How to Sync your Emacs diary with your iPhone or iPad

Oh yes! I have wanted to do this for such a long time, and

glancing through the iPad manual gave me the answer. I will now show

you how to synchronize your Emacs diary files with the calendar in the

iPhone or iPad. I should warn you right out that the implementation

seems broken in some ways, for instance I don’t see cyclic dates

showing up, but it provides a start. I have tested this on an iPad

running iOS 3.2.1, and an iPhone running iOS 4.0.

To do this, you just need a working Emacs and a place to put it on

the web. First, within Emacs, use M-x<br /> icalendar-export-file. Put in the name of your diary, for

instance ~/diary. Make sure the output file has the .ics

extension, for example diary.ics. Now, copy the .ics

file to the web. You should probably do this on a server where you

can implement some security restrictions, or just delete the file

immediately afterward.

Now, go to your iPhone or iPad. Go to Settings, then

Mail, Calendar, Contacts. Add an account, choose

Other then Add Subscribed Calendar. Put in the full

URL of your .ics file in the server field. You don’t need to worry

about the user name, password, and SSL fields, unless of course you

do. This would also make a good way to secure your diary. Now save

it and enjoy. You could also enter the URL in Safari, but doing it

through the settings menu lets you put in a description and other

things. Either way works. To update your calendar, just go back to

the mail settings, and Fetch New Data.

I hope this helps some Emacs using iPhone enthusiast out there. I

wanted to sync my calendar for the longest time, and felt an obvious

way existed, and I found it. I look forward to discovering other ways

to integrate Emacs with my iPhone and iPad. I consider it a very

worthy effort.