zhasper2.0

Some hints about using the Google Sync for iPhone. These will prob­ably also apply to the Win­dows Mobile sync — but I’ve not used that, so I’m not sure. I’m going to say “iPhone” con­sist­ently — but the same will apply to an iPod touch as well (mod­ulo the things that involve a 3G con­nec­tion, of course).

• BACK UP YOUR DATA. Really can’t stress this enough. The pro­cess of set­ting up the sync WILL WIPE ALL YOUR CONTACTS AND CALENDARS. Back up first.
• You can choose up to 5 cal­en­dars (not includ­ing your primary cal­en­dar) to sync. 
  • If you have a gmail/googlemail account, visit m.google.com/sync on your iPhone, fol­low the prompts, and you’ll be able to choose up to 5 addi­tional cal­en­dars to sync.
  • If you have a Google Apps account, visit http://google.com/m/a/«domain.com», then click “More” and then “Sync”. For this to work, your domain admin­is­trator will have to have enabled Google Sync for your domain first.
  • [update]It’s been poin­ted out to me that Apps users can actu­ally access the sync set­tings from m.google.com/sync. Click on “Google Mobile” on the bot­tom left-hand corner of the page, and you’ll be taken to a page  with lots of icons for dif­fer­ent Google ser­vices. Scroll down and make sure there’s a link that says “Not in United States?”. If it lists another coun­try, click it and change your con­try to the United States — this won’t work in any other coun­try. Once you’ve changed that and you’re back at the page with ser­vice icons, find the “Google Apps user?” but­ton, and enter your domain into the popup. You’ll now have icons for your Apps domain — includ­ing a Sync icon. Click it, and once again just fol­low the dir­ec­tions from there.[/update].
• I have one Google Apps account for work and one per­sonal Google Apps account. How­ever, the iPhone only allows me to set up one Exchange account, so I have to pick which of the two I’m going to sync, right? Wrong! I’ve shared my per­sonal cal­en­dar with my work account, giv­ing it “Make changes to events” per­mis­sions. I’ve then set up my work account to sync with my iPhone, and chosen my per­sonal cal­en­dar as one of the addi­tional cal­en­dars to sync.
• If you go with the default setup, it will sync both Cal­en­dars and Con­tacts. This is almost cer­tainly not what you want. It does have the bene­fit of push­ing changes to con­tacts straight into the cloud — but it also has the effect of break­ing the sync between your Google con­tacts and your Address Book. That is — assum­ing you used to sync the two — which a lot of people did not, due to Google’s con­tacts man­ager being rather broken. How­ever, it’s easy enough to set the sync to Cal­en­dar only. If you look at step 13 of the offi­cial instruc­tions, you’ll see both Cal­en­dar and Con­tacts selec­ted. If you choose to sync only Cal­en­dar, Con­tacts will still be synced with Address Book by iTunes whenever you sync your iPhone. If you’ve chosen to sync Address Book with Google Con­tacts as well, that will still hap­pen too.
• You can sync cal­en­dars with both an Exchange and MobileMe cloud at the same time; but as soon as you enable one of them, you can’t sync cal­en­dars with iTunes any more. You can only have one MobleMe account and one Exchange account.

I used to have a messy messy setup involving Span­ning Sync pulling all my Google Cal­en­dars into iCal; then using Mobile Me to push them into the cloud; then using the iPhone’s Mobile Me sync to pull them onto the phone. Many mov­ing parts, 3 dif­fer­ent sync stages for some­thing to go wrong. Only works if you have a per­man­ently online machine that can be doing the trans­la­tion between the Google cloud and the Apple cloud. I’m much hap­pier with this dir­ect sync.

[update]About the con­tact sync thing. See, you only get the option to sync your Address Book and your Google Con­tacts vis­ible in iTunes if you’re syncing con­tacts with your iPhone. If you’re syncing con­tacts with the cloud, you’re not syncing with your iPhone, so you don’t get the option. If you do use Google Con­tacts, that means that the cloud and your iPhone are both up-to-date — but your desktop is not.

If you really want instant syncing between your phone and your desktop, turn on cloud-syncing of your con­tacts. If you’d prefer to keep your phone, desktop, and the cloud all in sync, turn off cloud-syncing, and let iTunes handle the sync instead. [/update]

[update 2009-09-09] As of Snow Leo­pard, it’s no longer neces­sary to have an iPhone/iPod in order to get Address Book <-> Gmail Con­tacts syncing. So, it’s now per­fectly pos­sible to have your iPhone cloud-syncing your con­tacts AND have your Mac also cloud-syncing. To turn it on on your Mac, just go into the Address Book’s pref­er­ences and look under the Accounts tab.[/update]

[update]Facebook Events? Magic­ally pushed into your iPhone cal­en­dar? Easy!

Go to your Face­book Events page. On the top left (below the blue Face­book bar; above the big word “Events”) you’ll see “Export Events”. Click on that link, and you’ll get a popup with a long URL. Copy this URL.

Next, go to your Google Cal­en­dar. Click “Set­tings”, “Cal­en­dars”, “Import Cal­en­dar”, “Add By URL”, and paste that URL into the box.

Now visit the Sync Set­tings page, and choose your new Face­book cal­en­dar as one of the 5 to import. Now if you RSVP to any events in Face­book, that event will appear in your Google Cal­en­dar and your iPhone.[/update]