I 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 Calendars in iCal.

Here are the reasons I’m turning Spanning Sync off (for now):

• It would somehow decide not to do scheduled syncs for long periods of time (8+ hours, sometimes days) with no notification to me. I’d have to go look for issues when I realized things were out of sync.
• Every time I upgraded it would forget which calendars to sync. This meant I’d have to reselect all of the calendars on every machine and it would take a very long time to do the first sync again.
• When an upgrade was required, the app would just stop working. It wouldn’t tell you this – you had to open the preference pane to discover the reason why.
• Event alarms did not sync, and there was no setting (that I could find) to set default alarms for items being synced in to iCal. This resulted in me being late for things because I rely on those reminders.

I’m hopeful that this will be a temporary departure from Spanning Sync, and that in a couple of months when I try it again I’ll be able to rely on it. It was a very handy service when it was working and now that we have over-the-air sync between Google Calendar and the BlackBerry, this would really make a nice solution.