Use your Google calendars on your iPhone

If you use Google's calendar you can synch it with your iPhone's built in calendar (which I must say, is a really nice app). You don't have to use Apple's Cloud, or be restricted to iCal on your Mac.

Google has now provided instructions (spoken, even!) for synching your mobile device calendar with Google's, including iPhone. Better late than never.

Here's how:

1: Set up a Google Calendar account on the iPhone

On your iPhone go to:

Settings> Mail, contacts, calendars > Add account > Other > Add CalDAV account

Then:

• Server is google.com, 
• User name is your Google user name (the email address or whatever that you sign in with), 
• Password is your Google account password,
• Description is optional. 

Then cllick Advanced settings and make sure SSL is On.

2: In Google, select the calendars you want on your iPhone

I noticed that not all my different calendars were showing. So:

• Open a mobile browser and go to this url: https://www.google.com/calendar/syncselect
• Sign into Google with your user email and password. 
• On the list of your calendars, check those that you want on your iPhone.

Done! it works!

3: Set your preferred Google calendar to be the default

Entries added on my iPhone weren't getting through initially - because it had decided to use the inbuilt Birthdays as the default calendar.

• Go back to Settings > Mail, contacts, calendars > and scroll down to Calendars > Default calendar.
• You'll see a list of those available. Delete any that aren't on your Google calendar and select the one you want to be your default.

You can also delete all the extraneous additional 'calendars' (that the iPhone is born with, I suppose).

4: Select on your iPhone the calendars you want to see

• Return to the home screen and go to Calendar.
• In any view, go to Calendars (top left of the screen) and from the list select those you want it to show on your iPhone. Then you can click the Refresh button bottom left.

After about half a day searching Google for answers, my iPhone does now perfectly synch iPhone < > Google calendar < > desktop Mac, both ways throughout. Solved!

(On my MacBook / iMac I like to use Mozilla's Sunbird with the Provider add-on, but that's a different story.)

PS: Searches on Google didn't throw up the iPhone manual as a possible source of answers, but it is fairly helpful although not as detailed. I'm not sure it gives the complete answer.

iPhone calendar - show public holidays

The previous post dealt with synching iPhone's calendar with Google calendar, but following that process you don't get public holidays showing.

Here's how to do that.

First do Stage 1 on your iPhone:
Settings> Mail, contacts, calendars > Add account > Other > only this time, select Add subscribed calendar.

Then, the server is whatever public holiday calendar you wish. I used Apple's purely because it's easy to find the server address:
ical.mac.com/ical/UK32Holidays.ics

For US public holidays, it's
ical.mac.com/ical/US32Holidays.ics

Or if you're using Google calendars anyway, here's Google's:
https://www.google.com/calendar/ical/uk__en%40holiday.calendar.google.com/public/basic.ics

Solved: Synch iPhone's calendar with Google calendar

Please see update blog, March 30th 2013

iPhone synching challenges

iPhone 3GS -
Is iTunes on your PC, or hopefully Mac, telling you that synching will remove half your hard won apps? You probably need to go to:
file > Transfer purchases from iPhone
first to get them backed up onto the computer.

They really know how to conceal these things, don't they.