THis post will tell you what a delegate is, how to get rid of it if you need to, and how to get your ical and iphone to be properly in sync with multiple top level calendars
I just had a look at the top keywords for the last 7 days. not surprisingly there are lots of entries for ‘ical delegates’, ‘google calendar’ + ‘delegates’, ‘what are ical delegates’ etc. so, I had a look at the stuff I did with google calendar, syncing it to your mac’s ical and thought the explination was a little poor.
first off, what is a delegate, and why should you be concerned about them:
a delegate is basically any calendar thats not your main one. you should be concerned because if you add a google calendar to your ical then all the sub calendars appear as delegates.
so if i have a calendar named ‘work’ and one named ‘personal’ and one named ‘gigs to see’ then ‘work’ would be the main one (the main one is the first calendar you made) and ‘personal’ and ‘gigs to see’ would be delegates.
its ok, and its workable, unless you sync your ical to your iphone (check out how to sync your google calendar to your iphone calendar here ).
to set up all your calendars without having them appear as delegates follow these instructions:
open ical, goto preferences and accounts.
hit the + button in the bottom left
fill in your google email address, eg bob.smith@gmail.com
and password and it will get the rest of the server stuff by itsself.
you then need to put in the url of your calendar in the server settings tab.
to get the url to use:
- goto calendar.google.com
- get to the properties for the calendar you wish to import
- goto the screen with the privacy options
- you will see the address of the calendar
it will be something like
https://www.google.com/calendar/dav/randomstring@group.calendar.google.com/user
put this in to the server settings tab in ical as the ‘server path’
Repeat with each calendar in your google calendar by making a new account in ical for each calendar you have in google calendar.
If you have the iphone setup to sync your contacts, calendars and mail from google (from the link up the page) then any event you add to any calendar (on your mac, on your iphone or via google calendar – or by any other method that adds the event to any of the devices) will be synced to every one of the other devices. that way I can automatically add events to my calendars from my mail.app, or by adding them in google calendar when im at work (by syncing outlook to my ‘work’ calendar) or i can add them on my iphone calendar, and they are instantly available on any of the other places!
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[...] for updated instructions, please see this post [...]
[...] for updated instructions, please see this post [...]
I am not sure where people run into issues with the delegates? I have iCal setup vanilla with my sub calendars as delegates and have no issues adding events from iCal, the browser or my iPhone and they all sync up instantly with eachother. The only difference I note from most of the instructions is that I use a google apps account. any insight on that?
no idea… is your phone synced to your google apps via the mobile exchange, or does it sync directly to your ical ? (i take it from your comment that it syncs to the google apps via exchange) it might be that google apps is setup differently than vanilla gmail / google calendar, or that apple has changed the way that syncing works -either with one of the updates to snow leopard, or one of the updates to iphone os. hopefully in the future we wont need to use my method
[...] please see this post for details on how to get your google calendar synced to your ical on your mac [...]
Hi Jonathan,
is there a way to merge the different google calendars under one header? in ical there appears the header “Google Calendar” for each of the calendars i added with you method described above…
Cheers, Gesa
ive not found a way to make them all appear in one ical calendar – they are all separate calendars listed down the side, but they usually come up with the name they were given in google calendars – i think the easiest way would be to go into google calendars and rename them to easy things – i have one called personal calendar, one called cycle calendar, one called ‘work’, etc. you can get them all to display in ical at the same time by ticking the small boxes – each calendar will be a different colour =)
hope this helps a little – any other questions, feel free to ask =)
Thanks Jonathan for your reply! I was just wondering if it was possible to move them into one calender, since you cannot switch entries between calenders this way!? or is there a way to work around that?
Thanks again and bests, Gesa
I use a similar method to sync my Google calendar with my ancient SonyEricson p910i and also to my Active desktop calendar.(http://www.xemico.com/adc/index.html)
Now all I need is something to put in the calendar!
Shalom
This doesn’t work at all, iCal won’t let anyone set up duplicate CalDav accounts for the same Gmail address
i only posted it here because its the way that i figured it out on my mac. it works for me, and everyone else that has used it. did you follow the instructions, or did u just flame?
Hi Jonathan. Found this post through a search, thanks for the instructions. This works for me, sort of except that my calendars are not appearing under one ‘accounts’, it is creating a new header for each calendar, so now I have three headers (I have three google calendars) with one calendar under. How do I fix this? Thanks very much for your post!
there isnt a way to fix it – thats just the way that ical displays them – if you get to the point that you have your 3 calendars all under different headers, then it will be working as you would expect it to work as if they were under one header =)
hey! i need help! i found these same instructions from another site as well (http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Calendar/thread?tid=4e5c309678c75983&hl=en), and despite me following them exactly, i keep getting error messages.
Originally I created a google account in iCal, but that created my one primary calendar with about 20 delegates, which is not what I want. Now that I’m trying to go back, I’m getting lost. One source said to go to iCal>preferences>accounts>delegations and uncheck all the calendars, and then to create a new account following your instructions. It said to make the new acount under CalDAV…
It also said to copy this code: [https://www.google.com/calendar/dav/__________@gmail.com/user]
and paste our calendar ID in the _________ section, then paste that whole thing into the server address for creating a new account in iCal.
I am confused; do we paste only the calendar ID from google calendar and nothing else into the server address box? (Ex. bdj2sd5mghchfh8h0j3c3uh088@group.calendar.google.com )Because that hasn’t worked for me.
Or do we need to add onto it or change it at all when putting that in the address box for iCal? (Ex. https://www.google.com/calendar/dav/bdj2sd5mghchfh8h0j3c3uh088@group.calendar.google.com@gmail.com/user)Because that hasn’t worked either.
I feel like I’ve tried everything and nothing is working. Is there anyway I can contact you directly (via email or something) to go through this step by step and figure out what’s going wrong? I really need to figure this out because these calendars are what I use to manage my work schedule between multiple clients, but all the syncing issues I’m having are causing my organization with work to suffer.
Please help!
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hi haley;
you need to put this in the server address:
https://www.google.com/calendar/dav/
before the randomstring@group.calendar.google.com/user
so that it looks like
https://www.google.com/calendar/dav/randomstring@group.calendar.google.com/user
you need to do this for every calendar that you want to appear
hope this helps
GREAT instructions!!! Worked great for me but had to remember to quit iCal after each account added! THANKS!