How To: Get the Jewish Calendar On All Your Devices
So with the New Year rolling in I figure now is a good a time as any to show everyone how to get their own custom Jewish Calendar for use with Google Calendar, your Blackberry, or anything else you make use of to schedule your life.
I am going to start off with a brief laudatory essay about Google Calendar and how I think everyone should be using, particularly because if everyone were to use it, organizing life would be a ton easier, as I will explain.
Google Calendar has some great features which make it, to me (and an independent poll of tech-people), the best calendar system ever…
- Calendar Sharing
- Multiple Calendars
- The ability to make any or all of those calendars disappear or reappear.
- Blackberry and Device Sync
- Remember the Milk Todo List Sync
- Import and Export to a whole bunch of file formats
- Coordinate with All Google Services
- Probably a bunch more
Calendar Sharing: If I have a calendar on Google, and my co-workers do as well, we can easily share our calendars with each other and schedule things when we are all free. You can also set the calendar to just show you as “free” or “busy” so know one needs to know what you are doing, but they can easily know your gameplan. Another cool funciton here, is that you can set the calendar to automatically accept event invitations that do not conflict with existing ones, so for example, lets say you have a Beis Medrash in the shul, and you need to manage who gives classes and learns in it when. All you do is set up a Google Calendar, set it to auto accept non-conflicting invites and share it with all those who give shiurim. Now when someone wants to schedule a shiur, they check the calendar, invite it to the shiur and if it doesn’t conflict with an existing one being given in that room, it gets added, otherwise it won’t! Simple!
Multiple Calendars: You can have many separate color coded calendars associated with your account, so for example, you could your personal calendar, your work calendar, all your friends and co-workers (see above) and other companies/organizations. This is especially handy for community workers who have to schedule events that don’t conflict with the 30 other organizations around the city, all you do it show all the calendars and you can see visually which days are free(er). But it is really handy for anyone with a number of things to consider when scheduling something, and allows you to keep things clutter free while still having a mass of information available (see below)
Show/Hide Calendars: You can make calendars appear and disappear by clicking them, so lets say you have 35 different Chevrusas and you want to invite them for shabbos, you don’t want to see all there calendars all the time, but you can just show them for a minute, see when they are free and then hide them again…The same applies for Jewish Holidays and Community Events…
All The Rest: Self explanatory.
The Good Stuff: How To Get Jewish Dates/Times
First we need to get a Jewish Calendar to upload. So head over to Hebcal.com to get your jewish calendar.
Step 1: Goto Hebcal.com
Step 2: Click the “Hebcal Interactive Jewish Calendar” link in the upper left of the screen.
Step 3: Select your options:
- Whole Year or Monthly
- Jewish or Gregorian Year
- What events/holidays should be shown
- You Zip Code for Shabbos Times
- It is pretty self explanatory
Step 4: Click the “Get Calendar” Button
Step 5: Click the “Export calendar to Palm, Outlook, iCal, etc” Link in the upper left of the screen
Step 6: Here you will find a selection of options to download the Jewish Calendar…We are interested in the Apple iCal (which is not only for apple, it is just a calendar format). Right Click the “Download” link and choose “Save Link As” or “Save Target As” depending on your browser. What you are doing now is saving the iCal file to your computer so you can utilize it for your purposes.
Step 7: Save the file to your desktop [for advanced users: Save it anywhere as long as you can find it]
Congratulations! You now have a calendar file which contains the Jewish Holidays/Dates/whatever you selected.
But now what?
Uploading the Calendar to GCal:
Step 1: Open GCal and login (if you don’t have a Google account, click the “Create and Account” button below the login section)
Step 2: On the left side of the screen under the “My Calendars” box, click “Create”
Step 3: Add a name (description, etc. optional) and click “Create Calendar” button on the bottom of the screen.
Step 4:You will now be back at your GCal home screen, again on the left side of the screen, under the “Other Calendars” box click “Add” and then “Import Calendar”
Step 5: Click the “Choose File” button
Step 6: Find you iCal file that we saved above and click “Open”
Step 7: Choose the calendar you want to import into (Created in Step 3 Above) and click the “Import” button
Step 8: Wait for the file to load and you should see a screen like this, indicating that your file was successfully uploaded. Click the “Return To Calendar” link
Step 9: Success!
Now the question is how to get all this Jewish Calendar goodness onto your blackberry (or other PDA)?
Simple: Navigate to http://www.google.com/mobile and select the appropriate phone type. Now follow the prompts to download the software to your phone. (NOTE : Blackberry offers a Sync App, which allows you to sync your BB calendar to GCal, other phones have a GCal app, which acts as its own calendar.)
I hope this was helpful! Have a great New Year!
