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!