GOOGLE HAS IMPLEMENTED CALDAV!!! ICAL HERE I COME!!!

YES!

Good news! No, GREAT news!!!!

I've been waiting to switch back to Apple's iCal once Google went ahead and implemented the CalDav protocol on their Google Calendar service. gCal now connects and syncs with iCal through Caldav.

The instructions are simple, just follow the link:

http://www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/answer.py?answer=99358

Word to the wise though, this only works with the Mac OS X Leopard version of iCal. If you don't have Leopard you can use other caldav compliant clients, like Sunbird/Thunderbird or something. They're out there, you can't miss them. Google is your friend.

Okay, I give, here's a list of currently working caldav clients:

• Apple iCal 3.0.1+ (Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard" or later) 
• Sunbird/Lightning
• Mulberry
• Evolution
• Chandler

There will be more eventually, especially now that Apple kicked down the "technology adoption door" and released Leopard Server with iCal/Caldav support, and iCal client on Leopard is out there just begging for service providers to start providing group calendaring for the rest of us.

I have it all set up. I'm using it now. Good bye web browser calendar, hello iCal. So far it is working perfectly. My updates to the calendar are synced upward immediately, and changes by others are synced down every couple of minutes. You can set the period for the updates and forget about it fore a while. Excellent.

Google Calendar meets CalDav meets iCal. I hear people have already set it up to sync upward to their MobileMe accounts so they can get push calendaring. I set that up to for my father's iPhone/MobileMe, but he's using BusySync. At the moment Apple's implementation of CalDav on iCal doesn't allow editing of CalDav account calendars on the iPhone, so BusySync was the best way to get a "local" calendar that is synced with the office Google Calendar, which in turn updates to my iCal, so we're all good. Confusing. I know. Let's just say that it all works. 

Enough now. If you want I can describe the process in more depth later. If not, well - Google is your friend.