This tutorial is intended to follow on from yesterday’s post on setting up a Google account to synchronise contacts and calendars automatically. It assumes you have contacts and/or calendars set up on a Gmail account.

It’s time now to set Address Book to automatically sync with this account. Open Address Book and click Address Book -> Preferences. Click the “Accounts” tab and check “Synchronize with Google”. Click configure and put in your Gmail address and password. Your online contacts will now be downloaded into your Address Book.

Setup a Google Account within Address Book

Configuring the calendar will be a similar process. Open iCal then go to iCal -> Preferences. Under the Accounts tab click “+” in the bottom left to set up a new account. Leave Account type as Automatic and put in your Gmail address and password. Your online calendar will now be downloaded into iCal.

Setup your Google calendar in iCal

If you have multiple calendars in your Google account you can select which ones to sync by going to the Delgation section of the account. Put a check next to the additional calendars you wish to synchronise.

Click Delagation to add multiple calendars

You should now successfully be synchronising with your Google account

The post Address Book and iCal Google Sync appeared first on My Tech on Things.

OK I won’t deny it, I’m lazy. I’m very lazy. Hell it’s been over a month since my last update. In fairness this is partly because nothing has impressed me enough that I wanted to write about. That is until a couple of weeks ago when I decided I couldn’t be bothered regularly plugging my iPhone into the computer anymore to manually sync contacts and calendar. Lazy, I know.

And so I decided to research ways of wirelessly syncing my phone contacts and calendar with my computer and possibly have them backed up online somewhere just in case. My search led me to MobileMe, Apple’s cloud service which for a fee per year the service would be provided, and Google’s mobile sync. Not being a fan of paying for something which I can can get for free I went with the Google option. And here we are.

To start one needs a Gmail account. If you already have one that’s great, otherwise head to Gmail and create one. With 7GB+ of storage and a nice user interface you’ll be wondering why you didn’t do it sooner.

In Gmail there is a link on the left hand side called “Contacts”. Click it. Now to import your existing contacts from your computer to Gmail. If you use Address Book for Mac click File->Export->Address Book Archive and save a file which will contain your contact data. Alternatively if you use Outlook or Outlook Express you can export in a similar way but choose to export as a CSV file so Gmail can read it. Back in the Contacts section of Gmail there is an “Import” link. Click it and upload the file you just created with your existing contacts. Hopefully you will see all your contacts appear in the All Contacts list.

As a side note – although Gmail can put contacts into groups, when you sync with an iPhone it can’t (as yet) mimic the groups.

On to Calendars. If you don’t want to sync any calendars you can skip this section.
There is a link to Calendar in the Top left corner of Gmail. Or you can access it from this link: https://www.google.com/calendar/

If you have an existing Calendar(s) in iCal or Outlook now is the time to export them to a file. Gmail can read iCal and CSV format. Like contacts use File->Export to make the file, or files if you use multiple calendars.

Under the My Calendars section of Google Calendar click Settings and then Import Calendar. Select the Calendar CSV or iCal file you created and marvel as the data gets copied into Google Calendar.

With contacts and calendars now stored in your Gmail account you are almost ready to (not so) magically wirelessly sync them with your iPhone….or Blackberry or Nokia or Windows phone. This is the link that will show you how to set up them up; although I am only going to be focusing on the iPhone version.

This page here will show you how to set up the iPhone Exchange account: Google Sync iPhone

As of the latest iPhone Software version only one Exchange account is allowed per device. This will change when software version 4.0 is released (apparently)

Right so now with the Google Exchange up and running, contacts, calendar and mail will now be synced to your iPhone. Every time you add, edit or remove a contact or event the change will be sent automatically to your Gmail account provided you have an internet connection available (3G or Wifi).

One problem I came across was not being able to sync multiple calendars. The solution is to open up Safari on the iPhone and go to http://m.google.com/sync
After signing in you can select the other calendars you wish to sync. This sort of thing is handy if you have separate calendars for work and home and you can also add predefined calendars from Google such as Australian Public Holidays.

This concludes the tutorial on wirelessly syncing with an iPhone. I will be preparing another post on automatic contact and calendar syncing using Address Book, iCal and Gmail shortly so check back in a couple of days….or months. I just remembered how lazy I am.

The post iPhone Wireless Sync Contacts and Calendar appeared first on My Tech on Things.