I use a mixture of calendars. I have some projects that are using Google Calendar, but there is some information I don’t quite feel comfortable putting in Google’s hands. Also, I use quicksilver which can do a lot of searching magic on local calendars (but not on browser based calendars), local alerts, apple+tab focus, and all the other goodies a desktop app can provide.

Up until today, I’ve been using 2 calendars – Mac’s iCal for personal / GTD indexable stuff, and Google Calendar for the projects that are using Google. I re-found this application, Spanning Sync, which “provides two-way synchronization between Google Calendar and Apple iCal”. The last time I looked at the application it was still in beta, but it has now reached a 1.0 release.

It seems to work very well. Here is a shot of it at work – the blue calendar is a Google Calendar, the green one is a local calendar, and the others are subscriptions or linked to my address book (sorry of the fuzzy / blurriness):

After you install it you create an iCal calendar, link it to a Google one, setup the syncing frequency, and you’re off and running:

So far it has had one event conflict, but it handled it very well. Spanning Sync popped up a dialog and just asked which event was the right one (just like .Mac does if you use .Mac).

Speaking of which I use .Mac to sync my “normal” iCal calendars and there is no way to say which ones to sync and which ones not to sync. It’s just all calendars or none of them. It will be interesting to see how all this syncing will hold up. Meaning, it will be interesting to see what happens if my desktop syncs with Google, then .Mac, and then my laptop syncs with .Mac before Google.

If you use Mac and Google calendar, and you dig iCal, you might want to checkout this application.