I was initially critical of Spanning Sync1. I still think this would be better as an application than a service, but I’m also a pragmatist and since their pricing is reasonable I decided to give it a shot.
Note: Make sure you get the latest version if you are running Leopard.
I’ve been using Spanning Sync for the last couple of weeks. In general, it’s worked pretty well but there are a few caveats.
- The ability to create events in iCal when GCal is down is really nice. I’ve started using iCal a lot more for data entry again. The 6-10 seconds to load GCal turns out to be enough of a delay for me to use the local app.
- This bug is annoying.
- Some events have been mysteriously duplicated.
However, there is one issue that may cause me to ditch Spanning Sync until it is addressed: alarms from GCal do not sync to iCal.
I need alarms on my iCal events. I’ve been through this before and I know I need them. I even wrote a script to add alarms to the GCal iCalendars because I realized I needed this in the past.
Even with the Google Notifier and the SMS notifications, I’m nearly missing phone calls or calling in a couple minutes late. I need my iCal alarms with their nice pop-up windows and snooze features.
So far, I’m sticking with Spanning Sync. It’s pretty good overall, and is probably going to get better. That is, until I miss my next phone call and start to rethink this again. 
Popularity: 14% [?]
Kerim Friedman adds this Comment:
Talking about the speed of webapps vs. desktop apps … Have you tried Gmail on Safari 3? They’ve implemented a new version of Gmail on the latest browsers which does some things like preload e-mails from the current view. The speed is amazing. I think its faster than using Mail.app to download and search IMAP e-mail.
October 31st, 2007 at 4:18 pm
motherduce adds this Comment:
I really want to find a good solution for syncing iCal with gCal. Alex, did you ever try gSync?
http://www.macness.c[...]te/products/
October 31st, 2007 at 10:24 pm
Goodbye Spanning Sync | alexking.org adds this Pingback:
[…] really wanted to like Spanning Sync, I bought a lifetime copy and tried it for over a month. However, I’d had to give it up and go back to my old solution: subscribing to my Google […]
December 19th, 2007 at 4:44 pm