Well the day has finally come… now you can finally synchronize your Google Calendar (gCal) with your own local calendar application on your laptop or desktop machine easily and automatically! Outlook, iCal, Thunderbird, whatever! And without investing in an expensive application to do it for you. At Lifehacker: “As of yesterday’s announcement of CalDAV support in Google Calendar, you can now sync your Google Calendar with virtually any popular desktop calendar for free.”

Used to be that I had to jump through several hoops to get my Apple iCal and my remote online gCal to sync up, and it was not a smooth two-way process like it should be now. One used to have to invest in a program like gSync or Spanning Sync, but now that Google has opened up the CalDAV support, you can easily match up your online and offline calendars without paying a dime. I know this will definitely be a godsend for me, since I maintain three personal calendars and will soon be throwing a shared business calendar into the mix!

The process is actually really simple, and I was so excited that I just had to share the news with you guys. Especially since you can even use gCal simply as a cross-platform syncing tool now (if you don’t actually like the Google Calendar format, say, but you want to sync iCal and Outlook), hopefully some of you will find this easy new process useful too. Adam Pash wrote up a really fantastic guide at Lifehacker: How to Sync Any Desktop Calendar with Google Calendar.

Best of luck with it.