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.

Google Reader – end of an era

Today is the last day of updates to shared items in Google Reader, as Google converts Google Reader to push eyeballs to Google Plus.

I’ve removed the shared items widget from this blog, though there are still a couple of links to my shared items archive at the bottom right. Not sure how long they will work.

I’m going to try switching over to Tumblr to store and publish the items I want to share from Google Reader. The link for that is http://iponderus.tumblr.com, and the RSS feed is http://iponderus.tumblr.com/rss . So ironically you can view the feed of my shared items from Google Reader in Google Reader, but it will be Tumblr powering it now.

I think the preferred method (at least the one Google would prefer) is that I “plus one” the items. However my Google Plus account is personal, so no one besides close friends and family would be able to see those, as best as I can tell. Good move Google. Oh well, progress is like this sometimes.

Google + Circles, Part 3

http://www.google.com/+/learnmore/
http://www.google.com/+/demo/

I just heard, on Paul Thurrott’s latest podcast http://twit.tv/ww215, where they were actually demo-ing Google +, that you can add people to more than one circle, so there’s that myth busted! Makes me hope for a quick invitation all the more.

Google + Circles, Part 2

http://www.google.com/+/learnmore/
http://www.google.com/+/demo/

So the first post got into why we needed Circles. This second post will hit on why Circles doesn’t go far enough. Remember, the point is to mirror real life, so that the product naturally extends and enhances what we already do.

Yes Circles allows grouping. However what about when the church leader is also your brother-in-law? What about when you hang out with one of your work associates? With Circles, a person can only go in one group. That is a completely artificial, limiting distinction, that I believe will limit Google+ usefulness, perhaps even dooming it to a fate worse than Buzz.

It’s a mystery to me how all these companies can keep getting this wrong. Sure there’s a sneaky reason why they don’t want us to have good grouping. But it’s shortsighted to make something we don’t want and can’t use. The first company to get this right wins.

Google + Circles

• http://www.google.com/+/learnmore/
• http://www.google.com/+/demo/

Well Google beat me to the punch here. I had been meaning to put up a rant about social networks, and how the lack of fine-grained “grouping” was keeping them from getting to the next level.

What I mean by that is Twitter and Facebook (and all the other lesser players in social media) only allow for the concept of a friend. Everybody in the whole world you have any type of relationship with, is a friend. And all of your social interactions go to all of your friends. This is one level below everything you do is public, and belongs on television.

Social networks have to model, mirror even, our real world social interactions, in order to augment them (and provide value we will pay for). That means Facebook needs to grasp the difference between my boss and my wife and my bowling buddy, and allow me to naturally control what I share with each one of them, not just lump them all into a group. This is not just about damage control (the classic drunk at the bar photo). It’s about value. I’ve got a cute story about my kids that my mother and my sister will find amusing, but it’s just clogging up the feeds of the rest of my “friends”.

Well, to get to the point, Google has had the same thought, and built friend-grouping into their newest Facebook-killer/social network, Google+, and is calling it “Circles”.

RIP Neuvasync

Neuvasync (http://nuevasync.com , http://blog.nuevasync.com), which I have been recommending for years for people who want to sync their iPhones and other smart phones to Google PIM services (contacts and calendar basically), has decided to stop offering a free version of their services, if I read this right - http://blog.nuevasync.com/blog/nuevasync/entry/new_services .

As Google offers the same syncing for free, I’m afraid most people, me included, will choose to move to the Google version. Well thanks for the memories..

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.)

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!

Google Calendar mobile clients don’t set default reminders

Oh this bug drives me crazy!! I can’t believe they haven’t fixed this yet, it’s been years!

When you create a new calendar item from the mobile web client, it doesn’t create any of your default reminders with it, so you get no notice of the event.

Furthermore, all the syncing services also seem to skip the reminders, or set a pop-up reminder, or just keep their own reminder. I am thinking here of the iPhone calendar and syncing via Nuevasync (imap/Exchange) and desktop Outlook syncing over gSyncIt, though the last time I checked the same was true of the various Microsoft and Google syncing utilities as well.

