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.