CalDAV, you wicked, wicked mistress

I thought I had it all figured out. Problem solved. Games over. I win.

For as long as we have had OS X in the newsroom at work, I have struggled with how to implement the awesome power of iCal and its support of CalDAV — the open-source calendar protocol that iCal Server uses. ICal Server itself was a bit out of the question, the company seemed to be rather attached to its three Windows-based servers, and did not want to spend thousands of dollars just so I could have calendars that weren’t text files.

Then Google, in all their infinite wisdom and glory, opened up Google Calendar to CalDAV. Rejoice! Answer at hand. But no. You see, when you have an account with Google Calendar, you have one calendar. You can create more, but Google does some backend trickery here, and hosts the calendar with an impossibly long string of characters.

What this all boils down to is, if I want to subscribe to a group of ten calendars I’ve created in Google Calendar, I have to make a “group” in iCal for each and every one. And that, as the screenshot to your left will show you, can get very tedious.

I hope Google will fix this one day. One day. For now, I will continue to work on getting this up and running.