Your sync stinks! Problems with Google Calendar CalDAV

Ok so no one told me that Google had introduced CalDAV syncing (the download package is cutely named Calaboration ) so you can sync Google Calendar and Apple's iCal together (announced here and here). For ages you've been able to feed your Google calendars into iCal (not sure how? Find out here), but it meant you always had to go to Google Calendar to make changes to your calendars. If you added events on iCal it would reside with a local (ie on your computer) calendar. You could only sync from Google Calendar to iCal, not the other way around.

Some third party applications started to allow you to sync both ways. My pick was Spanning Sync. I did the 15-day trial and was pretty happy with it so I purchased a licence for it. It's not overly pricey; I paid $65 for the lifetime licence, but there is a $25/year option too.

Anyway, on the quiet Google released the CalDAV sync feature. I gave it a whirl but I have to say I am not convinced it is better than what Spanning Sync does. Here's why:

Synced with Spanning Sync

Synced with Google CalDAV

Sure Google CalDAV is free, but the way it sorts your calendars that are synced just isn't useful for me. It's ugly. It's messy. It makes my list of calendars huge! Also, you can't sync calendars of different names. And event reminders and alarms are not synced. The whole reason I use an electronic calendar rather than a print diary is because it reminds me (well and it is searchable).

Also the CalDAV 2-way sync is a dodgy at best. Over the last couple of hours since I put it on only 1 of the 6 events I have added to iCal have come up in Google Calendar. Oh and apparently (I haven't actually tested it), any events added on iCal/Google Calendar will come up read only on an iPhone, meaning you can't change anything about those events on the phone. Surely that's why people have iPhones right?

Plus, on top of all of this, I keep getting this with CalDAV, even though everything is set up right:

You can find out all you want to know about using CalDAV in the Google Calendar help. You have to be using OS X 10.5 (Leopard) to use CalDAV.

If you've installed the CalDAV sync on your mac, I have posted a removal guide to help you get rid of it if you want to.

[And no, I am not part of Spanning Sync's Save 5 + Make 5 referral program. No upselling here]