Sync Nirvana has been achieved

Longtime readers of this blog will know that I have a focus on, and a personal interest in, PIM (personal information management). And while I've made a lot of progress the last couple of years in getting my PIM solution defined, the one missing piece has always been that I was unable to create new calendar entries that had alerts (reminders), using my preferred alerting method (which is a series of emails from Google Calendar), except by using the "full" (desktop) version of the Google Calendar web page.

I couldn't (get entries with preferred reminders) in the iPhone calendar app. I couldn't in Microsoft Outlook on the Windows desktop. I couldn't in the mobile Google calendar page.

But let me summarize my PIM solution so that you have the context. It's a triangle with 3 corners.

First corner: Outlook runs on the desktop for calendar, contacts, and email when I am there. It also provides another key component - backup of the cloud. Many folks are learning the rashness of not keeping a local copy of what is in the cloud. The company goes under, or the servers go down, or your account is compromised or deleted or locked out, and you are done. But not if you have a local backup.

Second corner: Google is my current cloud PIM solution for calendar, contacts, and email. They have highly functional and efficient web-based clients to fill every gap. They have mature API's and robust standards support.

Third corner: iPhone/iPad is my mobile client of choice. Apple has a unique focus on the user. They understand the toaster paradigm (people don't want to configure drivers, manage updates, and reboot their toaster, they just want to push a button and make toast). Apple's products, for the most part, strive to get out of the way and let you do what you came to do.

I should note here that I do not try to add iCloud as another cloud provider. It might be possible, but it doesn't make sense to make things more complicated than necessary. I do think the interesting thing with iCloud is it is vertical integration (it's for Apple products) and thus will always tend to lead to insularity rather than homogeneity, which goes against the whole point of the cloud in my opinion. Very interesting to me.

The coolest part of the triangle is getting them all syncing back and forth. That means a change on any one is replicated on both the other corners. And this has to be "non-rickety" - adding a phone number to a contact on one platform can't cause the email address to go away on another.

I actually bought a product to take care of syncing Google to Outlook, after a long period of research and trial and error. I'd prefer something from Google or Microsoft, but alas. The product I bought is gSyncit  (http://www.fieldstonsoftware.com/software/gsyncit3 ).

I use a host of connections on the iPhone to sync back and forth with Google. In fact I use a different one for each of mail, calendar, and contacts. I use "Exchange” account for contacts, “Other” (Pop/Smtp) for email, and the “Gmail” account for Calendars. Actually it was moving to that last one that is part of the final fix. More on that in a minute.

Note in my diagram that the last connecting line (between Outlook and the iPhone) is grayed out. I am not syncing these two because Google takes care of that. I could do a sync with either iTunes or with iCloud directly between them, but I don’t see the benefit at this point.

 

Some other miscellaneous parts of my PIM solution follow:

TYPE	SOLUTION	COMMENTS
Notes	Evernote	The notes are in their cloud, and Evernote has desktop, iOS, and web clients which all sync with their cloud.
Notes	OneNote	Second choice, but I'm evaluating it because it is more accepted in business and now has an iOS client and can sync to the MS cloud Skydrive.
Tasks	Toodledo	Tasks on their website, and there is a web client and iOS clients. Prefer the organization over Remember The Milk. I'm not currently syncing tasks back to the desktop, but I just read that gSyncIt has expanded to Toodledo (and Evernote and a mess of others).
Passwords/Bookmarks	eWallet	No cloud yet, but they have wifi sync between the desktop and iOS clients, very secure, supports many types of information.
Passwords/Bookmarks	Lastpass/Xmarks	For bookmarks and passwords associated with websites, this can be more easy to use on the desktop, because they integrate with the desktop browser. Not as easy to use on iOS, but they do have apps.
Music	Zune	I have Zunes still and use Zune software and the subscription service.
Podcasts	Zune
TV/Movies	misc	I use Netflix and Hulu and Amazon and iTunes for TV and Movies. There’s still a lot of innovation to come in this category.
Pictures/Videos	na	I keep all of these local, and back them up. I use explorer to get them off the iPhone. I don’t sync them around.
Backup	iDrive	offsite file backup

 

Ok, finally on to the topic in the title. How did I finally discover a way to create calendar entries with my preferred email reminders on something other than the desktop version of Google calendar?