I should note in Google’s defense that the capability is available via the API.

I note that the iPad can switch between mobile and desktop versions of the web client, so that is an additional way to create appointments besides via a desktop browser, and still get default reminders.

Google Voice not intercepting voicemail for iPhone

· http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/voice/thread?tid=06b28869a293df1b&hl=en

· http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/voice/thread?tid=56a6385ce48d6e5d&hl=en

· http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/voice/thread?tid=1cb861553cb65a33&hl=en

· http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/voice/thread?tid=0d3905d1eabcb546&hl=en

· http://www.knowyourcell.com/apple/apple-iphone-3g/iphone-3g-guides/479280/how_to_set_up_google_voice_voicemail_on_the_iphone_3g.html

· http://www.clicksandbits.com/2009/03/21/forward-iphone-to-google-voice/

I’ve had a problem ever since I got the iPhone, whereby sometimes voicemail ended up at Google Voice where I wanted it, but sometimes AT&T intervened, and callers were greeted with a message that I had not set up my mailbox, which I hadn’t. I figured it had something to do with whether the phone was on the network, out of network, powered off, etc. As I have Google Voice answering for two phones potential complications were doubled.

I don’t remember if this problem extends back as far as GrandCentral days. However at some point GrandCentral/Google Voice did something about this. They added some functionality in the Voice settings which walks you through forwarding Voicemail only to Google Voice. So now it doesn’t matter whose voicemail wins the race, they all point to Google Voice. I expect this will be quite a boon for my interpersonal relationships.

The more things change, the more they remain the same

I had a strange feeling when the Cold War ended. Something like being lost. Sure it was great that we weren’t going to be blown to bits any second, but man what a change.

I had the same feeling as the tech landscape has changed the last couple of years. When I first became aware of the computer industry, the titans were raging - Apple, IBM, Oracle, and Sun and their iconic leaders aligned against Microsoft in a battle royal, an epic struggle. Talk about haters – Sun’s McNealy, Apple’s Jobs, Oracle’s Ellison slung some memorable comments in the press.

But that battle petered out. Microsoft is no longer the feisty newcomer trying to teach big iron how to play their own game. Now the tables have turned and they are the entrenched monolith trying to survive obsolescence, frequently called the “new IBM”. McNealy and Sun have both retired from the game. Ellison has gone underground, Oracle becoming if anything stronger and bigger, but no longer boisterous.

But the quiet was eerie. The tech industry needs personality. It needs drama. It needs events to record passing time against. It’s like how the national news will find a key picture or two of a family or a person and show it over and over, to help everyone identify with a disaster like a flood. Sure tons of people are effected, but that one are two are the landmark we use for remembrance.

Well now all of a sudden we have it once again, and in spades, in the mobile computing space. Mr. Jobs, some would say last man standing from the initial conflicts, is taking all the new kids out behind the woodshed for some schooling. He’s got Adobe over his knee on Flash and dev kits, though some are saying this is pure spite over a slight to the Mac platform from a decade ago. He’s calling his ally Google, who had the best apps on the iPhone and a member on his board at one point , some really nasty names. One of his disgruntled ex-employees has doppelganger-ed Palm and now HP into facing off against him. And he’s even found time to take the battle to juggernaut Amazon’s home turf in the book category with the iPad. It’s the wild wild West.

It’s tough to say what would be best for consumers here, competition or cooperation. I’d really love to see some standards develop around PIM (contacts, calendars, etc.), syncing, mobile web-browsing. On the other hand, these guys are going to duke it out by throwing billions of dollars into one-up-man-ship. Look at the acceleration of development of mobile phones going on right now, and compare it to the years RIM Blackberry and Microsoft CE let the market languish.

I’m going to go pop some popcorn.

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.

Google is now a cell-phone vendor

https://www.google.com/phone/choose?locale=en_US&s7e=

With the advent of the Nexus, Google now sells it’s own (and other’s) cellphones from it’s website.

