A Free MobileMe Alternative

My intents of getting an iPhone began in 2007 when it was introduced – at the time I wasn’t sure it met my cost/value needs. Only after breaking the applications barrier and proving its commitment with the 2.0 overhaul, Apple made the decision much easier. I finally got the first 2G generation iPhone at 320$ on eBay. With the launch of MobileMe – Apple changed the rules for personal email/contacts/calendar syncing, bringing the experience of Exchange push technology “to the rest of us”. Apple’s one step forward to this uncharted scene was predictively followed by a step backward, a yearly 99$ price tag. Yes, you do get an additional few gigs of net storage and beautifully designed set of web apps, but these just don’t measure up to the tax. In this post I will describe a free alternative for MobileMe – for an iPhone, Mac OS X and Gmail setup, using Apple’s native applications – As I find the best solution around. It took me a few days to get it going, as expected – it has its ups and downs, and I will try to guide you through everything. Credit goes to Beau Giles for his detailed post on the matter.

First to understand what we’re trying to achieve, here’s a picture of how our email/contacts/calendar scheme works. For a true push experience, imagine the “cloud” as being one service (Just the MobileMe) and all three arrows working in all directions.

So let’s jump right in, first we’re going to set up Contacts and Calendar syncing, on part two i’ll describe the best way to sync Mail.

PART 1 – SYNCING CALENDAR AND CONTACTS

1. Set up your NuevaSync account
   After verifying your account, login to NuevaSync. Here we need to configure it for our Gmail account. Click the change link next to Calendar, it should direct you back to Gmail site for approval – just fill in your Gmail details. then do the same for Contacts, and we’re done!
   
2. IMPORTANT STEP
   Backup all your contacts/calendars from your iPhone because after the next step they will be erased and replaced. If you regularly use iTunes for syncing (you should!) – Launch Address Book on your mac, on the menu bar go to File > Export > Address Book Archive and save it somewhere. Then launch iCal, choose File > Back up iCal from the menu bar, and save it there also.
   
3. Set up your iPhone for NuevaSync
   Now that we are safe, back on your iPhone, go to Settings, and then choose Mail, Contacts, Calendars. On the next screen press Add Account. Choose Microsoft Exchange from the top. Put in your Gmail address, but for Username and Password put your NuevaSync details. Tap Next. After verification, enter www.nuevasync.com for the Server field. Make sure you turn ON contacts and calendar, and turn OFF mail. Tap Save.
   Now all your contacts and calendar are being erased and replaced by the ones from your gmail account. On the next steps we will add your Mac to the syncing loop.
   ONE MORE THING your calendar is synced as a whole, without color coding, each time you add an event it’s added to your main calendar. More of that later.
   
4. Set up your Mac for Contacts syncing
   Open Address Book on your Mac, go to Preferences from the menu bar, under the first tab you should see Synchronize with Google, hit the checkbox and write your account information (Same details as you log in to Gmail on the web).
   Problem is now, you have to enable iSync menu bar icon and hit “Sync Now” manually each time anything changes on either your iPhone or on your Mac. This is just the way Apple chose to implement contact syncing, and it’s a bit uncomfortable so we will make it automatically.
   Download and install iSyncIt (I heartily recommend making a donation to these folks). When you’re done, from the menu bar press the iSyncIt icon, choose Preferences, disable bluetooth control because we don’t need it, then under Scheduling make it sync every, let’s say, 60 minutes. then proceed to Login Item and make sure it starts on login.
   The next step might look unnecessary, but believe me, it is. Find someone who has a phone with Bluetooth that can talk with iSync (you might want to check this on how to install other phones) Go to iSync, and set up the new Bluetooth device for it, after it’s done, just make sure the device is turned ON for synchronization in iSync’s main window. also, check either Contacts or Calendars for the device.
   Now, we don’t want to see the iSync application pops out on our Dock every hour, so let’s get rid of it. Go and download Dock Dodger (Donate please!), install it and drag iSync from the applications folder to Dock Dodger’s main window. This way the iSync application will activate sync with Google, and you won’t even notice it.
   
   • iSync does popup for a second and then disappears, I just use the Spaces feature to make it always open under my least used space (far down-right). you can do it also under Settings on your Mac. believe me it won’t bother you. If you do find another solution for this feel free to post your suggestions.
     
5. Set up your Mac for Calendar syncing
   There are some other ways to sync your iCal with Google, they just cost money or just less cool – and we’re here for free cool alternatives right? We are going to create a separate calendar in Gmail for each calendar in iCal. Or – the other way around, depends on where you previously kept your calendar.
   Go to your Gmail Calendar, and create your desired calendars with their respective names, just hit Create button under My calendars on the left side. For each calendar click the arrow next to it and choose Calendar settings from the list. You will see a Calendar Address section down the page, and just right to it the Calendar ID inside brackets. For the first main calendar this will be just your email address, but for other calendars there will be a code followed by “@group.calendar.google.com“. Now open iCal application on your Mac and go to Preferences. Under Accounts tab you will see the + button on the down-left corner. Click it, and you will be presented with a drop box. On the Description write the name of the first calendar which Calendar ID you just copied. Put your entire email address for Username (including @gmail.com) and your Gmail password. Hit the small arrow next to Server Options, on Account URL you should write like that:
   
   https://www.google.com/calendar/dav/[Your Calendar ID]/user
   so if my calendar’s ID is xyz@group.calendar.google.com, what I should write is:

   https://www.google.com/calendar/dav/xyz@group.calendar.google.com/user

   leave the authentication option unchecked, we don’t need it. Press Add. Do the same for each calendar in your Gmail account. I remind you that you should make this process in the future if you plan to add more calendars, so go ahead and make some.
   You can change the interval in which calendars are refreshing. Just select each one in Preferences and look for Refresh calendars in the Account Information section. You have 1/5/15/30 Minutes intervals. I really manage with 15. Notice that it will update the first time you launch iCal, and for every new meeting you make it will also make a refresh.
   That’s it, you now have mirrored always-in-sync calendars with google.

   • If you had your calendars already in iCal and you want to copy them to the new ones, I recommend you check out CaliBrate ($8 Shareware), it will do the job just fine.
   • Each new meeting you make in your iPhone is created under the first (main) calendar. I just named the first one “iPhone”, so I won’t confuse, and from time to time sort it out in iCal to the different calendars.
   • Kind of a downfall for this method, the different calendars in iCal are placed in separated groups, meaning that you can’t just click on a meeting and change the calendar it resides in. You will have to either drag the meeting to the desired calendar on the left pane, or make sure you select the right calendar and only then create a new meeting.
   • One more thing I’d like to note here, If you are used to Apple’s birthdays feature straight from Address Book contacts to iCal – you will have to keep another “online” birthdays for google (So strange Google hasn’t thought this feature yet…) I recommend checking iCalBirthdays, this Automator action takes your contacts birthdays and put it on iCal, and lets you control a whole bunch of other stuff on the way, you can just create and application from it using Automator, and make it run automatically every now and then.

CONCLUSION

It take sometime to get this going, but if you follow this work-around as I described, you will have a nice solution, that actually works! I guess there’s always more than one way of doing these stuff so feel free to post your own suggestions. In the next part I’ll describe a way to manage your emails with Gmail, iPhone and the Apple’s Mail.app on your Mac.

Tags: Calendars, Contacts, Gmail, iPhone, Mac, Mail, MobileMe, Syncing