Software

Keep your calendar in sync with BusySync (Mac OS X)

How do you keep your diary up to date? I have a paper one, but occasionally I forget to look at it for a few days and end up missing important appointments. Electronic diaries are great, but then I forget to charge them up and the same problem occurs. Computer diaries are also great, but the problem I’ve always had is access: I don’t want the hassle of having to login to Google every time I want to put something in my diary, but if I just use iCal then I have to be at my home computer to see my diary. Oh, if only there were a way to have the ease of use of iCal, but the portability of Google Calendar so that I could see my appointments on my cellphone.

Up until recently, I didn’t have a way to do that, but now I do! BusySync! (cue fanfare)

BusySync actually offers more features than just keeping your iCal and Google Calendar in sync: sharing calendars over a local network, multi-user editing, offline access, and differing access rights for different user groups. However, it’s the iCal-Google Calendar sync feature that really attracted me to this nifty program.

Installation is dead easy - just open the installer and a new panel is created in System Preferences where you can enter your Google account details, and choose which calendars you want to sync with. I decided to delete everything from iCal and start afresh with my Google Calendars, and that worked fine. As I say, there are options to share and publish your calendar, but I haven’t explored them because I don’t have a need for them at the minute. One nice feature is the ability to sync your alarms with an action on Google - so when I set an alarm in iCal I have told BusySync to get Google to SMS my mobile phone and tell me I have an appointment coming up.

It all works very well, too: changes to iCal are synced seamlessly with Google, and vica versa. So far, no complaints whatsoever.

At $19.95 this is a steal, and well worth it if you find you need to share of sync your calendar. I know it’s saved me a lot of hassle… and I tend to know what I’m doing these days!

© 2008 Geek-Speak.