Google Bookmarks in iPhone

I recently decided to move my bookmarks from Simpy (http://simpy.com) where they have languished waiting for me to tag them, to Google Bookmarks (http://google.com/bookmarks).

There’s a bookmarklet on that page for desktop browsers that works well. However I also wanted to use this on my iPhone. You can use bookmarklets from the iPhone bookmarks once you get them in there, but there’s no simple way yet that I could find.

Here’s the current code for that bookmarklet, hopefully the blog engine won’t mangle it. Just create a throw-away bookmark and then edit it, setting the url to the following by copy-pasting it:

javascript:(function(){var a=window,b=document,c=encodeURIComponent,d=a.open("http://www.google.com/bookmarks/mark?op=edit&output=popup&bkmk="+c(b.location)+"&title="+c(b.title),"bkmk_popup","left="+((a.screenX||a.screenLeft)+10)+",top="+((a.screenY||a.screenTop)+10)+",height=420px,width=550px,resizable=1,alwaysRaised=1");a.setTimeout(function(){d.focus()},300)})();

UPDATE: I confirmed that this works with the iPhone, but so far no dice with the Android Droid..

UPDATE; It looks like Android (well the built-in browser) doesn’t support bookmarklets at this time -

( http://friendfeed.com/android/03b4e99a/bookmarklets-in-android-browser ). The workaround would be to copy-paste the bookmark URL ahead of the URL you wanted to bookmark, which sounds painful. I’ll try this out some before recommending it.

Google Wave Book

Gina Trapani, of LifeHacker fame, writing with the current LifeHacker editor Adam Pash, is offering a preview of her new book for free viewing. If you are wondering, “What is this Wave thing?’, this is where you need to go to find out.

http://completewaveguide.com

Quick fix for iPhone duplicate contacts with Nuevasync

If like me you are crazy enough to sync Outlook to Google and Google to the iPhone, you may have found yourself with duplicate contacts on the iPhone (but not in Gmail or in Outlook) after the 3.0 software update. After a lot of agonizing (about deleting contacts and then having that ripple to the other services) I finally turned off contact synch for Nuevasync in the iPhone settings, which wiped out the iPhone contacts. Then I re-enabled it, and I ended up with just a single set of contacts, yeah! Please note that I did of course backup Outlook just in case, and so should you as well…

Wolfram Alpha – new computational (search) engine

http://www61.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=distance+from+Earth+to+Alpha+Centauri+divided+by+55+miles+per+hour+divided+by+24+hours+per+day+divided+by+365+days+per+year

http://www61.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=temperature+of+the+sun+divided+by+the+distance+between+the+sun+and+the+earth

http://www61.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=us+president+in+1996

http://www61.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=distance+between+chicago+and+new+york+city

Like as with any oracle, the key seems to be asking the right question… Put any good queries you come up with in the comments.

iPhone and GrandCentral

So I am planning on using Grand Central ( http://ww.grandcentral.com ) to front-end my various phones. One oversight I made, was to not check out how Mobile GrandCentral and the iPhone felt about each other. Big mistake. The mobile stylesheet which looks great on Windows Mobile is practically unreadable on the iPhone. Then there is the dealbreaker of (GrandCentral) visual voicemail requiring Flash which the iPhone doesn't have.

So I did some googling, coming across one iPhone app ( http://www.google.com/search?q=granddialer ), GrandDialer, which enables you to route calls through GrandCentral. While cool, this does not address my problem. I also came across a web app for working with voicemail - iVoicemail ( http://rectu.ms/iVoiceMail ).

I am hoping that I can make the combination of the horrible-looking GrandCentral mobile web page (for admin) and iVoicemail (for triaging messages) works for me until something better comes along. It gives me the heebie-jeebies handing my account info off to a website in the .ms TLD with no usage or privacy page, but they have some respect in the Apple community ( http://www.apple.com/webapps/utilities/ivoicemail.html , http://www.appsafari.com/phone/6646/ivoicemail ).