I love Google Apps. And it turns out, I’m really digging my new iPhone. Using the iPhone with Google is awwwwkward. What follows is my current solution for syncing contacts and calendars between my Google apps account, Addressbook, iCal and my iPhone. Getting email perfect might be a later post, if I ever figure that one out.

The main goals were to 1) sync my main Google Apps account contacts and 2) calendars with Addressbook and iCal respectively, and with the iPhone. And have 3) calendar entries be editable on the iPhone.

Some options I tried or at least considered:

Scenario 1: Addressbook on Leopard has the ability sync with Google, and thereby with the iPhone. It works, sort of. I couldn’t figure out what schedule this ran on, so it really only seemed to work if Addressbook was the source for everything. For edits from Google, it didn’t sync right away and when it did, sometimes I’d get these crazy boxy characters on my iPhone, even though Addressbook would display things just fine. Lame. There seems to be some formatting that Google does that Addressbook can deal with but the iPhone can’t. That and the unpredictable syncing wasn’t really working for me.

Scenario 2: iTunes has some settings to sync with Google. I didn’t try this, because I really wanted the Addressbook synced as well, and didn’t want to have to plug in my iPhone each time I needed the computer and Google to sync. I just thought I’d mention it to be fair.

Scenario 3: Switch to mobile me. This would be tempting, if I could use my domain(s) with mobile me.

Scenario 4: Use web service Soocial to do the syncing. I tried them really early on and had lots of duplicates in my Addressbook. I didn’t revisit them for this project but they may be a reasonable option.

Calendars: None of these options deal with calendar syncing, which I wanted as well. I saw something about read-only syncing via iCal directly. But, come on, I want to be able to edit my calendar on the iPhone. I want it all!

Google Suggested Contacts: Nothing deals with these right. Nothing. The issue is that Google won’t let you add a contact that’s in your Suggested Contacts area, which it infers from who you chat with and email. You’ll get conflict errors, at some point, just be prepared. It’s annoying, hopefully there will be a disable option for this one day.

And on to the solution I settled on…

I spent $25 for a year with Spanning Sync. Mainly it was the hope to sync both contacts and calendars that drew me. Oh, and the free trial helped. After a bit of messing around I settled on a method that seems to work for me so far, thanks very much to their forums and support staff. Here’s my best recollection of what I did ::

1. Back up your contacts in Google ( Left Rail -> Contacts -> Export )
2. Back up your contacts in Addressbook ( File -> Export -> Address Book Archive )
3. Pick one side to start from, update all your contacts there and delete the other side. I’d probably recommend Addressbook, but I think it’ll work either way. Make more backups. And a third time for fun, but don’t say “Beetlejuice”.
   
4. Install Spanning Sync, input your Google credentials, etc. There is 1 Absolutely Critical Option. When it asks you whether to use Google’s format for contacts, or Address Book’s format, you NEED to choose the Address Book format, or you’ll get more crazy boxy characters on your iphone and probably freak out, leaving me nasty comments on my blog.
5. Hopefully, there is no step 5. Do some testing, add a contact on one side, delete it, etc. Spanning Sync allows you the ability sync on demand and see the latest status from the menu bar, which is great for testing.

• Google has really small photos for it’s stuff and I didn’t like that for my iphone. You are able to tell Spanning Sync to disable syncing photos and either just not have photos, or use higher resolution ones in Address Book. ( more here )
  
  


• Spanning Sync isn’t yet able to get around the very annoying Google Suggested Contacts issue. Hopefully just knowing it’s there will save you some headache where you aren’t frantically sending support and email with “OMG! Why am I getting conflict errors when I don’t see the contact in Google!” and sending over debugging dumps. ( They’re very responsive, btw. Thanks guys! )
  
• There are some more competitors to Spanning Sync. At the time at least, they didn’t sync both contacts and calendars under Leopard. If you’re a fan of one, mention it in the comments and I’ll link to it up here for completeness and fairness.
  
• Update: My good friend David uses NuevaSync. They do over-the-air somehow, which boggles my mind. But it sounds pretty slick. For me it would me using native Addressbook/iCal syncing to get stuff down to my mac. But, still looks like a great option if you don’t plug the iPhone in very often.
  

Google has a great blog post and YouTube video about Jean Bartik a true pioneer in the field of Computer Science. I hadn’t heard of Jean before today, but this video interview of her being inducted into the Computer History Museum is great, truly inspirational. For those that know me, you’d agree that I don’t use happy, warm, fuzzy terms like inspirational,well, ever. Seriously, go watch the video.

Born on a farm in Missouri, the sixth of seven children, Jean Jennings Bartik always went in search of adventure. Bartik majored in mathematics at Northwest Missouri State Teachers College (now Northwest Missouri State University). During her college years, WWII broke out, and in 1945, at age 20, Bartik answered the government’s call for women math majors to join a project in Philadelphia calculating ballistics firing tables for the artillery developed for the war effort. A new employee of the Army’s Ballistics Research Labs, she joined over 80 women calculating ballistics trajectories (differential calculus equations) by hand - her job title: “Computer”….

Stormy, aka server cat, decides to help me and a coworker manage a server move with our hosting provider, really freakin’ early in the morning.