Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Sync IPod touch/IPhone calendar to PC

Here was my challenge, how to manage 4 Gmail and 1 Yahoo email accounts on my PC and have everything sync with my IPod Touch. I use my IPod touch when I’m out and about to check email and surf the web when I’m away from home. I was getting tired of having to go to individual email accounts to answer email messages. The IPod Touch has a great interface for dealing with multiple web email accounts and will tell me when I receive a message from any of those accounts. I could answer them on the IPod but I don’t like to fumble with the small on-screen keyboard if I don't have to. I would much rather answer them on my PC.

I played around with Windows Live email, and I like the Outlook like feel. It's a nice free Microsoft software package, but alas it’s really a stripped down version of Outlook and is missing some features that I want to use. So I ended up downloading Thunderbird. Thunderbird is a free full featured desktop email application that is able to take care of all of my Gmail and Yahoo email accounts. That being said it is full featured and I needed to do some tweaking to get it to look and feel like other email package I’ve been using.

Thunderbird’s default settings are to have new messages come to the bottom of the list, and for replies to emails to go to the bottom of the conversation. This is pretty much backwards from what everyone else in the world does, but it can be changed. Simply by going into the account settings for each email account and selecting Composition and Addressing you can set Thunderbird to behave like other email packages. It’s one of the best free desktop email programs around, and there is a bunch off free Add-Ons that can be installed to enhanced your email experience. Changing the way it looks and feels is really no big deal.

The next goal was to be able to have a desktop Calendar that would sync with the Calendar on my IPod and to do it for free of course. There really isn’t a direct link between the Calendar on my IPod and a desktop application, however Google or Yahoo Calendar can be used as an in-between to make it seem like the connection is direct.

Here’s how:
First off the IPod touch will sync with online Calendars from Yahoo and Google, so what I did was Sync the IPod Calendars to one of my Google accounts that I’m using for email. Then I use Sunbird on my Desktop. Sunbird is a free cross platform Desktop Calendar application. I added my Google Calendar account to Sunbird and now any change made on my desktop get made on my Google account, and passed over to my IPod Touch. It works the other way too. Here are the step by step instructions for setting up Sunbird to work with Google Calendar.

So now I have all of my email in one place on my desktop and my IPod and a Calendar that I can update from my IPod or my desktop via a little smoke and mirrors. Both Thunderbird and Sunbird come to us from Mozilla the creators of the Firefox web browser.
Dan

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