Vote for the Google Calendar features you want ...

You can "vote" for the Google Calendar features you most want.

Go to Calendar Help Center and click on the "send suggestions" radio button.

On the next screen you can click "Suggest it" for the features you most want.

The one I want, a no-alarm default for appts and a kb shortcut to add/remove alerts, isn't on the list today. Lots of other good things are.

Vote once. Vote often.

Aperture is still slow

I've ordered Aperture 2.0, but my time with the trial version tells me Aperture is still slow.

It's not the old GPU/rendering story. That's not the problem.

The problem is that Aperture brings up the SBOD (spinning wheel) on very routine operations -- such as deleting images when in "P" (preview) mode. Thirty second timeouts are not uncommon.

These aren't operations that should push any machine. I assume they're related to threading issues with the underlying data storage mechanism.

There's still a lot of rework to be done on Aperture. The 1.0 code base must have been extremely problematic.

Visible Body - Internet Explorer Only

The Visible Body | 3D Human Anatomy sounded interesting -- but it's XP and IE only.

What a shame.

That's quite odd these days. Once upon a time insisting on IE and XP worked quite well, but I'm not sure that's true now.

Google Apps Calendar fix? Integrating identities.

Only last week I'd hit another snag in our family calendaring project:

Gordon's Tech: Calendar sharing bugs and limitations in Google Apps vs Google Standard

.... I'm running into design limitations and bugs with Google Calendar and Google Apps Calendars. At the moment they include:

• A Google Calendar has both a "Private Address" and a "Calendar Address". The Private Address enables sharing with a single individual. A Google Apps Calendar has a "Google App Domain Address" and a "Calendar Address". It's likely that Google re-purposed the "Private Address" function to enable "Domain sharing", but that means you can't privately share a Google Apps Calendar outside of a Google App domain.
• There's an bug in Google Apps Calendar. Under certain operations it gets stuck in a mode where it will only share busy/free information -- even if you enable public sharing at both the domain and calendar level....

Today the problems have resolved, and my Google Apps Calendar now shows the both a standard and a Public calendar address.

I hope Google's fixed the bug(s), but I suspect the unexpected resolution is due to slow propagation and completion of certain changes to Calendar settings. For now, anyway, I seem to have a fix.

Now that I'm moving forward again, I'll recap. This might be useful to someone.

I've described our family calendaring project previously. Using Google Apps to create our eNom administered family domain was easy. That gave each of us email and calendars.

Emily's email has lived on the Google Apps account for months, with IMAP sync from two our Macs and access via Google's Java client for the Blackberry. Her Google Apps Calendar also synchronizes with her Blackberry using an other Google Java app.

That left me as a problem. I'm waiting for the iPhone to meet my minimal demands, so I'm on my second Palm Tungsten E2. That devices syncs with Outlook at home (work is more complex, I'll omit it). Now that Outlook can sync with a Google Apps Calendar my home Outlook is synchronizing with my Google Apps Calendar every hour or so.

Only one problem remained.

I have two primary (and several secondary) Google/Google App identities. One is in the family domain, the other is much older and has a plain gmail.com address. The older one is bound to years of email, Google search results, blogger*, etc. Google now lets me keep a single Google App identity and a single Gmail identity running simultaneously so I can work with both, but it's a pain to have two calendars. Two emails are fine, but two calendars is no good.

Now that's fixed. Here's what I did:

1. Google Apps: In Domain Management set the limit on extra-domain sharing with authenticated users to maximally permissive.
2. In my Google Apps Calendar added my Gmail account with maximal control (this didn't used to work).
3. Set my Google Apps email to forward to my Gmail account -- so I get email reminders.
   
4. In my Gmail account cleaned out my Gmail Calendar and renamed it "Don't Use!"

Now I can sync my Google Apps Calendar to my Palm via Outlook, I can quickly add items to that Calendar from my regular Gmail account, and my wife can see my personal calendar and add items to it.

The only minor glitch is that my Gmail defaults to using my legacy Gmail Calendar for event creation, but it's not hard to switch target calendars in the drop down box. The name for my old calendar, "Don't Use", reminds me to switch.

