Sync Google Calendar 2-ways with Your iPhone Using Nuevasync

Nuevasync provides an easy, hassle-free 2-way sync between Google (contacts and calendars) and your iPhone.  Simply create an account at Nuevasync (step-by-step instructions here), grant them access to your Google accounts, choose your calendars to sync, add an exchange server to your iPhone, and bam, you’re done!  Create an event on Google and it shows up on your phone in seconds. Add a friend’s e-mail address to your phone and send them an e-mail in Gmail before you can say syncronize 5 times. (Results may vary depending upon your signal strength and the servers’ usage)  

While they’ve recently had some server trouble, it was due to massive amounts of new users and a new feature they just added: multiple Google calendars on the iPhone in their own colors.  Today everything seems to be working again so you should have no troubles.  When the calendars sync, the color is chosen automatically and there is no setting to choose which calendar gets which color; without a little hacking, of course.  Thanks to Jim Kimmel’s comment on Nuevasync’s blog, here’s a step-by-step guide to customizing the iPhone color of your Google calendars.

I think I figured out exactly how to get the colors the way I wanred them without relying on luck or randomness.

We already know the five color order: Red, Orange, Blue, Green and Purple. I figured out (by playing around) that the calendar that syncs with the first appointment TODAY gets the first color, then next calendar with an appointment today gets Orange, and so on (All Day Events count as the first appointment because they “start” at 12:00Am.

So, to get the colors I wanted (I should note that I wanted my main, default calendar to be Green), I created four temp calendars in Google (Temp1, Temp2, Temp3, and Temp4). 

I created an 8:00AM appointment in Temp1, a 9:00AM appointment in Temp2, a 10:00AM appointment in Temp3, an 11:00AM appointment in my default calendar (luckily I didn’t have any other appointments today), and a 12:00PM appointment in Temp4. 

I then synced those five calendars with my iPhone using Nuevasync (turned off calendar syncing on the iphone and then selected the four temp calendars on Nuevasync and hit submit, then turned the calendar back on on the iPhone. I did this over WiFi, so if you’re on 3G, it could take longer. With only one appointment to sync in the temp calendars, it went very quickly. Temp1 came in Red, Temp2 was Orange, etc and my default was green.

Now all I had to do was deselect the Temp Calendar on Nuevasync and launch calendar on the iphone to resyc (basically just had to wait until the first temp appointment was gone), then selected the calendar on Nuvasync that I wanted to be Red and relaunched Calendar on the iPhone and waited for the sync to finish. Rinse and repeat for the other colors….

Obviously, I then deleted the temp calendars from Google and my colors are right were I want them to be.

If you need more than 5 calendars, do the above for the first five and then add in the others as you want the colors to appear (i.e. the 6th calendar will be red, etc.).

Hope this helps everyone out!!

Jim