With OS X 10.6, syncing support is built right into the operating system. Launch Address Book and head to the Preferences. Under the Accounts page, enable Synchronize With Google. A pull-down window appears asking for the Google account name and password. If you are a Google Apps user, the Google account is your full Google Apps email address, such as
you@yourdomain.com; for Gmail users this would be
you@Gmail.com.
Once this is done, close the Preferences. On the OS X menu bar, there should be an icon to sync (the dual arrows in a circle). Click this and select Sync Now. If this icon isn’t present on the menu bar, launch iSync and in its Preferences, enable showing its status in the menu bar.
Once the sync is complete, you can log into Gmail and your contacts should be listed and available.
The iCal sync works just as well but is a bit more annoying. In order to synchronize local calendars to Gmail or Google Apps, you need to define and use the calendars on the Google side, rather than the local side. iCal subscribes to the Google Calendar as its own calendar, so existing calendars are not synchronized to Google. If you are just starting out, this isn’t a big deal but if you have a lot of appointments or tasks in existing local calendars, linking that to Google can be a chore.
Subscribing to the Google calendar is very straightforward. Simply head to the iCal Preferences and the Accounts page. Use the [+] button to add a new account, and add Google as the account type. Again, for Google Apps users, enter your
you@yourdomain.com email address and password and iCal configures the rest.
In iCal’s calendar list now, a
YOU@YOURDOMAIN.COM entry appears, and the subscribed calendars are nested beneath it. By default, it will only show your personal calendar, but in the Preferences for this account, the Delegation pane allows you to list other calendars you have access to (other calendars of your own and any shared calendars from others you may have defined). These will show up in the calendar list under the DELEGATES heading.
Some third party applications like Spanning Sync may work better than the built-in services offered by OS X 10.6. Spanning Sync allows you to match local calendars to Google Calendars, so if having local calendars online is important, Spanning Sync or another application may be preferable to iCal’s support. If contacts are all you are concerned with, the built-in sync with Address Book will do the job.
