Can I use Spectacled with my Google account? With Outlook? With iCloud?
The short answer is no, and we would rather you found that out here in two minutes than after an evening of trying. The longer answer is worth reading, because it explains what Spectacled actually needs from a server – and once you know that, you can judge any service for yourself.
What Spectacled needs
Spectacled does not have its own backend. Your entries live on a CalDAV server that you choose, stored as ordinary iCalendar data – the same open format calendars have used for decades.
That format has several kinds of entry, and Spectacled uses two of them:
- Spectacled Tasks needs
VTODO, the standard’s to-do entry. - Spectacled Notes and Journals need
VJOURNAL, the standard’s note entry.
The first is reasonably common. The second is where most services fall down: VJOURNAL has been part of the iCalendar standard since the beginning, but a lot of calendar systems never implemented it, because they were built to handle appointments and nothing else.
So “does it support CalDAV?” is not quite the right question. The right question is “does it support CalDAV including journals?”
Google Calendar does offer CalDAV access, but it serves calendar events and nothing else. Google Tasks is a separate product with its own interface, and is not available through the CalDAV endpoint at all. There is no journal equivalent anywhere in Google’s offering.
So none of the three Spectacled apps can work with a Google account – not Tasks, not Notes, not Journals. There is no setting to change and no workaround to find.
Microsoft
Microsoft is a shorter story: Microsoft 365, Exchange and Outlook.com do not offer CalDAV at all. Microsoft’s calendar services are reached through their own interfaces, which Spectacled – along with every other standards-based CalDAV client – does not speak.
The answer is therefore the same, and for a more fundamental reason: there is no CalDAV endpoint to connect to in the first place.
iCloud
iCloud is the closest of the three, and the only one worth testing rather than ruling out on paper.
Apple does run a real CalDAV server, and it does handle to-dos – that is how Reminders syncs. Journals, as far as we know, are not supported: Apple has no feature that corresponds to them, and its server does not accept them.
Worth knowing either way: Apple accounts require two-factor authentication, so any third-party app connecting to iCloud needs an app-specific password generated in your Apple account settings, rather than your normal password. The same principle as the app passwords in our Nextcloud article.
At a glance
| Service | CalDAV? | Spectacled Tasks | Spectacled Notes & Journals |
|---|---|---|---|
| Events only | ❌ | ❌ | |
| Microsoft 365 / Outlook.com | No | ❌ | ❌ |
| iCloud | Yes | ❌ | ❌ |
This is not us being awkward
It would be easy to read this as three big companies being closed, and there is something in that. But the more useful way to see it is this: Spectacled is built on an open standard precisely so that your notes are not trapped in any one company’s product. That design choice has a cost, and this is the cost – we cannot connect to a service that does not speak the standard, however large it is.
The upside is the part that matters once you are set up. Your entries sit on a server you chose, in a format that dozens of other programs can read, and you can move them somewhere else whenever you like without asking anyone’s permission. That is not true of any of the three services above.
What to use instead
If you are coming here having just discovered your existing account will not work, the good news is that getting a CalDAV account that does work is neither expensive nor difficult.
The easy route is a hosted provider. Spectacled suggests several when you add an account, most of them Nextcloud-based, several with free tiers, and all of them supporting everything the three apps need. Our Nextcloud article covers how that works.
The self-hosted route, if you would rather run your own, is covered in our articles on Baïkal and Radicale – both small, both free, both fully compatible.
Either way, the switch is a one-time job, and you are not handing your notes to a service that could change its mind about them later.
Leave a Reply