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?
