Syncing Google, iCloud and Outlook

Connecting a calendar stops the rest of your life double-booking your chair. Your existing events come into Maelo and hold that time closed, and the bookings you take through Maelo go out to the calendar you already live in.

All three providers connect from the same place: Settings, Scheduling, Calendars. For Google, press Connect Google, sign in, and approve the calendar permission. You come straight back to Maelo with every calendar on that account listed.

Each calendar in the account gets its own row. Tap one to open it and you get three switches, described in full further down. New calendars start out importing and blocking, which is what most artists want on day one.

Apple does not offer a sign-in button the way Google and Microsoft do. Instead you give Maelo an app-specific password: a one-purpose password that only reaches your calendar, never your Apple account, and that you can revoke on its own whenever you like. Your real Apple password is never involved.

1. 1

   Sign in to your Apple account

   Go to appleid.apple.com and sign in. The Apple Calendar section in Maelo links straight there.
2. 2

   Find App-Specific Passwords

   Open the security part of your account, then App-Specific Passwords.
3. 3

   Generate one and name it

   Create a new password and call it something you will recognise later, like Maelo. Apple shows it once, in the form xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx. Copy it before you close the window.
4. 4

   Paste it into Maelo

   Back in Settings, fill in Apple ID Email and App-Specific Password, then press Connect iCloud.

Outlook works exactly like Google. Press Connect Outlook, sign in with your Microsoft account, and approve the calendar permission. Your calendars appear as rows you can switch on individually.

Microsoft ends a connection that has gone unused for a long stretch. If that happens Maelo tells you plainly, and a Reconnect Outlook Calendar button puts it back in one step.

Every calendar row carries three switches, and they do genuinely different things:

• •Import to Maelo shows that calendar's events on your Maelo calendar, so you can see everything in one place. Turn it off and its events disappear from Maelo on the next sync.
• •Block availability with events in this calendar is the one that matters to clients. Events on that calendar close the time, so nobody can book over them.
• •Export to this calendar sends your Maelo appointments out. Only one calendar per provider can be the export target.

Blocking is deliberately blunt. Any event on a blocking calendar closes that time, including all-day events, which close the whole day. Maelo does not read whether you marked something free or tentative in the other app, so if you keep speculative holds in the same calendar, put them somewhere that is not set to block.

On the calendar you marked as the export target, Maelo creates an event for each appointment: the session title, the client's name and phone number, the total, what has been paid and what is still due, your notes, the address with any arrival instructions, and a link back to the booking in Maelo. Reschedule or cancel in Maelo and the external event follows.

Editing goes one way only. Change an appointment in Maelo, never in Google, Apple or Outlook, because Maelo owns the booking and will simply write its own version back over yours.

Connecting more than one provider is fine. If Google and Apple are both connected, the appointment is written to both.

Sync runs by itself. Google and Outlook push changes across almost immediately. Apple is checked roughly once a minute, so an event you have just added there takes up to a minute to appear. Your calendar header shows when the last sync happened, and Force Full Sync at the bottom of the settings panel pulls everything again if you want to be sure.

Connections do occasionally lapse, usually after a password change or a revoked permission. When one does, Maelo shows a red banner on the provider explaining exactly what happened, emails you, and puts a notification in your bell. Until you reconnect, events on that calendar no longer hold time closed, so a client could book a slot you are not free for.

Disconnect at the top of a provider removes its synced events from Maelo and clears the time they were blocking, so you become bookable again straight away. Appointments Maelo already wrote into that calendar stay where they are.