Use Google instead of MobileMe
Posted by ed on August 15th, 2008 filed in calendar, contacts, email, syncingComment now »
If you don’t want to shell out $99/year to Apple for MobileMe and don’t need “push” data, you can use Google’s free services to sync to your computer and iPhone/iPod Touch with the web.
This is fairly straightforward since Google enabled IMAP for Gmail. Google has a great help article that will show you how to set up Outlook on Windows, Apple Mail on OS X, plus your iPhone or iPod Touch. With this setup you will have the same view of your inbox from your iPhone/iPod Touch, computer, and the web.
Contacts
Syncing contacts between Gmail and an iPhone/iPod Touch is now built into iTunes 7.7. OS X users running 10.5.3 or higher can set Address Book sync with thier Gmail contacts. Windows users, unfortunately, still have to follow a manual process to get their Outlook contacts to match their Gmail contacts.
Calendar
Google Calendar is great because it makes it easy to share a calendar with friends, family, or coworkers. This feature is extremely popular for couples.
For Windows users running Microsoft Outlook, Google offers a free program called Google Calendar Sync. This program will allow you to choose between syncing in both directions or a single direction, but is limited to syncing your main Google Calendar with your main Outlook Calendar.
Unfortunately for OS X users, Google doesn’t make a similar program for iCal. Instead there is a program called Spanning Sync which has more features than Google Calendar Sync. Spanning Sync can handle the syncing of multiple calendars, and is good at helping you fix mismatched calendar data.
These features come at a price, though, and Spanning Sync costs $25/year or $65 for a lifetime subscription. The good news is that there is a 15 day free trial, which is what got me to pay for the service after seeing how good it is. Also, since I’m a subscriber, anyone can get $5 off the price of the software by clicking on this image:
Photos
For web photos Google offers Picasa Web Albums. This is a nice photo sharing site that lets you share photos at their full resolution, plus offers a variety of ways to order prints. This essentially works as a one-way sync from your computer to the web.
Windows users should download the free Picasa program. It lets you organize and edit your photos, plus uploads them to the web.
OS X users can download the free Picasa Web Albums Uploader. It can be used as a standalone photo uploader or can upload from within iPhoto.
What makes Gmail the hot webmail
Posted by ed on July 23rd, 2008 filed in emailComment now »
There’s a great post by Stephen Shankland at CNET about switching from using Yahoo Mail to Google’s Gmail. Shankland finds that what makes Gmail so great is that Google targets the needs of power users. Over time, people start using the “power user” features the more they use the service.
Apple Launches MobileMe
Posted by ed on July 11th, 2008 filed in Cloud Computing, backup, calendar, contacts, email, pushComment now »
Apple has had a rocky start for the MobileMe service, but it’s now live. There is a nice first look over at theAppleBlog. Their impression seems to be that the service is limited by your connection speed, but the applications that make up the service show some nice features and polish.
Create Site Specific Browsers
Posted by ed on June 26th, 2008 filed in utilitiesComment now »
If you find yourself constantly logged into your favorite webapps, with browser tabs that you can’t bear to close, you should start creating site-specific browsers. The fine folks at Mozilla have created Prism, which runs on the same engine as their fantastic Firefox browser. Prism is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. If you are using Ubuntu Linux, there are a number of pre-made Prism site-specific browsers included in the Hardy Heron repositories. Just open up Synaptic Package Manager and do a search for “prism”. For Mac users, there is another option named Fluid. Fluid is similar to Prism, but is based off of WebKit, the engine that Safari runs on. Fluid is a cocoa application, so it has better integration with OS X than Prism does.
Manage your finances with Mint
Posted by ed on June 17th, 2008 filed in Cloud Computing, moneyComment now »
Mint.com allows you to automatically keep track of your personal finances. After signing up, you enter your login information for the web sites of your banks, credit cards, and investments. Mint then sets up a secure connection to each institution, downloads your transactions, and categorizes them. You can then adjust the automatic categorization and set monthly budgets for each category. You can set up alerts based on changes to your accounts via email, sent to your mobile phone, or when you log into the site. Mint updates each of you accounts daily, and has an interactive pie charting feature to let you visualize where you spend your money.