Sync iCal For FREE.

Oh how I wish .Mac was a free service. It will soon have to, what with all these web services sprouting up on the daily. But until then, I have found a way to mimic part of the .Mac service: syncing calendars between Macs.

This method is not a NEW idea, but rather, a way to make it just that much easier. A calendar in iCal can either be published to a .Mac account or to a private server. What is not spelled out, is that that private server must have WebDave support. GoDaddy, with whom I purchased my domain and hosting plan from, does not have WebDav support, along with many other server landlords.

There is one hosting provider that is often overlooked; this is most likely because it is not really a hosting provider. That service is BOX.NET

Box.net offers severl different online storage plans, ranging from 1GB for free to 15GB for $10/mo. One thing they don't advertise, for obvious reasons: it's boring, is that their servers support WebDav. This means that, if you sign up for a 1GB free account, you can publish and subscribe your calendars in iCal for free.

The following set of screenshots/instructions walk you through how to set this all up after you have signed up for a free Box.net storage plan...

Open iCal; right click on the calendar you want to share and select Publish...

Select 'a Private Server' from the 'Publish on' drop-down menu.

Enter in the box.net URL and the appropriate credentials.

Click on the 'Publish' button.

Now you can subscribe (read-only) to this calendar from any other Mac...

Right click in the calendar pane and select 'Subscribe...'

Type in the URL of your published calendar and press the 'Subscribe' button.

Login with the appropriate credentials.

Choose a name for this calendar and press 'OK'.

The newly subscribed calendar will now appear in the calendar pane.

The one catch, however, is that you can only edit the published calendar from the machine that publishes it. If you would rather have a calendar that can be edited from anywhere and subscribed to from anywhere, then you should look into Google Calendar; the catch there is, ToDo lists cannot be created with the Google Calendars, and the calendars can only be edit online.