• After 15+ years, we've made a big change: Android Forums is now Early Bird Club. Learn more here.

Sync with mac

M

MarkArgent

Lurker
This is almost inevitably a rant.

My last two phones (literally) out of the box would sync diary and calendar with my mac.

When I looked into getting an Android phone I saw cryptic references to sync via google, and naively assumed this would be fine.

It turned out to be a sod to set up. I tried Missing Sync, which turned out to be seriously shoddy software (giving error messages about failure to syn music lists... which might not be unrelated to my not having any, and creating a load of spurious entries in my address book). So I deleted Missing Sync, tinkered more with Google accounts and got things working.

A persistent frustration since the has been that there doesn't seem to be a way to force the syncing of calendar and address book: the Mac doesn't seem to offer a way to say "Sync with Google NOW" and while the Android has this facility, it doesn't seem always to do it. It is more than a little frustrating to add an event to the calendar on the Mac, set it to sync every minute and then wait... the tell the Android to sync and have it not do so, as if nothing has changed... That's a damn site less use than my previous phones, where I'd just have clicked a sync application on the Mac and it would have synchronised.

I have just had a ridiculous experience. An event has been postponed, so I dragged it from one day to another in the calendar on the Mac. I got this error message:

The server responded with an error.

The request for
 
I don't need a google account. All I want is to synchronise address book and calendar.
Click to expand...

Well that's how android works. Get a google account, which takes less than 30 seconds to set up, and then you can sync your contacts/calendar. You dont ever have you use that email, and its free, so I dont see the problem with getting one.
 
Setting it up was more of a faff than that -- the net result is that I now have on my mac duplicate entries for all events that were in there when I set up the google account, one for the calendar listed as "On my Mac" and the other for the google account. There also appears to be no way to say "Sync mac to phone NOW", so I have had some infuriating instances of putting something in the calendar on the Mac, setting that to sync to google every minute, syncing phone to google a few minutes later, and the phone not syncing, apparently failing to detect changes at the google end.

Yesterday evening I was getting the error message quoted above... so it was throwing an error I can do nothing about and failing to sync to google. As I write, that error message isn't appearing, but I have automatic syncing to google turned on on my phone, events changed on the mac yesterday have not appeared there, and when I try a manual sync of the phone to google, I have an error message on the phone saying "Sync is currently experiencing problems. It will be back shortly".

This is ridiculous. I don't give a damn about google accounts but I do want my address book and calendar to sync between mac and phone. If the android is so much better than my previous phones, why can't it do this? The net result of having to go via google is that the diary on my phone and on my computer are now out of step and there's not a damn thing I can do about it. This is basic functionality, and its not working is serious. Should I have got an iphone instead?
 
That link is not relevant as the account is set up.

What it is Not doing is working. I am repeatedly getting the error message above when I alter things on the Mac, and the phone refusing to sync.

Neither error message sheds any light on what one has to do to make the wretched thing sync, and I have zero desire to mess around with google accounts trying to troubleshoot something that is not working.

However, I do want to be able to alter an event on my mac or my phone and to be certain that this information is propagated either immediately or when I tell the two to sync. What I do not want to do is add an event and then not have the faintest idea whether it has been propagated (so that I have two inconsistent copies of my diary).

Surely, surely, surely this is a basic requirement. The sales blurb implied that it simply works. Instead I now have several events that are in one diary and not the other, this is infuriating.
 
When I had iCal setup for to access my Google account I could create event directly in the Google Calendar from within iCal, no syncing was required. At that point iCal was just a desktop app using caldav to read/write to Google. It sounds like you're trying to keep a local calendar and push/pull events between that and Google.
 
When I got the phone, I already had a load of events in iCal, so it is a tad frustrating to find all those now duplicated, once in the local calendar and once in the google one. Since setting that up, I only add things to the google calendar.

What triggered the error message above was trying to drag an event that had been postponed from one day to another. This is a perfectly reasonable thing to want to do. As the error mentions 'The server responded with “HTTP/1.1 500 Server error code: d22673f1” to operation CalDAVWriteEntityQueueableOperation.' I assume that there was a problem in iCal talking to Google. It is mightily annoying to seek to change something in one's diary and be told you can't... and now to be wasting time attempting to guess what Google accounts are up to when I don't give a monkeys about the google account, but do want a diary accessible on my mac and my phone where both are always in step with eachother.

The latest irritant is this message that has just appeared:

The server responded with an error.
The calendar https://www.google.com/calendar/dav/markargentuk@googlemail.com/user/ was not found on the server. Make sure the URL is correct.

To which the blunt answer is that I've not changed anything on the google account. From a computing point of view the google calendar idea might be elegant, but it just seems to get in the way.
 
It is also less than impressive that the instructions on

Get Started with CalDAV - Google Calendar Help

say to type the server address as

https://www.google.com/calendar/dav/YOUREMAIL@DOMAIN.COM/user

but the preferences in ical offer two boxes, one for "server address" and one for "server path", so one assumes this gets split into Google and /calendar/dav/YOUREMAIL@DOMAIN.COM/user (with email address changed).

It would be reasonable to ask me whether I have done *exactly* what the instructions say: less so when the instructions are wrong.
 
And the latest joy... I try to add an event in iCal and get:

The server responded with an error.

The request for “New Event” in “Home” in account “markargentuk@googlemail.com” failed.

The server responded with
“HTTP/1.1 500 Server error code: d22673f1”
to operation CalDAVWriteEntityQueueableOperation.

and three options "stay offline" "revert to server" and "go online"

What on earth does this mean? Of those three options the damn thing is connected to the internet or I'd not be able to post this.

When I check the settings in iCal as per the Google Calendar Help, the thing that is fishy is that clicking on the "delegation" tab shows no names, when it says "refreshing delegates list" nothing appears, and when I enter the email address associated with the google account I get "Cannot enable access to your account. "markargentuk@googlemail.com" was not found." Yet I can log in to my google account using that email address and events are on the calendar.

What do I do now?

And why, oh why, oh why, can my supposedly super new phone not sync directly with the mac as the two previous ones did?
 
Go to your accounts (in your Preferences) in mail and click the advanced tab under your gmail account. Uncheck the "enable account" box, and then you won't see duplicates of your emails in your inbox! That should do the trick!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom