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This blog entry is very Mac-centric. You have been warned.

Our family is a big user of Google Calendar.

We’re also big Mac users. The rest of the family is fine always going to Google to check out the calendar, but my personality is such that I can’t stand not having my Mac iCal program synced with our Google calendars.

For over a year now I’ve used Spanning Sync to sync my calendars and it’s worked quite well.

It’s a two-way sync, and after doing a lot of experimentation with various mechanisms to sync Google calendars on both Windows and Mac, Spanning Sync was the only one that appeared to do it correctly for every calendar event. (I do a lot of odd repeating events, like repeat every three days and then I’ll change a single event in the series to skip only two days.)

Now Google has announced that they support iCal sync directly. So why stick with Spanning Sync (other than the fact that I just paid for another year of service)? I was wondering that myself. In the back of my mind I was thinking, “It’s working, don’t mess with it,” but I knew at some point I’d get around to tinkering with the free Google stuff, at the very least because I can’t help but tinker with stuff.

Now today Spanning Sync has released a blog entry that answers why I will stick with them: http://blog.spanningsync.com/2008/12/how-does-google-caldav-compare-to-spanning-sync.html. Point #2 is the big reason for me: bidirectional sync with the iPhone/Touch.

A great number of my calendar entries are entered directly on my Touch, which I then count on being synced to iCal on my next iTunes sync, which I then count on getting picked up by Spanning Sync and sent up to Google Calendar. Apparently that process isn’t going to work with the free Google stuff, so it’s not an option for me. Spanning Sync will get my $15 every year, at least until something else changes.

Spanning Sync has also never screwed anything up, which I’m a little paranoid about since that calendar data is very important. And from what I’ve read, on the off chance something does get screwed up at some point, apparently it’s repairable when using Spanning Sync. See point #3 in their blog entry.

(If you actually made it to the end of this post and are interested in Spanning Sync for yourself, use this link to save $5.)