July 2008 Archives

Everybody manages their personal information differently, and if you read through some blog posts here you can see that I usually struggle with managing mine.  The iPhone has definitely made it easier, but it's taking some work to get everything organized to a point to where I'm happy.

The push/sync stuff is pretty cool, but the price tag of MobileMe is not.  I am on the trial of it right now, but I'm not getting much use out of it.  First off, I'm not a Mac user, and I'm quite happy not being one.  It does work with Windows and Outlook, but I'm also not an Outlook user.  My calendar doesn't change very much in one day either.  Maybe it would be useful if I had a lot to manage, or if I was already accustomed to using .Mac or something, but I don't.

I live online with everything, including my email and calendar.  I realize Google pretty much owns me, but it works for me, and even the iPhone makes it work easier. 

Email

Setting up Gmail to sync and even push to the iPhone is not a problem, there is an option for this in iTunes already.  I don't have my email app on the first page though.  While I do use the iPhone app for email, I still prefer to check my email in the Gmail page (which is nicely optimized for the phone).  The app is good for checking how many new messages I have, or quickly browsing new email, but I cannot star or archive mail there so I still prefer visiting Gmail online.

Contacts

Managing contacts on the iPhone is awesome.  You can call, email, map addresses, even visit hyperlinks straight from the contact page.  It is so useful... assuming you have updated information stored in there.

There is an option to import contacts from Gmail, but my contact list there scared me.  Gmail likes to automatically add frequently emailed contacts in your list of regular contacts, and I accumulated a scary list of people I didn't know over the years.  It took me about a day and a half, but I got this list down to about 100 real contacts that I could be happy with keeping in my phone.  I went the extra step of looking up friends on other social networks (Facebook mostly) to make sure I had updated contact information for them.  I can also import vcards from LinkedIn and other networks that will merge with existing contacts in Google.

Once this is done the contacts can automatically sync to my iPhone when I plug in to iTunes.  Now I can update contacts on my iPhone or in Gmail and they will be the same in both places.

I can push contacts to the phone too, but I haven't set that up yet.  The process will be the same as the calendar push I talk about next.  I just wanted to try the push out with the calendar first so I didn't accidentally delete a bunch of contacts while playing around with it.

Calendar

The only thing that the iPhone didn't support was syncing the calendar with Google Calendar.  There is an optimized page for Google Calendar, but the app version of the calendar is actually quite a bit nicer.  I can change the views and get reminders, and it's accessible even when the internet is slow or off.

Having your Google calendar sync to your iPhone without using MobileMe is actually possible.  I originally found the solution on Lifehacker, but the blog post that explains it is here:

Using Google as a *free* MobileMe alternative (with push contacts & calendar)

It's a multi step process, and everything seemed to work fairly well for me.

There was a problem with the captcha unlock not going through right away, but NuevaSync emailed me to fix that.  Once I did the calendar syncing happened with no other problems.

This only syncs your main calendar to the phone.  I have many many many different calendars in my Google Calendar, which will not appear on the calendar app, but that's fine with me.  The main calendar is where all the important stuff is anyway.  To view the other calendars the Google Calendar page is still a good place to go on the iPhone.

If you do a contact sync through NuevaSync you can also use Google, the difference between this and what is already native to iTunes is that the contacts will be pushed to your phone without the sync from iTunes, which is a pretty good deal.

If you're a Plaxo user you can also set up Plaxo to sync with your contacts on your phone with this service.  I've only been playing around a little bit with Plaxo, but so far I'm pretty happy with what I can do with my Google contacts so I probably won't be switching things around.

I have no compelling reason to keep my MobileMe after the trial now.  I did mess around some with the photo gallery, and there seems to be other cool features, but nothing I can't get elsewhere for free (as opposed to $99/year).  The photo gallery seems really nice by the way, but I had some frustration using it because it seemed to integrate more with iPhoto, which I obviously don't have being a Windows person.

Now that some of my personal information is cleaned up, especially the contacts, I think I will be more diligent about keeping it that way. 

** Update **

I just turned on the NuevaSync option for contacts on my phone and one really really awesome feature is that it also connects the profile pics that the person sets in Gmail as their contact image on my phone!

