Google's CalDAV - Not quite the perfect solution

This is my main topic for the week! After converting all my calendars to use CalDAV, I've started to see the limitations. First off, you can't enter events on the iPhone and have them sync back as the iPhone treats them as read only calendars. Second (and I hope there is a way around this), I got invited to a meeting today and couldn't add it to one of my CalDAV calendars which creates a problem that I need to solve as I want to deploy CalDAV to my company in the upcoming months.

I'm back to BusySync for one calendar (the one I use for meetings for work). Hopefully I'll figure all of this out without pulling out too much more hair.

Magic Google Calendar CalDAV fix

Yesterday I wrote about only being able to use my main calendar with Google Calendar's CalDAV. Today I was searching and found a post by one of the authors of Calabaration (Google's tool for adding calendars to iCal) about a preference that says "Enable read-only calendars". I enabled this and presto, everything now works. I know that one of the calendars I added I don't have write permissions to, so I simply don't modify it.

While I really like BusySync, CalDAV support has a few advantages for my use. The first being I don't have to have another program running and the second is that changes I make on my calendar are immediately reflected on Google (it updates from Google every 5 minutes). One disadvantage is that if iCal isn't open, I don't believe the calendars update, so MenuCalendarClock could have the wrong information and when I update my iPhone, it may not have the correct info, either. However, these days iCal is pretty much always open for me.

Google Calendar's CalDAV Support

Today, Google announced better CalDAV support which is excellent, but there is a huge issue with Google Apps for Domains. The CalDAV support only works for calendars for which you are the owner; Google Apps for Domains only has the owner specified for the Default domain. Any additional calendars you create don't have the owner set so you can't use them. I'm not sure what the issue is, but I've spent a few hours trying to figure this out and have gotten no where. Well, at least I can use CalDAV for one calendar (I tried this with my Gmail account and it works fine).

AppleTV and Boxee

I got an invite to Boxee the other day and just got around to installing it on my AppleTV which went pretty smoothly. It seems interesting, but haven't had much time to play around with it. I took the opportunity to use ATV USB Creator to install it instead of the old Patchstick I used before. I had to re-install part of my SqueezeCenter software after upgrading to AppleTV 2.3, but I'll document that in another post when I get a chance. I think that installing the SqueezeCenter software with the ATV USB Creator will be much easier as it installs SSH 2 instead of SSH 1 so I'll be able to use Transmit to upload files and use BBEdit's SFTP feature to edit files.