Hey @benln, thanks for hunting SyncThemCalendars.
This product is solving something that has been very painful for me - the ability to block time in one calendar based on events in another calendar.
Sure, there are many solutions for seeing calendars side by side, but what I really wanted is to make sure that when my wife schedules a date night in my private calendar, no one at work would be able to invite me to an evening phone call. And vice versa.
So I decided to build SyncThemCalendars to take control over my availability once and for all... :-)
Please give it a spin, would love to hear your feedback.
Obviously, after a free trial (no credit card required), product hunters get an exclusive life time discount!!
Love the idea. But when I try it, it's more of a "push" than a "sync" right? If I delete the source, it doesn't seem to delete the copy. Or did I miss something?
@james_mtc You are probably right - a true sync will introduce complex product issues - for example, what happens if you are invited to a meeting in the source calendar, and after it is copied to the target calendar you delete the copy. In a true sync operation, what would you think should happen to the event in the source calendar? Should it be deleted? Should it send a decline?
I'm not sure this would be an easy call.
@eshaham I would love for the source calendar to be "truth" and the duplicate to be a filter/lens on that. For example. I have a personal calendar that I want to make available on my work calendar, but not fully visible to my coworkers - they shouldn't know if I'm at an interview or at coffee with a friend or cutting out early for drinks somewhere. I've been duping events via Zapier, but that's also a one way sync (and free). What would be great is that the personal events get added as "Busy" on the work calendar. And if I delete the personal event or move it, the work calendar would update the necessary events. I assume there's probably some unique hash that could be made of the source event to track if it still exists or where it went, and then make decisions based on that.
@james_mtc this is exactly how SyncThemCalendars works. When you set up the sync, you can specify if you need the copied event to be marked as private, or even completely override the title of the event, for privacy or any other reason.
Also, when you make any changes to the source event, the target event gets updated as well.
As for Zapier, as a side note, I've been using Zapier for one way sync as well.
What didn't work for me?
1. They don't handle recurring events well - every time a recurring event is changed in the source calendar, over 700 tasks start running (eventually making it go over the free account quota)
2. Setup isn't trivial at all if you need target events to get updated/deleted
3. If a task fails for any reason, you need to make sure to re-run it manually, or else you will never have that event updated in the target calendar.
4. There is an inherent delay of up to 5 minutes until an event gets synced
SyncThemCalendars solves all of these issues, and more features to come
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