So far, not too bad.

* Google Apps accounts can't join a Blogger blog btw.

Travel tool: Mini Surge Protector with USB Charger

I carry one USB charger and a simple extension cord in my bag. This Belkin product is a sure thing for my carry-on bag:

Belkin Mini Surge Protector with USB Charger - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

....stylish surge protector power strip looks like it would be right at home in any mobile Mac user's bag. It includes two powered USB ports for charging iPhones, iPods, and the like, as well as three AC outlets...

...The Belkin Mini Surge Protector is "coming soon" for $24.99.

The Belkin site mentions a "360-degree rotating plug with 4 locking positions". I assume the plug fully retracts.

This is a great boon when fighting for an airport outlet; most travelers will gladly relinquish an outlet in favor of the protector. My only change is that I'd like to see it ship with a 6 inch extension cord, I'll look for one that would fit.

Calendar sharing bugs and limitations in Google Apps vs Google Standard

In honor of Google's Outlook synchronization I've been synchronizing my personal Outlook/Palm calendar to my calendar on our family site. (Corporate Outlook sync to Google Calendar is, regrettably, an unfair bending of corporate rules.)

So far, not too bad. I've done multiple personal Outlook/gCal syncs and one Palm/Outlook sync without duplicate events. So far.

Unfortunately, I have multiple Google identities. So I need to be able share a calendar between my primary (older) Gmail identity, which binds all my personal email and my primary blogs, and my family domain identity.

That's where I'm running into design limitations and bugs with Google Calendar and Google Apps Calendars. At the moment they include:

• A Google Calendar has both a "Private Address" and a "Calendar Address". The Private Address enables sharing with a single individual. A Google Apps Calendar has a "Google App Domain Address" and a "Calendar Address". It's likely that Google re-purposed the "Private Address" function to enable "Domain sharing", but that means you can't privately share a Google Apps Calendar outside of a Google App domain.
• There's an bug in Google Apps Calendar. Under certain operations it gets stuck in a mode where it will only share busy/free information -- even if you enable public sharing at both the domain and calendar level.

So I can't meet my primary goal -- of keeping my sync'd Family Domain Calendar private while enabling read-write access to it from my personal Gmail account (outside the family domain).

Even the private address functionality of the standard Gmail Calendar has a pretty limited set of functionality:

Note: the private address was designed for your use only, so be sure not to share this address with others. If you want to let others view your calendar, we recommend that you share your calendar's public address (or "Calendar Address") with them. If you accidentally share your calendar's private address, click on the "Reset Private URLs" link to regenerate your calendar's private address.

Google does have certain cultural limitations -- there's such an institutional bias to openness that they can't seem to get their heads around access controls.

I may experiment with flipping things around. Maybe I can sync my personal Outlook account to my Google Standard Calendar, and then share that Calendar within the family domain.

3/15/2008: I tried again today and from my Google Apps account I can now share the calendar with full privileges to my Gmail identity. From my Gmail identity I can now edit the calendar. Is someone from Google reading this blog?! (I presume the fix is coincidental, but ...)

4/24/2009: I've just run into the same od bug again. My Google Apps account was set to allow sharing only in the domain. I created a calendar in my owner/admin account. I then changed sharing to allow non-domain shares. I couldn't then make the calendar accessible. I tried various tricks as described in comments such as trying to make the calendar universally editable, etc. After a half hour or so of playing around I found I could create another calendar in the same account and that one was shareable. I then returned to the primary calendar and ... that one was shareable too.

I don't know if anything I did made a difference. Maybe it just takes an hour or so for sharing changes to really take effect. Clearly Google hasn't fixed this problem in the past year.

I'm back to Camino

I used Camino years ago -- it still runs on an ancient 10.3.9 iBook of ours and it's highlighted from days of old on my legacy web pages.

Eventually I switched to Firefox for OS X. I use it on XP, and for a while it was the best choice for working with Google's products and the general web alike.

Lately, however, Firefox has been pretty lousy on OS X. So I tried Safari, it seemed at first to work with Google stuff.

