Hi Larry,
Thanks for your response. In my basic testing, I was able to get two
way syncing of multiple calendars with the out of the box Snow Leopard
solution.
These are the advantages you wrote about:
> * Fully editable calendars on the iPhone/iPod Touch
If I have my iPod Touch set to sync with google, then the calendar is
fully editable (even with the out of the box Snow Leopard solution
between Mac and Google)
> * Calendars sync with Mobile Me -- this is crucial if you use Mobile Me to sync the iPhone over-the-air
Don't have Mobile Me, so I can't talk about this one.
> * Supports read-only Google calendars
I thought this could be done with CalDav?
> * Integration with existing calendars in iCal
I think the out of the box solution with Snow Leopard supports this,
but I'd have to double check
> * Smarter alarm syncing -- e.g. you'll get two emails from an email alarm with Apple's system; only one with ours
I don't use e-mail alarms, so I can't comment.
> * One-way syncing
Isn't this the same as your point above, "Supports read-only Google
calendars"
> * Free tech support
Always a good thing!
I wish Apple did release some documentation on this feature; it puts
you and the rest of us in a position where we have to guess, instead
of them just laying out how it works.
Larry, you didn't make any comments regarding the built in contact
sync with Snow Leopard. Have you had the chance to test it, and how
is Spanning Sync's contact sync better than the Snow Leopard solution?
I'm a happy user of Spanning Sync, and I can appreciate what a
terrible position Apple is putting some of its developers in. The
uncertainty of when features will be added (plus arbitrary iPhone app
rejections) must give Apple developers a great deal of anxiety. I'm
sorry you have to go through this.
Thanks,
Ara
> Hi,
>
> We were hoping that Apple would publish some documentation on this new
> feature that we could point to, but it doesn't look like they're going
> to. From what we can tell, the iCal/Google Calendar syncing support in
> Snow Leopard is nearly identical to what it was in Leopard. The main
> difference seems to be that they've added a "Google" account type to
> the preferences window rather than making the user select "CalDAV" and
> then entering the impossible-to-guess server address (as documented athttp://
www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=993...).
>
> It's still CalDAV-based, the CalDAV calendars are still read-only on
> the iPhone, they don't sync at all with MobileMe, and each calendar
> still occupies its own group in iCal which many people find
> cluttering.
>
> (To be clear, I'm talking about the "Google" item in iCal's accounts
> window and not Exchange support. Exchange support, which is completely
> new in Snow Leopard, requires an Exchange server.)
>
> So I'd say the advantages of Spanning Sync continue to be:
>
> * Fully editable calendars on the iPhone/iPod Touch
> * Calendars sync with Mobile Me -- this is crucial if you use Mobile
> Me to sync the iPhone over-the-air
> * Supports read-only Google calendars
> * Integration with existing calendars in iCal
> * Smarter alarm syncing -- e.g. you'll get two emails from an email
> alarm with Apple's system; only one with ours
> * One-way syncing
> * Free tech support
>
> You can read more about the advantages of Spanning Sync over Apple's
> CalDAV syncing in these two blog posts:
>
> la...@spanningsync.comhttp://
spanningsync.com