IPhone – Is it possible to copy and paste iCal events in iPad / iPhone

BusyCal is the best answer I can give you if you only want to sync calendars to Google.

I would also highly recommend SpanningSync which will also sync your Contacts in a much better and more reliable manner than Address Book will.

(I have no affiliation with either company, and am a paying customer/user of both. I use/love BusyCal for my calendar, but I sync with MobileMe not gCal… I use SpanningSync to sync my contacts to Gmail. I have written reviews for both Spanning Sync and BusyCal.)

To set single alerts on all birthdays, you can avoid a script altogether:

1. Open Calendar Preferences in Calendar.
2. Under General, tick "Show Birthdays calendar".
3. Under Alerts, set an alert for "Birthdays".

I haven't taken the time to actually write up an AppleScript for the double alarm parts, but this article seems to cover scripting calendar alarms quite nicely. I would imagine you would just need to create a file or list in the script that contains the names of the events (which you can deduce from the standard naming convention Calendar app uses).

Also I am using Mountain Lion with Calendar app. I can't recall if the steps above work on older versions of iCal.