Alas, no way Safari. I got tired of pasting text into a rich-text field and having it appear in outside of the field borders. It's a mess. Safari (beta) is doing things that it shouldn't ever do - no matter how buggy the JavaScript.

OmniWeb is based on WebKit, so I didn't bother trying it (that was my original OS X browser, before Safari came out). That left Camino; it's been very recently updated (Feb 2008).

I've been using Camino again for a week. It feels much faster than Firefox or even Safari, it seems to work better than Firefox with Google stuff, and, merciful Minerva, the damned keyboard shortcuts mostly work (cmd-I brings up "page info" rather than italicizing in the rich text editor, but cmd-c and cmd-v work).

So far Camino has been extremely well behaved. I've used it with Google Blogger, Documents, Spreadsheets, Calendar and Sites and it's worked with all of them.

Definitely worth a look.

Thanks Camino team. If you supported Amazon donations or Google checkout I'd send you some money! (Sorry, I don't do PayPal.)

Update 3/17/2008: Camino is giving me a few problems. It seems to miss clicks on occasion -- so I have to click twice for some items. Google expects Ctrl commands so the Cmd shortcuts aren't as useful as expected. Most of all I've been getting odd hangs using Google Calendar. Of course I can't say any other browser is better!

The iPhone is more like Palm OS than OS X?

Two interesting points from recent Daring Fireball posts about TouchOS (formerly known as iPhone OS X):

1. No multitasking. iPhone OS switches apps, exiting on switch.
2. Apps only have access to their own data (sandbox). (I think they may have access to some common pooled data though.)

Both of these limitations were part of the original US Robotics PalmPilot OS (PalmOS), and years ago conventional wisdom said Palm desperately needed a multitasking OS. (I would have had a different set of priorities myself; I thought the memory management issues were much more important than the multitasking problems.)

Jobs, during yesterday's presentation, said something like iPhone OS "draws heavily from OS X". DF has hinted the same thing over the past six months -- "inspired by OS X, but not OS X".

We need a name for this OS, maybe TouchOS. There's obviously a lot in common with Tiger 10.4, but the iPhone team did some radical surgery to build the TouchOS. Only they know the basis for these decisions -- hardware limitations, memory limits, security issues, stability, desperation ...

The lack of multitasking suggests TouchOS can't do Spotlight, or any indexing tool -- that requires multitasking. I wonder how many odd functional omissions are related to underlying OS issues. (The lack of task management, I'm convinced, must come from Jobs himself. I suspect he simply hates To Do lists.)

I'm not worried about the multitasking limitations. There's obviously enough available to enable enough functionality to succeed, the similarities to PalmOS 1.0 are really more curious than important.

Limitations of iPhone iCal synchronization

From a Tidbits discussion post (emphasis mine): 

TidBITS - Why would Apple not fully enable iCal on the iPhone?

My wife and I wrote a few weeks ago about our frustration with Apple's iCal features on the iTouch and iPhone. We have 6 calendars that work fantastically on our home and work iMacs, but we are confused looking at the amazing limited version of iCal for iPhone. Can anyone explain to us the limitations Apple was facing that forced them to opt for a version of iCal where you can't make appointments on your different iCal calendars (or view them, for that matter) on the go? Why would anyone using Mac syncing of their iCal calendars even consider the iPhone and iTouch??? We won't be able to get either until this is fixed...

A man after my own heart. I know I'll feel the same pain. This why we need the SDK, so small vendors can provide solutions for power users. Apple can't justify the cost of supporting folks like us.

In a related note I've a post pending on Google's gCal sharing and notification services, and the issues (design and bugs) related to multiple Google Apps and Google Standard identities.

Google's official Outlook calendar sync has arrived

I've been waiting for this almost exactly one year.

Official Google Blog: Google Calendar Sync:

...This was my life for a whole year before we started working on Google Calendar Sync, a 2-way synching application between Google Calendar and the calendar in Microsoft Outlook. I was probably the most excited person on the team when we started developing it, because now I can access my calendar at home or on my laptop, on Google Calendar or in Outlook. When I add an event to the Outlook calendar on my laptop, Google Calendar Sync syncs it to my Google Calendar -- and since I also have Google Calendar Sync running on my desktop, the event then syncs from Google Calendar to Outlook calendar on my desktop. All of my calendar views are always up to date, and I can choose whichever one I want to use....

