yCal Help

How to: sync data

Currently, yCal accesses calendar data only through Apple's official application programming interface (API) — which is a good thing as it makes yCal fully compliant with the Apple universe. The bad side of it is, that yCal has to live with the limitations of this programming interface, too.

Calendar access

yCal will automatically pick up and list all calendars you have set up in Apple's iCal or Calendar app. If you purchased yCal from Apple's Mac AppStore, all calendars will appear in the group "Local". If you downloaded yCal from our website www.ycalapp.com directly, you'll see calendars nicely grouped depending on the calendar source (remote server). So why is there a difference? Information about calendar sources (and remote servers) is only available via undocumented functions in the API, which are not allowed to be used by apps distributed via the Mac AppStore.

If you're using calendaring apps other than Apple's iCal or Calendar and have configured remote calendar servers in those apps, you will not automatically find those calendars in yCal, as yCal only picks up calendars from iCal or Calendar (to be more precise: from OS X CalendarStore).

By the way: missing a birthday calendar? Mac OS X has a built-in (and by default hidden) birthday calendar which is used by Apple applications such as Contacts. You can activate this calendar (meaning: make it visible for calendar apps) from the preferences menu in Apple's iCal or Calendar app (also read about birthday management in yCal).

Syncing data with remote servers

Currently, yCal always and only operates on your local machine's calendars. This is due to one of the limitations of Apple's programming interface: the API does not provide any support for accessing remote calendars hosted on servers in the network.

You can, however, work with all your remote calendars by using Apple's iCal or Calendar for syncing. Just start up iCal (or Calendar) once in a while to synchronize your changes to the calendars. There is also a preferences option in yCal to start iCal (or Calendar) in the background automatically when you run yCal, so you don't have to remember about syncing.

We know that this is still a little cumbersome. We have started to work on our own protocol implementation to access remote calendars via CalDAV. Once we finished this update, life will get a little easier.