Welcome to The Hoosier Illuminati. Macintosh bigot, clothes horse, motorsports fanatic (as long as they turn right), Anglophile.

Clothes and manners do not make the man; but when he is made, they greatly improve his appearance. --Henry Ward Beecher

Spanning Sync: Highly Recommended

I wrote a while back about my frustrations trying to keep all of my calendars synchronized.  I thought Google CalDAV was going to be the answer, but it’s clearly not.  Google Sync does a great job of taking my corporate calendar and dumping it into Google Calendar, but CalDAV is a different story when it comes to iCal.  CalDAV creates a separate calendar in iCal, which is kind of ugly.  About half the time CalDAV claims I don’t even have a Google Calendar, which shutting down and restarting iCal seems to fix.  Most obnoxious though, is the fact that any CalDAV-created items on my iTouch are not editable. 

I’ve been holding off on trying Spanning Sync because I really didn’t want to pay for something that ought to just work, but it finally became so annoying that I decided to give it a toss.  And it’s REALLY slick.  It just works.  It works the way CalDAV should and doesn’t.  Google should be ashamed for not providing this thing themselves, they should wise up and buy Spanning Sync.  It’s the answer to a whole lot of problems. 

It will even sync Address Book to Google Contacts if you want.  I don’t, since I really don’t use Gmail for all that much, but it’s nice to know that you can. 

On something of the same subject, now that I have two Macs and the iTouch I talked myself into trying MobileMe, despite it having the dumbest name in the history of computing.  I’m forwarding all of my e-mail accounts to my MobileMe account, and I must say that despite the launch failures it’s working spectacularly for me.  All of my accounts fall into the same inbox now, and I can answer from either Mac or the iPod.  Contact sync works, iCal sync works, Safari sync works.  I’m not doing a lot with iDisk yet.  I set up a personal domain, which works.

I wouldn’t pay the $99 Apple wants for it (eBay is your friend) unless they finally do what should have been done from the very beginning and let me use my private domain name for e-mail.  They do that and they have a nearly perfect service.

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