Paul Jacobson

I posted about a new application called Spanning Sync that will enable Mac users to synchronise their calendars in iCal with Google Calendar a little while ago. Well, the public beta was released just a few days ago and then promptly closed because of a tremendous spike in traffic. According to the blog:

I hate to do this, but we've closed the public beta temporarily until we can upgrade our hardware to handle the load. If you were one of the thousands of people who used Spanning Sync in the last few hours, you'll still be able to sync. But if you haven't yet used the system, I'm going to have to ask you to wait just a bit longer.

We're thrilled (and a little freaked out) by the literally overwhelming response, but we want to make sure all of our users have the best experience possible. With any luck, the public beta will open again tomorrow, with a lot more capacity to handle the load. Thank you for your patience.

This application is gold for people like me who have most of their calendars on Google Calendar and rely on calendar subscriptions in iCal to keep up to date. The problem is that subscribing to calendars in Google Calendar gives you a locked calendar in iCal. You can't edit it in iCal and you don't have event notifications. In fact I noticed that I only receive event notifications from Google Calendar for my primary calendar and not the others that I created (I have a calendar for each major activity so I can properly allocate my events and turn whole categories of events off if I am no longer involved in them).

Hopefully the public beta will open again very soon. I am pretty excited about this product. There is a screencast here which shows what you can do with Spanning Sync. It is very easy to use and does exactly what I need it to do. I would like to see the synchronisation happening in iSync so there is one place to go to synchronise everything. On the other hand, Spanning Sync allows for regular and automatic synchronisations so there probably isn't a really big need for integration into iSync.

Tags: spanning sync, google calendar, ical, screencast, demonstration