Attempts to duplicate the functionality of .Mac can be very technical (as here), or Google-centric (as here). In his recap of alternative options, Derek mentions a potential iDisk replacement called Box. Box offer unofficial WebDAV support; WebDAV is the same protocol used by .Mac that lets you publish your calendars and allow other folk to subscribe to them from within iCal. Unfortunately (mt), my web host, doesn't support WebDAV. I've already taken care of photocasting using iPhoto to bypass .Mac, although an easy way to share my calendar to my wife had eluded me until now.
- Register for a Box account (1GB free storage), providing a login (email address) and password that you're prepared to share with those needing access to your calendar;
- In iCal select the calendar you want to share and choose Publish from the Calendar menu;
- Choose to publish on a private server, entering http://www.box.net/dav as the Base URL (thanks Dan; https:// didn't work for me);
- Enter your Box username and password and hit the Publish button.
Once you've published, folk can access your calendar via a simple "webcal" URL (Calendar > Subscribe... in the iCal menu).
On entering this URL and clicking Subscribe, they will be required to supply the login and password as above. Your uploaded iCal .ics file can now be managed from your Box account, even made public if you choose.
When you refresh your calendar in iCal, the uploaded file on Box is automatically updated.
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Interesting solution. Any idea of Box offers Address book uploading/syncing? I'd really love to do that. For a while, I was using Plaxo, which is slick looking but the Apple plugin was really flaky and unreliable. I think it was third party too.
My trouble is trying to sync my iCal with Google Calendar. Currently, gCal doesn't offer private iCal support, so your calendar has to be on a publicly readable URL to work. And being Google, you also can't use any robots.txt exclusions either.
For the sake of just syncing my calendars, I'm simply using the FTP iCal plugin which allows me to upload my ics file periodically to my own server. Then I have Google reading that location for the calendar.
For the other direction, I have my iCal reading my gCal. It's not truly syncing, it's just reading both calendars simultaneously. But for now, it works.
Happy New Year Rob!
Address Book sharing is tied to a .Mac account, although there are sync alternatives (i.e. MySync, ChronoSync). Maybe someone could write an Address Book plugin to allow sharing along the lines of iTunes playlists and iPhoto albums (which don't require .Mac)?
For "true" two-way sync between iCal and gCal a solution is promised in the near future in the form of Spanning Sync.
Hmm, looks interesting.
Hi Bruce,
If I am the admin for someone and need to both access their iCal *as well as* make changes and edits, will this method then work?
Thanks,
Taryn
Excellent solution. This is just what my husband and I were looking for. Thanks for your work on this.
Just helping to spread the word Michelle ;-)
Taryn, sorry I must have missed your comment. No, if you are subscribed to a calendar in iCal it is read-only. You can only edit your own calenders.
Update for you Taryn:
Hi :) I just tried to do the box-thing described above.... but when I get to the subscribe part I do not get the loginname/password request... just an alert telling me that the data transfered is invalid :( What am I doing wrong?! <:) Cheers, Stine
Stine I guess it could be any number of things, but I don't know what is causing this. I would suggest first that you browse to your published calendar on Box and download the .ics file to your desktop, then create a new "test" calendar in iCal and import your download into it. Does that work? If so you've verified that the export went OK (the data are not corrupt) and you can delete your test calendar. That you're not seeing the name/ password dialog at all makes me wonder if Box (or iCal) is sensitive to the type of characters in your name or password. Perhaps try changing these to simple ASCI text to determine this.
If those things don't help I can only suggest trying Box support. I set ours up over a year ago and they continue to work reliably without adjustments. In that time Box has evolved, so has iCal (in OS X 10.5.x), but never change has caused us problems.
Thanks a lot Bruce.. but unfortunately my Box seems to be all empty :/ No .ics files! This despite the fact that iCal told me that my calendar had been successfully published and that the .ics file could be found by following the URL to my Box..
The user name to my Box is my e-mail address.. maybe the @ could be a problem?!
Hmm :)
Certainly possible; try changing it. At least you now know the problem is with the publishing, not the subscribing.
But I do not think that I have the option to choose a non-email-address-username? <:)
Just checked; the user name is an e-mail address as you say, so "@" is not the problem. No other characters e.g. umlauts in your login or password? Can you publish from iCal on another Mac in your network? Can you publish from outside your network, suggesting a firewall issue?
Cheers Bruce, worked a treat.
However, Google CalDav does offer an editable, synced calendar, but my favourite has to be BusySync. Perhaps I will pay for it now!