How To: Add Facebook, Meetup, Salesforce and other events into your Apple iCloud calendar.

Calendar Cloud helps you to do more with your Apple iCloud calendar.

Historically our team is divided fifty-fifty between Google and Apple users. Consequently, we included a support of Apple iCloud into the product road-map.

Facebook, Meetup and Salesforce events synced to the iCloud calendar with Calendar Cloud.

Some parts of this post I copied from "How to add Facebook, Meetup, Salesforce and other events to Google Calendar" post. This is expected because we want to build a generic user experience in using our product.

Add Facebook events to the iCloud calendar with Calendar Cloud.

Calendar Cloud setup is very simple. It lives in the cloud. Consequently, I don't need to install anything on my MacBook, iPad or iPhone. I need just a several clicks to connect external service and see the calendar on iCloud. Let's install a connection to Facebook, click by click, starting from the Login page.

First click: Login to Calendar Cloud using an Apple iCloud account.

Calendar Cloud works with tree most popular calendar services – Google Calendar, Apple iCloud Calendar and Outlook 365 Calendar. It is very logical that you should choose one of them to sing in.

This post about iCloud, so I do my first click on Apple iCloud button and see Login Form. Apple doesn’t support OAuth, Instead of this, a user should provide Apple ID, app-specific password, and a number of the dedicated server. Usually, there is no problem with Apple ID. Of course, everybody knows his Apple ID. The rest two things are less known by a common user. I give you a short explanation.

App-specific password.

In few words, app-specific passwords allow you to sign in to your account securely when you use third-party apps with your Apple ID. To generate and use app-specific passwords, your Apple ID must be protected with two-factor authentication. You can read more about the app-specific password on Apple site. (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204397) I just provide simple steps to generate it.

1. Navigate to Appleid.apple.com from your web browser and sign in with your Apple ID and Password.
2. Verify your identity with two-factor authentication.
3. Under the Security section, select Generate Passwords.
4. Enter a label for the password. You free to use any name but I like "Calendar Cloud" and click "Create".
5. Copy the app-specific password you generated and provide it to Calendar Cloud login form.

It could be useful not only for Calendar Cloud.

Dedicated server number.

Calendar Cloud needs server number to know where stored your data. We are working on a solution to get this info from iCloud API. It will be not needed in near future because it is not a useful approach. Meanwhile, you can help us to provide it.

1. Navigate to the iCLoud calendar in any browser.
2. Select any available calendar or create a new one.
3. Click on "Share calendar" icon.
4. You should see a "Calendar Sharing" popup like in the picture below.
5. Check "Public Calendar".
6. Finally, you will URL started with "webcall://pX-calendars.icloud.com/"(See highlighted part of the screenshot). Where X is your server number. In my case, it is 60.

Second click: Calendar dashboard.

After success login, I see the Main page with calendar dashboard. The dashboard is divided into two parts.

The first part is a list of connected apps available for you.

I see Facebook, Meetup, Foursquare, and Salesforce but it could be changed in future. The CC team work hard to add more and more connections.

The second part is aggregated calendar view. It is empty in my case because I do the setup from scratch.

Empty Calendar Cloud aggregated view. All data is coming from your Apple iCloud calendar.

I just click on Setup button against Facebook calendar and see standard OAuth login prom, but this time it is Facebook. I grant access CC to read my Facebook calendar.
All set. I wait a minute then click on a refresh button and see my Facebook events in the aggregated calendar view. That means connection was installed properly.

Last click: Check result.

This step is not required but somebody may be interested the result. If you open your iCloud calendar you see a new calendar with name “Facebook (Calendar Cloud)”. It is auto-generated and being under control of Calendar Cloud. You don’t have to do anything. CC will sync the calendar time to time (approximately every 20 minutes) and all latest changes will come to you iCloud Calendar.
Thanks to Apple the calendar will be available on all your Apple devices.

PS: Setup connections to other applications.

Setup connection to other apps is very similar to what we did for Facebook. Most of them support OAuth login protocol. That means you just grant access and Calendar Cloud takes care of the rest.

Oleksandr Ieremchuk,

Product Owner at Calendar Cloud,

oi@calendar-cloud.com