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?

Apple, Google, Microsoft leverage vertical mobile-cloud integration

The 3-horse smartphone race is on. Apple iPhone, Google Android, and Windows Phone are duking it out for market share and mindshare. They each are amazing advances in their own way, and have plenty of features in common and differentiators as well.

One of the cool features of the latest generation of smartphones that has really resonated with people because of it’s utility and ease of use, is backend cloud integration, which has practically replaced the old clunky desktop pim (personal information management – contacts/calendar/tasks) sync functionality. Apple has the MobileMe platform, Google has all their cloud web services that have blossomed from Gmail, and Microsoft has their Live services.

What is it going to take to pull ahead in the next leg of the race? Something big. As I mentioned this vertical cloud integration to backend web services is something big. They all have it. And each one also allows a certain amount of limited capability for other vendors’ services as well. For instance I don’t have MobileMe, and instead use Nuevasync to sync contacts and calendars with Google’s backend over IMAP and Exchange.

But what none of them have, is great integration no matter what the backend platform. So if you are a Google services customer, but you want to use Windows phone, you are penalized with reduced functionality and convenience. If you are a MobileMe customer who wants to try an Android phone, you’re not going to get the full experience. And you can get your Live mail on the iPhone, but you’re going to have pay a 3rd party or hack to get your contacts or calendar.

Now we can easily guess why these 3 companies would want to tie smartphone users to their web pim offerings. These backend services are very sticky. If you got Hotmail a decade ago, you’re probably still using it, and naturally your contacts and calendar ended up in Live. Gmail customers use Google Contacts and Calendar, and Reader, etc. MobileMe has plenty of loyal diehard fans, even though Apple charges $100/yr for what the other services give away. People change cell companies all the time, as evidenced by the “churn” statistics we always hear about. But if these companies can get us hooked onto their services, we are much more likely to stay with their phone platform, because of the extra integration features.

I think the next leader though, is going to have to be welcoming to customers of other web services, rather than penalizing. In the same way as Google has garnered  massive gains lately by supporting multiple carriers and multiple equipment vendors, the big 3 need to equally support multiple backend services well. Or perhaps even offer ala carte – email from Hotmail, contacts from Google, calendar from MobileMe, etc.

(As a footnote I’d like to pre-respond to the guaranteed-to-come accusation that I’ve mistakenly left Palm or Blackberry or Symbian out of the race. Yes it’s just my opinion, and I’ll be glad to change it when I feel it’s warranted.)

iPhone smtp issue - won't send mail

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=8709794

My manual gmail smtp settings had been working fine. All of a sudden I couldn't send mail. The error was: "Cannot send mail. The sender address was invalid."

The apple forum url above contains a buch of possible fixes and workarounds. The one that worked for me was to explicitely add username and password to the gmail smtp server settings. I don't know if it was using defaults before and that broke, or if the username/pass was in there and got lost.

View multiple Gmail accounts simultaneously in Chrome

I don't normally have multiple Gmail windows open. I have two accounts, but I use one for companies and one for friends, and the first filters into the second. However the terms of service say that you need to check your mail every so often. I take that to mean in the browser, just to be safe. Therefore once a month I like to have every Gmail account in my family get logged into once. The rest of the time they are accessed via Pop, or Imap.

I know this is not possible in Internet Explorer. There are add-ons for Firefox, but that did not appeal to me. I thought perhaps some of the new features in Chrome might present an opportunity to make this happen finally. So I googled "multiple gmail account chrome" etc. Most of the articles I read were not very encouraging. So I wanted to report that this works fine, with some initial setup required.

My most-used reference was:
http://www.labnol.org/software/create-family-profiles-in-google-chrome/4394/

What I did was first set up a new profile for each account I needed to check, which amounts to first cleaning out your default profile, then copying the profile folder to some location and duplicating it for each account, with a unique folder name. Then I created a shortcut for each profile. Then I launched Chrome via the Shortcut, logged into the particular Google account, saved the password, bookmarked Gmail, and then created an application shortcut for it.

Once that initial process is done, all I have to do to launch and view these multiple Gmail accounts at the same time, is to launch the application shortcuts. Very cool!