Artryst.com: Design by Gregory Tarnoff

Almost True Google Calendar and Outlook Sync

Last week I wrote about how Google had released a tool to sync your Outlook and Google calendars. I had some concerns:

1. It only syncs Outlook events I schedule, so all the meetings that people set up that I need to attend I still have to manually sync.
2. It only syncs the primary Google calendar.

Well it looks like issue number one no longer exists. I am not really clear if this an update or just a case of poor documentation, but looking around today I found out how to make this work. Item number two on this page explains it in detail but the short is this:

1. You must first associate your Outlook email address (this is my corporate address) with your Google account.
2. When setting up the syncing program on your Windows machine, enter this address as the one to sync AND NOT your Google Gmail address as you would think.
3. Run sync. This will add all of your Outlook appointments that you either organized or are a guest on to your Google Calendar. It will also pull down all your appointments on your Google Calendar primary calendar and place them in your Outlook calendar.

While still lacking in the ability to sync multiple calendars from Google to Outlook or to add to Google those meetings set up on a distribution group, this is much closer to the holy grail and accomplishes what I was trying to do. I now have the ability to automatically sync my work calendar (in Outlook) to Google which I then use the iCal subscription URL to import to my Mac’s calendar and sync to my iPhone. Now I have my complete calendar (with a few minor exceptions) on my phone (my true goal) and accessible via the web if I don’t have my phone (Google Calendar).

Apple Underestimates iPhone SDK Demand

Today Apple released the iPhone SDK in a beta format for developers. The official version and the ability for the average joe to use these to be developed applications will come out in July. However it appears that Apple greatly underestimated how many people want to produce applications for their now infamous device. The link to get the SDK and subsequent information is http://developer.apple.com/iphone/program/, but unfortunately this site is suffering from a massive digg effect as it has not be available since the announcement was made almost 4 hours ago.

UPDATE:

It looks like Apple is struggling with keeping their servers up. I was able to get to the SDK page a little while ago, but a lot of the links were broken and I didn’t try downloading it (I am away from my Mac at the moment). Sporadic attempts to get through to the proper page may occur.

You also need to have an Intel Mac in order to proceed, so if you are like me and waiting to buy a new Mac, now is the time.

Google Calendar and Outlook Synchronization from Google

Google launched a synchronization tool this week that allows one-way and two-way syncing with Outlook on Windows machines (where is the Mac version for Entourage or iCal?). This looked to be the holy grail of my synchronization…but alas it is nothing more than a gilded goblet.
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An Old New Look

Something I have always been good with is paying attention to details. However this sometimes finds me spending more time on personal projects, or jumping between personal projects while working out these details.

Since working on client projects I have a clear deadline that forces me to stop, I have a tenancy to be more efficient in completing those. Well with my last theme change to the site, I never set a deadline for myself, and subsequently the features I wanted to add didn’t get resolved before I tired of the design. So I have pulled out an old theme (with a few modifications) from the past that I will have up until I finish the current theme I am working on. Which I have set the deadline on as being this upcoming Sunday, March 10th, 2008.

I figure I have enough time as that gives me all weekend and all day Wednesday (taking the day off from the regular job for my birthday) to get it done and it is more than half way there already.

Google Lets You Associate Other Emails to Your Account

So this week Google rolled out this little new feature that in their words:

Adding email addresses helps Google associate useful information with your Google Account. For example, Google Calendar can show invitations sent to any of your addresses.

I thought this was genius. I am constantly having syncing issues with my calendars. I bought the iPhone in September because I thought it would be the solution, however the solution is to export my work calendar (from Outlook) and import it to Google Calendars which I have a feed imported into my Mac iCal. The loop hole here is that I don’t like exporting my work calendar daily.

This new feature could answer that. I associated my work email address with my Google account but when people sent me meeting invites, nothing happened. So I tried my Yahoo! email address and sent an invite to myself. Still nothing happened.

Has anybody gotten this to work yet? Is the invites thing something “coming soon”?