Chris Betcher

Ok, hopefully you're read Part 1 of this article and you now have your calendars all set up in Google Calendar instead of iCal..  Now let's get that all synced up to your phone. One of the biggest benefits of Apple's MobileMe service it the way it keeps your iCal calendars in sync with your iPhone. Unfortunately MobileMe costs $129/year here in Australia (even though it's only $99 in the US and our dollar is almost 1:1 at the moment... don't get me started on that!) The good news is that you can get exactly the same sort of synchronization at no cost by using Google Calendar instead of Apple's iCal, plus you get all the extra benefits of sharing calendars that only Google's cloud can offer. If you're a Google user then you've probably set up Gmail on your iPhone. The trouble is, when you set that up you probably did the obvious thing and went to Settings, selected Mail, Contacts, Calendars and then chose the Gmail option. That seems kind of obvious...

At the recent Google Teacher Academy in Sydney we were given a presentation by Danny Silva about making Google Calendar "sexy". Although Danny was probably being a bit tongue-in-cheek about it all, I have to admit it made me completely rethink my use of digital calendars. This rethink was also helped along by a late night geek-session with my buddy Roland Gesthuizen , another new GCT, who was showing me some of the cool things he does with integrating Gmail and Google Calendar. I'd been using Apple's iCal software that came with my Mac, which I generally quite liked. What I didn't like was the $129 it cost me each year for MobileMe in order to sync my calendar across all my computing devices. The massive benefit of a digital calendar is it's ability to set up a 2-way sync between computer to phone. Adding an appointment on my iPhone and having it magically appear on all my computers was definitely a killer feature. Of course, I also keep a work-related calend...