I spent some time yesterday working with the new CalDAV support in Google Calendar. If you’ve been under a rock, they announced support for it very recently, and for users of the iPhone, and users of iCal, it means seamless syncing of their Google Calendar’s with all 3 systems. What I found lacking, was a step-by-step tutorial on setting everything up, and the pitfalls and hidden steps along the way. First, a few assumptions to go over:

1. You've got a Gmail account or have a domain with Google Apps
2. You've got a Mac with iCal (only required if you want the iCal sync with Google Calendar)
3. You've got an iPhone (only required if you want to sync your iPhone with Google Calendar)

Step 1 - Setup Google Calendar

Google has created a great system for managing calendars and sharing them with others across a domain, or individually with their Gmail account. The initial setup will involve having the default calendar setup with your account. If you have multiple calendars, continue to set those up as you normally would and we’ll show you how to get those sync’d with iCal and iPhone.

Google Apps users will need to ensure that the administrator for their domain logs into the management website, clicks Service Settings and Mobile in the menu. On that page click the checkbox for “Enable Google Sync” and hit “Save Changes”.

Step 2 - Setup iCal

In setting up iCal, we can do this the easy way, or the hard way. As long as their is no difference in the effectiveness of the end result, I choose easy. To that end, we have Calaboration, a Google Sync setup tool specifically for setting up the CalDAV links in iCal.

1. Download Calaboration 2. Copy the .app file to the Applications/ folder on your Mac

2. Run the Calaboration.app

3. Sign in with your Gmail or Google Apps login. Full email address with the password.
4. If iCal is already running, the application will prompt you to quit iCal and return to the application for setting up your calendars.

5. Select from the listed calendars what you would like to sync7. Click Add to iCal NOTE: If you see your calendars greyed out, they’ve already been added, if they are greyed out with a lock to the right, they are read-only. If you want to add them to iCal, visit the applications preferences and select the “Enable read-only calendars” option. Make sure to read the message that goes along with this option, as it could affect your use of iCal.

6. Okay, all done with that? Awesome. You’re done with the iCal setup.

7. Open iCal and ensure that each of the calendars selected from Calaboration show up. You’ll notice that instead of the sane method, of having all calendars show under the same CalDAV server, the current implementation has one for each.

8. iCal is now set-up and syncing with Google. Try it. Go wild. Add stuff and see it magically popup in iCal. Remove stuff, refresh Google Cal and see it disappear. Magic.

Step 3 - Setup iPhone

IMPORTANT: If there is anything on your iPhone that isn’t sync’d with your computer, plug in your iPhone and sync now. The process of setting up the iPhone deletes all calendars in order to proceed.

The next step is covered very well in Google Support and should be followed completely: Sync: Set Up Your iPhone or iPod Touch

If you are using Gmail, you are done. If you are using Google Apps, and you have multiple calendars to sync, follow along for the conclusion.

Getting Started

1. Visit http://m.google.com/sync

2. You’ll see a webpage with icons for the various Google services, scroll down till you see:

1. Tap the rounded button below the icons to configure sync for your domain

2. In the popup, enter the domain name for your Google App account, and press the Go button to the right of the text field. Do not use the iPhone Go button at the bottom right, as it only refreshes the page. Details on why this doesn’t work would be boring.

1. You will see an interface like the one in the first picture, select “iPhone”.

2. Here you’ll see a list of possible calendars to sync with the iPhone calendar. You’ll see that the default calendar is already selected, simply select the calendars you want, and click “Save”.

3. After hitting “Save” you will see a confirmation page which notifies of success.

4. That’s it. Hit the “Home” button on your iPhone and select the Calendar. Within a few moments your Calendar items should stream into multiple calendars on the device.

I hope this quick tutorial was informative. The steps are fairly simple, but I was unable to find a tutorial that brought each of the pieces and caveats of each step together. Happy syncing!

If you’ve ever wondered what the architects who designed the system powering that big farm of servers, Eugene Ciurana has written the guide for you. At just shy of 6 pages, with a wealth of great, easy to understand diagrams, it is a quick but informative read. I must admit however, that I’m a bit biased, as I’ve worked with Eugene on some of the large systems that he’s designed, and have seen the concepts he explains in this refcard, put into action and work. Giving up some vitals to DZone puts this reference in your hands, you will be pleased you did:

What are you waiting for? Download it!

I realize this post is over 2 1/2 months past the actual event, but it was such an awesome time with the Mystic crew, I thought I’d share a bit of the day.

First off, several flew in the night before, and enjoyed a bit of Vegas before the official festivities. Two of the folks in our team had never been to Vegas before, so it was an especially interesting experience. Mystic put everyone up for the night at the Mandalay Bay, a fantastic hotel and one of the few I’d recommend staying in Vegas.

We started on Saturday at around noon, had some lunch brought up to my suite, and started rapping with my good friend John Catalina. John is an amazing energy that I hired on with Mystic several years ago and helped to catapult us to heights we had not yet imagined. After a short break, we got down to business talk, my vision for the company, and how we can continue to get there. Lots of great ideas came out of this session, about 4 hours in total, and we’ve been integrating the ideas for the last few months and starting to see our master plan in action.

Hyped from some great work earlier in the day, Mystic treated everyone to dinner at Red Square. It’s an obvious Russian themed bar / restaurant, so any drink had must have some vodka in it, so we chose Chernobyl, which had 4+ shots of various Vodka’s in a cranberry juice on the rocks.

Nice and full from the evening dinner, we headed off to the entertainment, Penn & Teller, who put on a fabulous show at the Rio.

We all laughed and marveled at the magic, and ever the teachers, the explanations they gave for a good portion of the performance. The one thing I will say is, Penn seems to have a soapbox behind the stage which turns out is why he is so tall :-).

All in all the most trouble of the night, was getting back to the hotel, which usually aside from some Vegas traffic, isn’t a big deal. The Vegas marathon was the next morning, so some brainchild decided it would be a good idea to shutdown Las Vegas Blvd and several other routes back to the attractions^Hhotels in Vegas.

The Mystic offsite is destined to be the first of many, and I just wanted to thank the rest of the team for making it an awesome experience!