Syncing iCal Birthday Calendar with iPhone / iPod Touch
I just spent couple of hours trying to get the birthday calendar in iCal to sync properly with my iPhone. Which seems nearly impossible. At least with MobileMe! It's kinda ridiculous the way it is now, so I suppose this will be fixed in a future release by Apple, but until this happens, I found a nice shareware (just 3 british pounds after 3 weeks of trial) workaround solution that is not too easy to find on the web. Let's get into detail:
Problem:
The Birthdays calendar in iCal is a 'Subscription' calendar which links to the Birthdays in your Mac OS X Address Book. Therefore it doesn't sync at all via MobileMe.
Non-solution:
Via BusySync (http://www.busymac.com) you can nicely sync 'normal' subcription calendars. It's a nice tool with great Google Calendar integration, no doubt. But it can't do the job as the 'Birthdays' calendar has no normal URL but it integrates directly with your local Address Book. Therefore BusySync can do the job for every other calendar BUT the Birthday calendar.
Solution:
A little shareware tool called Dates to iCal 2 by John Maisey (http://www.nhoj.co.uk/datestoical/) does just that. Quietly. Easy. It lets you define a name for your calendar, even lets you customize the event titles and up to 5 different alarms.
Problems solved (meaning problems you wouldn't have even dreamt of until venturing into the time-consuming and non-fun task of just syncing a freaking automated calendar with your iPhone):
- The calendar produced by Dates to iCal 2 is seen as local calendar by iCal, so it simply syncs to your iPhone / iPod Touch via MobileMe
- The calendar is read/write, not read only like a subscription you would make via Google Calendar
- It is not a one-time copy of the Address Book Birthdays but a service that keeps the Birthday calendar up to date until deactivated
I just installed the little tool, clicked 'Activate' and all problems were solved! Perfect!
Download here: DownloadDates to iCal
Enjoy!
