There’s a new version of GCALDaemon, and I’ve been playing with it for a few days. (OK, nonstop this entire weekend.) The (semi)colon bug for Unix is fixed in beta 2, and you can sync multiple calendars now!
First things first, I kept losing data (usually To Do items), so make a backup first. I haven’t figured out the pattern to this problem yet, so I don’t know if I should submit a bug report. Another annoyance is that two of my calendars went unidirectional, with Google overwriting iCal. I made a new Google calendar and linked it to (a restore of) the same iCal, and it appears to be better. (Odd, hunh?) Make several backups if you want! I made one with iCal and one in the Finder.
/Developer/Tools/CpMac -pr ~/Library/Application\ Support/iCal/Sources ~/Library/Application\ Support/iCal/Sources.backup- # or just cp instead of CpMac on OS X 10.4+
Now you can install beta 2.
cd /binsudo rm -rf /bin/GCALDaemon# unless you don’t want to start over from scratch with a clean slate!sudo unzip/Downloads/gcaldaemon-linux-1.0-beta2.zipsudo chgrp -R admin /bin/GCALDaemonsudo chmod -R g+w /bin/GCALDaemonsudo chmod 755 /bin/GCALDaemon/bin/*.shcd /bin/GCALDaemon/bin./password-encoder.shcd /bin/GCALDaemon/confopen -a subethaedit gcal-daemon.cfg
Follow the directions for file-based synchronization like Rainlendar. HINT: Look in ~/Library/Application\ Support/iCal/Sources/*.calendar/Info.plist for the name of that calendar.
Then you can make it a full OS X citizen using Lingon. To get started, click on Assistant in the toolbar.
- Keep an application/script always running
- Label: net.sf.gcaldaemon (leave “Launch only when I log in” checked)
- Application/script: /bin/GCALDaemon/bin/standalone-start.sh
And there you have it, a new entry in “My Agents” to keep iCal sync’d with your Google Calendar(s) every time you log in to your Mac!
I also ran across two other alternatives that will sync iCal and Google Calendar bidirectionally, jin’sync in alpha, and Spanning Sync coming soon.
For some reason, Lingon wasn’t loading the plist file into launchd. I had to add it manually from the command line with:
launchctl load net.sf.gcaldaemon.plist
in the ~/Library/Launch Agents directory.
Comment by E.J. — March 2, 2007 @ 10:19 am
I wondered why it didn’t always seem to run! Thanks for the tip!!!
Comment by Dr Mom — March 2, 2007 @ 1:05 pm
So I’m sold on using this. But just in case something comes along that might be better and opensource, how easy is it to uninstall? TIA
Comment by Sherwin — May 3, 2007 @ 2:17 am
It’s *very* easy to uninstall: everything is under the one directory, so you just delete it. If you did the extra Mac step with Lingon (or something similar to get it to run in the background), you’ll need to undo that as well. Enjoy!
I too dislike software that uses more resources than it should (uses a server when local should work, spreads folders all over the place, seems too big for what it is, uses a ton of RAM). This one passed my filter, and I think it’s easy enough to install and uninstall that you can run it through your filter, and even if you don’t like it there won’t be any cussing at the uninstall stage!
Comment by Dr Mom — May 8, 2007 @ 1:19 pm