi Cliff,

Try clearing Safari’s Cookie and Cache, to reset anything that may be stored. Always accept cookies, that’s how they keep you logged into the site. I’d avoid the “from visited” setting only because most sites now use other sites to store active content and it results in sites behaving strangely.

By: Cliff

Cliff — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 03:39:28 +0000

Hmm. Followed the steps, but I keep getting the following message once I’ve signed in: “Your browser’s cookie functionality is turned off. Please turn it on.” Despite going into settings on my iPod and changing Safari’s “accept cookies” from “never” to “from visited” and even to “always” I keep getting the same message.

By: David Balogh

David Balogh — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 11:28:16 +0000

Hi Cliff,

It’s pretty easy to do. Just point your iPod Touch to http://m.google.com/sync and follow the prompts. If you need more detail, I wrote a tutorial – Here’s the link.

By: Cliff

Cliff — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 02:24:04 +0000

Hi David,

Thanks for the helpful post. Can you tell me what to do if I have more than one Google calendar to sync? It appears as if only one of them has actually synced with iCal on my iPod Touch (2nd generation, everything up-to-date). Any suggestions?

By: David Balogh

David Balogh — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 11:45:24 +0000

@Nick -

According to Google: “Apple’s iCal, Mozilla Sunbird, and Google Calendar differ in the types of event reminders offered. While Google Calendar supports pop-up, email, and SMS reminders, iCal and Sunbird only support pop-up reminders. Accordingly, only pop-up reminders are synced between Google Calendar and these calendar applications.”

That said, from iCal, I was able to add popup reminders by choosing message and Email reminders by choosing Email.

I’m not near my home computer, so I can’t test out the reminders with Thunderbird / Lightning but I do remember it being similar. I’d recommend trying it out as it’s much better using one application rather than two (Mail and iCal) and it’s cross platform.

By: Nick

Nick — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 19:42:43 +0000

David — Thanks for the updated post!

I set this up using iCal and I’m still noticing some syncing issues with the reminders.

From iCal, when I create an event it automatically uses the default Google Calendar reminder settings. However, I can only add/remove iCal’s own reminders from there and cannot change any of the Google reminders (without logging directly into Google Calendar). I can’t figure out any other way to sync the reminders.

Does this functionality work better with Lightning/Sunbird?

I’m just hoping the Google Calendar team releases full offline Gears access like Gmail… and then I can forget all about setting up a separate desktop calendar client.