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. 😉

1. For example, this wouldn’t happen it wasn’t a service. [back]