Instant use case: Add echo "Next 24 hours:";google calendar today title to your ~/.bash_profile file to see what you've got scheduled for the day when you launch a new Terminal window. Some more GoogleCL fun inside.

If you just type google at the command line, you launch an interactive terminal that lets you try all the various commands. In the interactive terminal, type command-name help to see its options, like help calendar.

Each command has several parameters that aren't immediately apparent. For example, in calendar, you can omit the long and hairy event URL by using the title parameter. You can list events for a particular day using the data parameter (--date 2010-06-16), and you can get events from a particular calendar and by keyword search term.

For example, to see all my trips to NYC on my TripIt calendar, I'd use the command:

$ google calendar list --cal TripIt --query NYC

Remember the beauty of the command line: you can easily chain commands together with the pipe, so you can sed, awk, and grep output to your heart's content, and then write it to a file if needed, using >. Before I discovered the title parameter on the calendar command, I was planning to use sed to filter out the calendar URLs from the output. (Thanks to lightening-fast sed and awk experts on Twitter, I was prepared to do just that.)

What I'd love to do is create a Todo.txt CLI add-on that inserts an event on your Google Calendar when you add a task with a due date. Here's the discussion about that going on now on the Todo.txt CLI mailing list. It's pretty much a no-brainer.

While I've mostly only played with calendar, the Docs access is pretty useful, too. With it, you could easily schedule cron'ed backups of your Google Docs, or push data into a new doc on a regular basis. Same deal with Picasa and YouTube. I like the idea of cron'ing a job that backs up my Google contacts to a CSV file on my local computer weekly, too. I don't see myself ever blogging from the command line, but it's neat that you can.

How are you using GoogleCL? Post your favorite command combos in the comments.

Thanks to things like Labs and gadgets, you can get your Calendar in Gmail (and vice versa), Docs in Calendar and Gmail, Profile info in Google Reader, Google Voice SMS in your Gmail, and just about everything on iGoogle. Here's how.

Read the rest at Lifehacker »

If you've upgraded your Mac to Snow Leopard (10.6), it's now dead simple to synchronize iCal with your Google Calendar. While in Leopard you had to either know detailed CalDAV settings or install a helper application, in 10.6's iCal you can just open up the Preferences pane. Under Accounts, click the + button to add an account. Enter your full gmail address (you@gmail.com) and your Google Account password, and iCal will detect and configure the CalDAV settings for you. This is full two-way sync, so changes you make to events in iCal show up in GCal and vice versa.

Pro tip: Google Apps account users, iCal won't automatically detect you're using a Google Account. From the Account type drop-down, choose "Google" and then enter your full email address and password to get your GCal in iCal. This also works for Yahoo Calendar, Exchange 2007, and any other CalDAV server as well.

CORRECTION: Contrary to what I posted earlier and said on TWiG, multiple Google Calendars are indeed supported! In iCal's Preferences, go to Accounts, then Delegation to check off as many secondary calendars as you want to sync to iCal. My apologies for the mistake! Thanks, Stuart!

Update: Sadly this sync only works with your primary GCal or Outlook calendar, not any of your secondary calendars. Google's official word on this:

It's not possible to sync events on secondary calendars at this time. Google Calendar Sync will sync only events from your primary Google Calendar (first one in your list) and your default Microsoft Outlook calendar. If you've scheduled events on a secondary calendar in Google Calendar that you'd like to sync with your Microsoft Outlook Calendar, you can either move the event to your primary calendar or export your entire secondary calendar and import the events to your primary calendar."

Recently I was a judge in a contest the folks at Doodle held for the best use of their API. My first pick for winner, Doodlendar, took home first prize. Developed by two students in Zurich, Doodlendar puts your Google Calendar side-by-side with your Doodle poll, so you can easily see your schedule as you make or respond to a poll. Doodlendar even lists the possible event dates on your GCal as pending so that you don't schedule over them before the final date is chosen.

Thanks to Doodle management for the opportunity to review some really nifty implementations of this underhyped but useful tool's API. Congrats to Doodlendar for bringing home first prize. Here's the full announcement of the winners and runner-ups.