Two-way iPhone and Google Calendar synchronization and SMS backup

ludek — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 17:00:36 +0000

New version of ics is out! See instructions here. Download here.

The most important new feature is SMS backup & view:

Two-way iPhone and Google Calendar synchronization

ludek — Thu, 08 May 2008 18:00:28 +0000

One thing I really missed about my iPhone was the ability to synchronize its internal calendar with my Google Calendar. I know it can be done via iTunes + MS Outlook + some iCal Outlook plugin, but I don’t use Outlook and would prefer more direct way. So I decided to write a simple utility called ics that’s able to do the 2-way sync of events.

Features:

Synchronizes events from all of your calendars – both ways
Works with jailbroken 1.1.3 and 2.0 firmware (not yet tested with other versions)

Requirements:

.NET Framework 2.0 installed
iTunes installed (tested with 7.6.1)

Installation:

Download the package (400 kB) and unpack it somewhere. Newer version available here.
Copy iTunesMobileDevice.dll (usually resides at c:\Program Files\Common Files\Apple\Mobile Device Support\bin\) to the directory with ics executable
Be sure to have your Google Calendar’s time zone set to the same zone as your iPhone – note that there are two places where Google Calendar’s time zone can be set – first is under Settings/Your current time zone. But the one important for us is really under Settings/Calendars/[Calendar]/Calendar Time Zone. If you have multiple calendars be sure to check time zone of each.

How to synchronize:

Connect your iPhone using USB cable
Be sure not to have Calendar application running on iPhone
Run the executable (ics.exe)
Enter your email and password which you use to log in to Google Calendar
Click Synchronize button
Review changes and confirm/reject them
That’s it

Known limitations:

Limited support for recurring events – recurring events coming from Google Calendar are shown in iPhone but not vice versa (only first occurence will be shown). Also editing/deleting recurring event coming from Google Calendar in iPhone won’t work and the change gets lost at the time of next synchronization.
No notifications at the time (although if you manually add notification to an event in iPhone it will remain functional after synchronization)
Events created in iPhone go always to default (usually the first) user’s Google Calendar
In case of conflict (e.g. event edited both in iPhone and Google Calendar and then synchronized), Google Calendar is the source of truth
Synchronizes events in range: [Now - 3 months; Now + 1 year], maximum of 10000 events
This utility is distributed without any guarantee, i.e. don’t blame me if it destroys your iPhone or deletes all your calendar events and so on

I would like to thank to:

manzana (.NET API for interacting with the Apple iPhone)
managed-sqlite (A Managed SQLite implementation)
Google APIs and Tools

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