Not that long ago I wrote an article about syncing a Treo to iCal to gCal and back again. This process required a lot of steps and a $99.00 yearly subscription to .Mac. While it worked, a more elegant solution was bound to come along and come along it did! Spanning Sync is an incredible utility that allows bidirectional syncing of gCal and iCal calendars for Mac OS X. Oh, and as an added bonus it will then also allow you to sync to any device that can iSync, such as a Treo 650/700.

Once installed, Spanning Sync will show up in the Mac OS X system preferences. From here you'll enter your Google account information for the account you wish to sync. I believe this is actually signing in to Spanning Sync servers that happen to use the same registration information that Google uses. After I sign in once it should be a persistent connection so I don't need to do it again.

On the left side of the interface are my iCals and on the right side are my gCals. I simply assign an iCal to a gCal, or select which calendar I want synced with which. Once I have done this I simply hit 'sync'. It's that simple.

I have my Spanning Sync set to update every 10 minutes. When I make a change in an iCal calendar it will auto-update to gCal within 10 minutes, and the same goes for the reverse of that. When I sync my Treo 700wx with my Macintosh it will pull down all the information in iCal which should also contain my gCal information that's no any older than 10 minutes.

The only solution that would be better is over-the-air sync to my Treo, but even if I had that I would want gCal access in my iCal. While Spanning Sync is in a closed beta right now, shortly they will be opening it up to a public beta. If you're a gCal and iCal user who has been trying to keep everything in sync, Spanning Sync is the clear winner in this space. Even in its closed beta form the app is very stable and works great (a few glitches, but they are to be expected). I would have to give this application one of my top picks for 2006!