Hallelujah. Bad news for gSyncIt and SyncMyCal but this was really something only Google can make work.

I'll have a report on my experience soon -- I sync my aging Palm to Outlook at home. In particular I'll be curious to see if it works with Google Apps.

Update: I had events on my Google Apps calendar from prior experiments, so I cleaned them out prior to my first sync (reset calendar to new state). I also backed up my Outlook Calendar by copying it to a PST file, so if it gets messed up I'll just delete and restore. (Takes only a few seconds. This doesn't work on an Exchange account btw, but I don't use Exchange at home.)

Update: It does work with Google Apps. As of today it will only sync with the primary calendar for the account. So if you want to sync work and home and view them together, you need to sync work to one Google account and home to another. You could, for example, set up a Team Edition calendar for work, and a Gmail calendar for home. You can then share the two to provide an integrated view -- something I've wanted for years. Then you can see how well this maps to the iPhone calendar! Exchange/Outlook Calendar work is much trickier than at home, so I won't be messing with Exchange any time soon.

I ended up syncing over 1100 events in Outlook to the newly emptied Google Calendar.

Update 3/8/2008: There's a bit of trickiness in the configuration.

Update 5/8/2008: It mostly works, but there's some problem with all day events between Google Calendar, Outlook and my Palm. They end up turning from an "all day event" into a "24 hour event" then time-shifting an hour. The fix is probably to get rid of my all day events -- until my iPhone arrives.

Another problem is that the default install launches Google Calendar Sync for every user. The fix is simple. Find Google Calendar Sync in something like: 'C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu\Programs\Startup'. Move it to something like 'C:\Documents and Settings\jfaughnan\Start Menu\Programs\Startup'.

Gmail address features: + and .

Wow. So if your email address is fredflintstone@bedrock.info you can start using fred.flintstone@bedrock.info any time you want. Gmail will treat the two identically:

Official Gmail Blog: 2 hidden ways to get more from your Gmail address:

...Append a plus (' ') sign and any combination of words or numbers after your email address. For example, if your name was hikingfan@gmail.com, you could send mail to hikingfan friends@gmail.com or hikingfan mailinglists@gmail.com.

Insert one or several dots ('.') anywhere in your email address. Gmail doesn't recognize periods as characters in addresses -- we just ignore them. For example, you could tell people your address was hikingfan@gmail.com, hiking.fan@gmail.com or hi.kin.g.fan@gmail.com. (We understand that there has been some confusion about this in the past, but to settle it once and for all, you can indeed receive mail at all the variations with dots.)...

The trick with the + suffix is very old, I think it might be a unix thing. It's neat to see it work in Gmail.

Personally, I prefer to use disposable Bloglines email addresses for the sorts of things the + suffixes are used for.

Google Apps Team Edition: extending an older domain with new services

Google has a version of Google Apps aimed at "teams" inside corporations who want to be able to collaborate beyond the limits of their IT department.

Welcome to Google Apps

Collaborate at work with Google Apps Team Edition.

• Work on the same document together, instead of sorting out changes in attachments
• Share documents and calendars securely with your co-workers with a click
• Access it all from any computer, and even from mobile phones
• Invite other team members to join and share with you

The trick is that Google Apps Team Edition can be setup without anyone demonstrating control over the corporate domain, though if you do demonstrate domain control then you can have more admin controls.

Using Google Apps would, of course, be cause for termination at many companies.

It has a safer potential use, however, as a way to extend an existing domain service.

An existing domain, like, for example, faughnan.com. I've long owned that domain; it's registered with Network Solutions and the DNS functions are managed by lunarpages. Through lunarpages I get the usual web/email/ftp services. The web pages are mostly legacy documents now, in part because they're published from a FrontPage 98 repository living on an old XP box.