I don't plan on using the iPhone GPS for geocaching, I really don't think it'll give me the type of features or accuracy that I would need for a serious day in the woods, but I do think there are ways the iPhone would be useful while geocaching.

One is the ability to know about nearby geocaches.  Sometimes you don't really need accuracy, especially in urban settings, and if you're out and about and notice that there could be a quick geocache nearby, the iPhone would be helpful.  I used to bring my GPS with me to unfamiliar cities because it does contain information on nearby businesses, restaurants, and shops.  This feature is more useful on the iPhone as the Garmin does not constantly update (and I paid a lot of money for new updates a few weeks ago).  The Garmin is much more useful for travel though, and I have a car mount for it so I don't see the iPhone replacing that either.  And as far as I can tell, I'm not able to load my waypoints into my iPhone anyway so that won't be useful for geocaching at all.  The setting and capacity I'm in will really determine if I need to have the Garmin or if I can be ok with just the iPhone, and for serious geocaching I plan on using both.

I did use my old phone for looking up caches, and I think paperless geocaching is where the iPhone can really be useful.  Unfortunately there are no good apps out for this right now.  I did find a few for the old iPhone, which I really wasn't happy with.  Yes, you can visit the geocaching.com site on your phone, but the site is bad enough on a regular browser when it comes to crashes and poor interface design.  I would use the WAP site on my old phone (one of the very few sites I could access on the internet, and the reason I added the option).  This will still work on the iPhone, but its features are limited, and at least on my old phone I had to log in each time I wanted to look up a cache, a slow process that I would usually try to avoid (the phone only really came out when I absolutely needed it).  I will probably still bookmark this site as it will likely come in handy.

Logs are not always necessary for geocaching, and I've hacked up my waypoints using GSAK (Geocaching Swiss Army Knife) to make them even less necessary.  GSAK is an awesome and super powerful database for managing geocaches (it's not flashy, but this thing rocks).  I run all my pocket queries through there to reformat the waypoints on my Garmin to include cache type, difficulty, cache size, and even if the last log was a find or not.  These are displayed in either the waypoint name or notes area on my GPS.  It was a GSAK feature I randomly stumbled across, but it's really come in handy for not having to rely on paper logs or the WAP site all the time.

GSAK also has useful features for offline viewing which have helped in areas where I couldn't get a cell signal (and the rare occasion I also have my computer, usually caches along a route to a destination).  Since the logs are stored local on your computer until you re-update the database you can access them without internet.  It also allows you to export html files of the logs, which is what I decided to do to view caches on my iPhone.  The html files are then uploaded to heidigoseek.com where I can access them on the phone.  The formatting and features of these exported html files are much better than the WAP site.  Although they are not real time updates, links to the caches are provided.  I get a pocket query in my email every Friday so I'm ready for geocaching on the weekend.  The file is usually only 1 or 2 days old.

I believe there may also be a way to store the html files on your iPhone for offline access.  This would only be useful if geocaching in an area with no signal.  This has only happened in one trip while caching in Northern Wisconsin and the UP (not a big surprise), and I haven't had much of a problem accessing the online site in any other area so I'm ok with online upload.  I normally don't cache in an area without checking on access capabilities though.

I think with a combination of the Garmin and the online capabilities of the iPhone, geocaching will be a lot more organized, and easier.  But I'm still holding out for a useful iPhone app.

This morning I've been looking at a variety of blogging tools made specifically for the iPhone. There's a lot of near tools out there but I'm really impressed with the iMT plugin for Movable Type. Once installed it simply renders your dashboard automatically optimized for use on the iPhone.

I suspect I might use Tumblr more for mobile blogging, I will have to play around with the tools to see what I'm more comfortable with.

This blog has been quiet but I've been around. I'm over on FriendFeed and Twitter a lot and I have been using Tumblr for shorter posts on random things. I like to think of this blog as a place for well thought out expression which is probably why you haven't seen much on here lately. Hopefully there's more rolling around in my head after summer vacation is over.

Oh and yes I did type this entire blog post on my iPhone. I think I'm realy getting used to typing on the keypad. It's small but not so bad.