Sync calendars, the free and easy way

I’ve been trying to figure out how I can sync my calendars on to more than one machine. Since switching to a Mac a couple of years ago, I’ve been using iCal. What I hate though is having to pay for a .Mac account (now know as Mobile Me) every year. It’s $100 annually but the only feature I use is the calendar and contact syncing. I already have my own website so I don’t need that from the service.

So I started to use Google calendar a couple of years ago to avoid having to pay for Apple’s service. It works perfect! I can be on any computer with an internet connection and have access to my calendar. I recently found an app that Mozilla created that does calendar management – Sunbird. It’s been out for awhile but an add-on was recently created that “Allows bidirectional access to Google Calendar”. Great! It makes my solution of using Google calendar easier. With this add-on, you can now connect to your Google calendars and have full access. Prior to this, you only had read-only access (which my iCal currently is doing 🙁 ).

So now I can use Sunbird to fully manage my Google calendars without having to use my browser. Then my iCal will continue to do it’s one-way sync from Google, then syncs with my iPhone.

Now the only thing that’s left is my Address Book.