Like I said above, the first key is switch from whatever iPhone account you are using for Google calendars (probably Exchange) and use Google Sync (listed as “GMAIL!” in add accounts). Google Sync will use your default reminders set in Google calendar if you don’t add them in iPhone. This was a revelation. I found out about it here - http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/mobile/sxF0iQs7bR4 . As noted in that forum though, this breaks multiple calendars, which is a problem as that is how I follow the rest of the family. They point you to the following URL http://www.google.com/mobile/sync/ with some instructions - http://www.knowliz.com/2009/02/how-to-sync-multiple-calendars-with.html but that didn’t work for me, my other calendars never showed up. Then finally I found - http://support.google.com/calendar/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=151674&topic=13950&ctx=topic which lead me to https://www.google.com/calendar/iphoneselect . I was able to successfully add my other calendars there, and have them show up on my iPhone.

So finally, after literally years, my PIM search is done. Only remaining question is, how long with this fragile peace last?

Google Music - for your protection

In Google Music – error “For your protection, please sign into your account again.”

http://digitalproletariat.com/blog/?p=3

If you are taking Google Music for a spin, and are getting stuck in an endless authentication loop trying to grab songs (even free ones), please check out this post – it fixed it for me.

iOS5 tips – iCloud sync vs Google sync

One of my favorite topics is PIM (personal information management I think) – contacts and calendar basically. Sometimes email and notes and tasks are included. I struggle with remembering things and staying organized like many people, thus the interest.

I’ve written posts before on keeping iOS products in sync with desktop and web PIM tools, the challenges of cross-platform, etc. Challenges there had settled down lately with the maturity of Google’s products, and the ubiquity of Exchange sync.

Now iCloud comes roaring into town, packing heat and looking to have a showdown. This is actually my biggest “head-scratcher” with iOS5 right now. How do I either make them play nice, or choose between them? There’s still lots of “dorking” to be tried, but so far it looks like playing nice is not a realistic option.

I’m not alone in this conundrum. Here’s a small sampling of other people who are asking the same questions:

• http://iphonehelp.in/2011/10/14/icloud-doesnt-work-with-google-sync/
• http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/gmail/thread?tid=0610650f9bcb357f&hl=en
• http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/apple-iphone-ios-5-icloud-problems-decline-after-initial-stumbles/2011/10/14/gIQAxa2XkL_story.html
• http://www.ausbt.com.au/icloud-for-business-travellers-your-essential-guide
• http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/icloud-explained-things-to-consider-before-embracing-the-cloud/
• http://daggle.com/outlook-icloud-google-calendar-sync-2748
• http://forums.macrumors.com/archive/index.php/t-1168685.html
• http://forums.macrumors.com/archive/index.php/t-1247881.html
• http://forums.macrumors.com/archive/index.php/t-1181601.html

Amazon AWS EC2 cloud failure

Amazon has finally published it’s write-up of the outage that occurred starting 4/21/2011 - http://aws.amazon.com/message/65648 .

Honestly I have to hand it to Amazon for single-handedly creating the cloud-computing race. Remember they were an online store, not a datacenter hosting company. They have to be the healthiest company around in terms of constantly improving, expanding, driving into and inventing new products and markets.

But I want to challenge them here. They’ve made something where there was nothing. But I don’t think they have gone far enough yet in cloud computing in terms of offering server computing as a service. I think they owe it to their customers to make some more of this complexity disappear. I’m talking about geographic fault tolerance. I can’t believe in this day and age companies still think they can bet their business on single-site deployments, no matter what kind of clustering and zoning is in place. Amazon needs to take over another layer of the stack here, and make global load-balancing automatic and standard, just build it in to everything.

Sure it’s hard. But right now Amazon is asking the customer to do that hard thing as a one-off baked into their application infrastructure design. Imagine the world-wide cost savings if Amazon does it once, and bakes it into it’s services. Sure the little guy doesn’t want to pay for it. But Amazon ask yourself if you want to have to write another letter like this. And maybe enough big guys will come sniffing around once you add it to the sales literature, to offset those admittedly significant development and ongoing increased resource utilization costs.

UPS pulls an Amazon

Got this message for a package I am tracking today, “Due to severe thunderstorms in Louisville, KY (our major air hub), UPS Next Day Air Early A.M., UPS Next Day Air, and International Express delivery times will be delayed today” … “ for delivery throughout the United States.”

