Synchronized Calendars.. (Rainlendar)

After I wrote about how to sync my rainlendar using Dropbox (across PCs) & MyPhoneExplorer (Sony Ericsson phones) in the previous post.. I went to research more again, after my bro wanted to use rainlendar to sync his calendar to his Android phone..

So this time I went to try out the Pro version of Rainlendar, as it says that you could actually sync with a lot of online calendars.. I didn’t really put in much expectations but surprisingly.. It actually could work! But you need to experiment with it.. It’s not really that simple..

So let me guide you step by step to set up the relevant calendars.

Step 1. If you have an existing rainlendar with events and tasks inside, go into manager from the context menu to export your files.

Step 2: In the Manager window, select all Events and export it. We shall name this as Events.ics.

Next, select all Todos and export it. We shall name this as Todo.ics.

We are now ready to sync our calendar with Google Calendar.

Step 3: In the Options window, go to the Calendar tab and click Add. Then select Google Calendar and then follow the instructions.

Step 4: If you do not have a constant connection or do updates on both Google Calendar & Rainlendar, set Poll Frequency to at least 1 (Check for updates every 1 min from Google Calendar), and set Offline Copy to Yes (so that you can still use your Rainlendar when you are not connected to the internet). If you don’t update your calendar often, just set it to a lower poll frequency like 10-30min to save on battery life.

Step 5: Now go into the Manager menu and import your event.ics inside this Google Calendar. It will take 5-10min to sync all the events, do not close Rainlendar during this synchronization.

After this, you are done syncing your Rainlendar with your Google Calendar. There seem to be some problems with the alarms in this configuration. Unless you select pop up notification from Google Calendar, you won’t be able to have alarms in your rainlendar for that particular event. So try out different ways and see which suits you. I opted for email notification instead.

You can also sync external Google Calendars such as the Singapore Holidays calendar (or friend’s calendars that they shared with you). Simply add them the same way as you would do when you add your first calendar. However, do remember to set them as Read Only as Yes since you will not be able to update that Calendar at all.

So now your calendars are sync-ed, but your to-do list isn’t! You cannot add to-dos in the Google Calendar as it doesn’t support task lists currently.. So the other tool you can use to sync your to-do list is Remember the Milk.

Step 6: Now go to Rainlendar again and add another calendar. This time we will add Remember the Milk.

Step 7: Remember the Milk requires authentication via the web browser before you could sync them together. So click on Ok, I’ll allow it to authorise this synchronization.

Step 8: If you do not have a constant connection or do updates on both Remember the Milk & Rainlendar, set Poll Frequency to at least 1 (Check for updates every 1 min from Remember the Milk), and set Offline Copy to Yes (so that you can still use your Rainlendar when you are not connected to the internet). If you don’t update your calendar often, just set it to a lower poll frequency like 10-30min to save on battery life.

Step 9: Now go into the Manager menu and import your todo.ics inside this Remember the Milk Calendar. It took me 1/2 hour to sync 200+ tasks, so please remember not to close Rainlendar during this synchronization, or else the tasks will stop syncing.

Step 10: There are a lot of ways to sync and notify you in Remember the Milk, so do remember to check them out. Some requires a Pro account though. You could also add Remember the Milk as a gadget in Gmail & Google Calendar! So you won’t need to maintain 2 accounts but just treat everything transparent.

So you have now finished synchronizing both your events and tasks online and you would not need to worry about not being to access your calendars when you are not at your desktop already. You can also remove the local calendar you have been using by removing it from the Options -> Calendar tab. (So you won’t see duplicate entries)

And now, do you want to sync to other platforms such as other PCs, Android, iPhone and others? It can be done. I will briefly write about them as I’ve not really tried all since I do not have a data plan for my phone yet.

PC to PC – Since you calendars are all on the cloud now, you could just download another instance of Rainlendar in another PC and repeat the steps above again. However, you do not need to export and import the events and tasks as they are already synchronized on your Google Calendar and Remember the Milk.

Android – Since the Android platform is created by Google, you can easily synchronize your calendar (even your contacts) to your Google Account by switching on the Auto Sync. However, for Remember the Milk, you need to get a Pro account to use the official Remember the Milk app, but you could also get 3rd party apps like Astrid Tasks to sync with your account. How good is it, I dunno..

iPhone – Use Google Sync to sync your iPhone calendars with your Google Calendar. It uses Microsoft Exchange to sync with the Google Calendar. For more information, click here. For Remember the Milk, I think there are 3rd party apps around too. Try searching for them..

Sony Ericsson phones – Use MyPhoneExplorer to sync manually, or configure Remote Sync (on Sony Ericsson’s UIQ phones) or RoadSync to sync with Google using SyncML protocol.

Nokia Symbian phones – Use Mail for Exchange to sync with Google Calendar. Details here.

I hope this will be a very comprehensive guide for people who want to synchronize their Rainlendar with the other devices. When I actually sync my calendar with my SE phone and iPhone, I will update this post again.

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