In the past 10 years, I haven't come up with anything better. Google Sites, though, is interesting. It doesn't have many of the capabilities of FrontPage 98, but it has some other advantages. Most of all, though, a Sites collection is accessible from anything that can run Firefox/Camino/Safari/IE

It took only a few minutes to create a Google Apps Team Edition add-on for faughnan.com. The login name is my old faughnan.com email address and I've created a "Site" with a temporary address: http://sites.google.com/a/faughnan.com/faughnan-com-extension/Home

The next step will be to to ask Lunarpages (alas, they don't give us direct access) to add a CNAME pointing to whatever I end up calling this Site. After that point any web extensions on my Google Apps Team Edition site will appear to have an address like abc.faughnan.com

I'll post on how well this works - or doesn't work!

Yahoo! Pipes: what they're good for

I've posted a couple of times about Yahoo! Pipes, but I thought I didn't have a personal use case. Pipes do things like:

combine many feeds into one, then sort, filter and translate it

Now that I've lived in the Feed world a bit longer I can see LOTS of uses -- especially in a corporate settings. One example is when feed categories (streams, tags, labels etc) have their own feeds. Then one can combine well tagged posts from multiple sources into a single feed.

For example, in a few minutes, without reading any documentation, I merged two of my blogs into a single Pipe feed [1].

Now that's cool.

It would be much cooler if Google's Blogger supported category-specific feeds, but they don't. Other blog tools do better, I hope Blogger eventually joins the 21st century.[2]

[1] Pipes couldn't auto-discover the Blogger Atom feeds, I had to enter them directly.

Update 3/4/08: Oops. Blogger can do "label feeds" , but the capability isn't exposed in the templates I use -- not sure it's in any template. I'll have to explore a bit more.

OmniFocus for the iPhone - under development

The famed Omni Group evidently believes the iPhone SDK will allow apps to sync with the desktop:

Macworld: 25 native iPhone apps we hope to see

...We're working on a mobile version of OmniFocus for the iPhone which will synchronize with the desktop version. (We don't have the SDK yet, so we've been working on things that don't require the SDK: designing the mobile interface, adding synchronization support to the desktop app, and so on.)...

Sign me up for the beta program.

Update 3/8/2008: post-sdk release notice on the Omni blog. I'm now tracking that blog.

Aperture's peculiar selection behavior - primary only

Aperture can't manage iPhoto metadata that I care about, such as comments associated with albums. So I can't use it as my media management solution, but I'm still seeing if I can use it as an image editor.

It's not doing so well.

One of the peculiarities is 'select primary'.

It's easy to set this mode by accident -- an errant touch of the S key will do it. In this mode even if you select multiple images in the UI, one is "primary" (the first selected). Operations apply only to the Primary.

To disable this mode either unselect it in the Edit menu or type S again.

I'm sure it's a useful mode for a serious Aperture user, but it's awfully easy to set it by accident. Of course Aperture is a pro tool, while what I really want is iPhoto Plus (with !$%@ Library Import capabilities).

BTW, there's an obvious bug in Aperture. Switching to Quick Preview mode should place a checkmark in front of that item in the View menu. It doesn't.

Update 3/2/2008: Well, I'm still at a loss. Even when I disable Select Primary mode an adjustment operation is only applied to the Primary image. This could be a bug, or just odd design -- equally probable I'd guess. Aperture has always had quality issues for me. Aperture doesn't have integrated Help functions (another budget cutting move), and the old PDFs aren't even on the Help menu (a last minute delivery bug), so it's a pain to investigate. Despite delivery version 2.0 the product still feels like it's on life support.

Update 3/2/2008: From the awkward PDF only documentation:

You can apply an adjustment or group of adjustments to a range of images by first applying the adjustments to one image and then lifting the adjustments from the first image and stamping them on the other images. You do this by using the Lift and Stamp tools and the Lift & Stamp HUD.

So if you want to get started by applying an auto-adjust function you can't do it in two clicks, you have to use extra clicks. Why?

Update 3/2/2008b: From Apple Discussion.

...If I just copy an adjustment of the auto level from an image to others, i think the copied auto level is only based on the first image...

...That's correct. There's no way to auto-level multiple images at once in Aperture...

In other words, even using the awkward Lift and Stamp operation, you only apply the results of the image-specific auto-level setting to multiple images, you don't auto-level each in turn.

Bizarre.