> Consider the simple scenario of using GMail, calendar and contacts - on a MacBook you need to know to configure it as an Exchange service, or you only end up with mail.
Actually, you can't set up Google anything with Exchange on a MacBook. For whatever reason, Google Sync only accepts connections from mobile devices. I'm not sure if the ActiveSync protocol is substantively different for mobile vs desktop, or if Google is looking at user agent strings, or what, but you can verify it for yourself pretty easily.
The only way to get calendar and contacts on OS X 10.7+ is to set it up as a GMail account, which magically does the right thing.
I'm not sure if it's equivalent, but setting up the iPhone to treat your Gmail account as an Exchange Active Sync account gives the iPhone most of the cloud push features (Mail/Calendar/Contacts). I can add a contact on my iPhone that syncs OTA to Google that then syncs to my mac address book.
Google voice texting and messages don't integrate perfectly yet, for example if I get a GV text on my iPhone and read it it doesn't show read in GV on the web (unless of course I use the GV app/html5 site to read it). Also contact groups do not sync from Google Contacts.
Android does the gmail / google calendar sync fine. If there's one thing Android has never messed up, it's that. My Android phone messes enough stuff up often enough that I do wish I had an iPhone instead.
Don't forget: Android already syncs all your contacts, calendars, apps, settings etc. App developers can use the sync API to sync files. In OS X-land, I've been using iSync to sync iCal and Address Book to Google Calendar and Google Contacts for about an year now.
The problem is that it appears Google is using ActiveSync. ActiveSync allows you to sync calendars and contacts as well as your email; so you run into a contention problem - which account is the winner for your calendar? For your contacts? Etc, etc.
It would be nice if the iPhone would let you pick which account owned which data, but I don't think it's sophisticated to do that right now.
So; if you really want to use Google's ActiveSync OVER your exchange server's ActiveSync, you may be able to configure your Exchange account to use IMAP instead of ActiveSync. I don't think you'll have any luck with 2 ActiveSync accounts for the time being.
(For whatever it's worth, I'm in the same position as you; if anyone hears about a way to get multiple ActiveSync accounts running, I'd also love to hear about it.)
Is there any 3rd party product that can sync gmail with apple's calendar?
I have google phone/Chromebook, and my wife - iPhone/OSX. So I haven't really looked, but we were thinking of starting to use more and more the calender to sync up with things we need to do.
I personally have a Google Apps account that I connected to my iPhone as an Exchange account, and it syncs my Contacts and Calendars plenty well, and gives me my mail at the same time.
I presume a regular Gmail account will serve the same purpose.
Can't you use Google calendar/contacts with an Apple device? So use FastMail for mail (works great with any mail client, or they have an app for iOS/Android), and google for calendar and contacts. That's what I do for Windows Phone and Android, because I just have the lite FastMail account -- only web based calendar and contacts.
My goal has always been to have my iphone, google, and outlook all properly sync emails, contacts, and calendars across different computers without spending a nickel.
I’m not going to turn this into a full tutorial, this is (hacker news right?) but:
1 – Get your domain synced with Google
Buy your domain name, set up Google Apps free version @ http://www.google.com/a/cpanel/domain/new
2 - Flip on Mobile Syncing
When logged into Google apps, go to “Service Settings” menu then “Enable Google Sync”
3 – Make it work on your phone:
Follow the steps to get things working properly on your Phone @
http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=138652
4 – Download the new Google Outlook Calendar Sync: http://www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=89955
Related to synchronisation with Google, I bought an Android Dev Phone a couple of days ago and one of the things that annoyed me was you have to sync your contacts and calendar with Google Contacts and Google Calendar respectively.
I'm using a Mac and getting Address Book to sync with Google Contacts was simple, but while Google Calendar offers 2-way sync with iCal, what it does is Google Calendar is the master copy. Now that totally turned me off. Because I'm using iCal and not Google Calendar, it means that right after I do my first sync, my calenders will be empty (the existing events on iCal will not be sync-ed over) and when if I ever decide to stop using the G phone and Google Calendar, it means that I will start with an empty Calendar again.
On top of that, I'm actually using an iPhone as my main phone. The G phone is for development purposes, but I like to switch to the G phone for short periods of time so that I get to use it and have a feel of how it works and to use my own apps. What this means is that I'm doing a 3-way sync and I'm am rather concern that a single point of failure will wipe everything out.
I also disliked the fact that I can't sync my photos and music over to the G phone automatically.
I'm not sure if there's a good solution for this, but maybe a synchronising problem like this is begging for a startup to solve (something like MobileMe but platform-agnostic with hooks into different platforms and apps?)
I recently bought a Huawei (yeah, I know) MateBook X Pro, having used Mac laptops almost exclusively since the iBook G4. My only complaint with the hardware (drivers?) is that two-finger scrolling on the otherwise decent trackpad isn't nearly as smooth as on a MacBook.
My biggest problem is actually connecting mail, calendar, and contacts to Google. Whereas it works out of the box on my Macs, I have not been able to get them working in Windows 10. I've fiddled with 2-Step Verification and Allow less secure apps. I can get mail working over IMAP by enabling 2-Step Verification and using an application-specific password, but I've had no luck with calendar or contacts.
I presume I would have the same problem with Microsoft hardware.
The only thing I can think of is to set up contact, calendar etc. sync to Google (via ActiveSync or otherwise). Calendars won't magically transfer over since they're assigned to a particular calendar, on iCloud in your case, but contacts should get pushed to Google. That'll at least give you a backup of your contacts, and setting up the other devices the same way should sync them all up.
Can anyone else chime in? Does this sound reasonable? I've had everything on my iPhone synced up to Google services for about 4 years now and it's never caused any issues.
I recently migrated to Fastmail, and I was pleasantly surprised by how easy it was. Fastmail automatically imports your emails from Gmail, and it took me so little time that I kicked myself for not doing it before.
> Calendar: iCloud
For those of us who don't use both OS X and iOS, this isn't feasible. Fortunately, though, Fastmail also provides a calendar service. It synchronizes with Google Calendar in case you still need to use Google (e.g. for work), and it was also a seamless switch.
As for a client, I was very surprised by this, but I've actually found that the latest version of Mozilla Lightning[0] is the best calendar interface. Fastmail's is okay, but still in beta (it's less than a year old). Setting up Lightning to sync with Fastmail's calendar took just a minute, and I actually like the interface more than I liked Google Calendar's[1].
Thunderbird is an okay mail client (not a terrible interface, but not a great one), but even if you don't use Thunderbird for mail, I would recommend trying out Lightning for calendaring.
[1] It's okay for viewing events in the week view, but there are a lot of UI quirks and bugs that catch up with you after daily use - this one is the most pernicious, but there are a number that are simply annoying as well: http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/01/how-google-calendar-... [2]
[2] Since I know people will ask - I consider this a UI issue because it's fairly easy to imagine a minor UI improvement that would indicate this unexpected result of Quick Add (and others) before clicking "Add" without sacrificing this functionality in case it is desired.
Actually, you can't set up Google anything with Exchange on a MacBook. For whatever reason, Google Sync only accepts connections from mobile devices. I'm not sure if the ActiveSync protocol is substantively different for mobile vs desktop, or if Google is looking at user agent strings, or what, but you can verify it for yourself pretty easily.
The only way to get calendar and contacts on OS X 10.7+ is to set it up as a GMail account, which magically does the right thing.
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