Now that Microsoft is Shutting Sunrise

I have been a big fan of Sunrise but there was always a danger when it was taken over by Microsoft that they would eventually shut it down and that is now on the cards. I really like the way that Sunrise allows me to see in my calendar information other than my diary entries such as Tripit travel plans and Foursquare checkins and I didn’t want to lose that.

My initial thought was to do something through IFTTT but not all services were covered and I couldn’t get the options I wanted to change the entry colour, for example. It turns out that the answer is pretty simple and that is to use calendar feeds, such as iCal or a dedicated feed for Google Calendar which is what I use.

The following instructions show how to add Foursquare checkins to your Google Calendar but the process is very similar for other services.

Login to your Foursquare account and then go to this link: https://foursquare.com/feeds/. You will be taken to a page at the bottom of which are a number of links for different calendar feeds. For Google Calendar I clicked “Add my check-in history to my Google Calendar”

This took me directly to my calendar where I was asked to confirm that I wanted to add this calendar

I clicked Yes and after a short wait I saw the following notification:

The calendar feed then appears on the left hand side from where you can click on the (tiny) down arrow and make changes such as to the colour of the entries.

After a little tweaking I saw my checkins appear in my calendar:

I have been able to add other services also covered by Sunrise as follows:

• Meetups
• Tripit
• Songkick

So while I was initially disappointed about the demise of Sunrise as it turns out I can have exactly the same functionality in my native calendar, Google Calendar, and there are plenty of mobile clients for it too so all in all I am pretty happy with the solution.