Folks that’s called a single point of failure. That’s called a lack of redundancy, and it’s called no geographical fault tolerance.

It’s just like Amazon last week, got all these poor websites run through a single datacenter. C’mon we knew better than that a decade ago.

Spend the money, have two or three. It’s not optional. Do it right, make them hot-hot.

This has all happened before many times

Great article on the trend away from web sites to cloud applications and the business drivers thereof on Wired:

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/08/ff_webrip/all/1

I had not considered this particular discussion (future of www) from this angle before, due to a lack of interest in advertising, which in light of the article appears to be akin to a lack of interest in money, and something of a blind spot. I have previously explored the idea of the internet and http being the new general purpose network, many times, but perhaps not on this blog.

The term cloud computing really begins to make sense here as well. I have been telling people to just substitute the word “internet” for cloud computing. But as this article makes clear (without actually saying it), is that cloud computing is the internet as a backend, without it’s default client, www. It’s a storage device, a computing platform, a delivery network. All these new custom apps are the front end client, or will be. Thus Google’s new Chrome Store, a place to now sell us, as apps, the very content and functionality we’ve been viewing for free as web pages for so long, begins to make perfect scary sense.

There’s a lot more to say about this topic. For instance it’s various back-stories of standard business cycles and even lifecycles. Birth, growth, learning, periods of discovery and wildness, time of work and contribution, injury, sickness, aging, death. But I don’t want to distract from the focus of Wired’s article. I was all for “apps” when they were just an alternate means to reach new audiences with our web content, but now that I can see this new angle of apps being yet another nefarious plot by brick and mortar big business to retain their stranglehold on my wallet and attention. Yikes!

Lost Google contact and calendar data

http://www.daveswebsite.com/gsyncit_critical.shtml

Well I guess I know how I lost both my calendar and contact data now..

This is of course a very real concern, because I use synching to keep Google (the backend cloud), Outlook (my backup), and the iPhone (my user interface) all current. A problem with just one piece wipes out all three in roughly one minute. Luckily I had some backups of those folders in Outlook. And I will start making more! I guess the answer would be to get Outlook more into a backup mode than a synching mode, where I am getting a separate snapshot once a day or similar.

iPad

Something I wrote to one of my Facebook friends..

Rewind to before Microsoft defined personal computers and imagine a computer modeled on the toaster or the microwave or the tv (but not the vcr), a device that got out of your way and let you do what you got it for. You push one button to turn it on and instantly you're surfing the internet. No booting, no hourglass. You flick your finger and you are reading your email, like changing the channel. No loading drivers, hiccupped virus updates, hours lost trying to get your sound card or printer working so you can just type a letter or play a song. Another flick and you are watching a movie. This device is a disruptive sea-change, that has the potential to reset what we think of as a computer, and pown the whole decade. The price point is half of what was expected. The battery life is twice the expected. They built their own cpu.

Also note the timing - people are in the process of moving their computing experience online and mobile, as proved by the success of Facebook, the iPhone, and the netbook (which only has enough power to run browser-based apps). Note the branching out and away from the desktop pc, with the rise of laptops, smartphones, and readers. How about the overwhelming importance of media in consumer computing - books, music, pictures, movies, rather than spreadsheets and word-processing. Apple has nailed a convergence of vectors driven by the rise of the prevalence of the Internet in computing. The Internet is the computer, and that thing in your hand, be it kvm (keyboard video mouse), laptop, smartphone, or tablet; is no longer your computer, it's just the way you communicate with your world-wide-web, which by the way, resembles Google more and more every day.

You are going to want one of these.

Easily access a usb drive from the internet

http://www.pogoplug.com

http://www.tonidoplug.com

This may answer one need I do have, which is to be able to easily share my pictures with my family without posting them on the internet..

Cloudkick

https://www.cloudkick.com/

This is a new free service that helps you manage elastic virtual machines in the cloud - even so far as moving between Ec2 (Amazon) and Slicehost (Rackspace?).

Thurrott on MobileMe and alternatives

http://www.winsupersite.com/reviews/mobileme_01.asp

Paul Thurrott has done us all a favor and created another one of his comprehensive deconstructions, this time of MobileMe, the new online (cloud) companion (synch) service for the iPhone. The review has 4 parts, and link above is to the first. That should lead right into his newer series on alternatives that grew logically from the first series -

http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/mg_clouds_01.asp