davereinhardt's posterous

davereinhardt's posterous

David Reinhardt  //  http://davereinhardt.com

 
Dec 2 / 9:31am

Google calendar / iPhone sync, unusual glitch #google #fail

I discovered today that if you are invited to a meeting where the start time and end time are the same (something I sometimes do to create a popup reminder), then the event doesn't sync to your iPhone.

The error can be recreated as follows:
  • Setup is as follows: iPhone syncing to Google Calendar using Google's "Exchange" settings
  • In your non-Google calendar (i.e. a calendar that is not synced to your phone, in my case my office MS Outlook calendar), setup a meeting that starts and ends at the same time.
  • Add the email address of the person whose calendar you want the reminder to appear in as an invitee. I invited my personal email address from my work account so that it would appear in both my work and personal calendars.
  • Accept the invite so that it appears in your Google calendar.
The entry appears in the Google calendar but does not sync to the phone. If you then change the entry so that it is not starting and ending at the same time and accept the meeting update, the updated meeting is synced to the iPhone.

Interestingly, if you create a zero length event in your Google calender directly, that syncs. It's only events where you are the attendee that don't seem to sync.

It's easily worked around, so I'm not too stressed - but it is worth being aware of if you like to setup 0 minute appointments as reminders.
 
Nov 30 / 2:29pm

iPhone week 3 - some observations

Okay - I've now been around the block a few times and have thought about this a bit more. See my previous post for some initial impressions. Here's some thoughts after a few weeks of usage..

Some more frustrations
(1) Calendar reminder options are too limited. For birthdays, I tend to set a 6 hour reminder so I am reminded the evening before. The iPhone seems to use a 1 day reminder which means my phone alarm goes off at midnight.
(2) I was surprised at the effort I had to go to set a regular mp3 as my ringtone. It wasn't difficult, but it should've been as easy as selecting a song from my music list.
(3) I am tired of allowing apps to use my location. I would like GPS permissions to be persistent after being set on the first load. It can subsequently be switched off via the settings menu.
(4) Many of the apps I've taken are roughly of the "information presentation" variety, e.g. news websites, sports websites, etc. By the time I've gotten on the Tube though, it's too late to update content. I'd like apps like this to have the option to update news feeds during the course of the day so when I get onto the Tube my news is all up-to-date.
(5) Push is just horrible. On the Berry, UberTwitter informs me of updates. So does Facebook. And lots of other apps. On the iPhone, this is very much a hit and miss affair. I shouldn't have to use Boxcar as a layer on top of my apps to achieve this.
(6) The predictive text is too slow and disappears too quickly. Generally I type fast enough that by the time it has predicted a word, I've tapped the next letter and it has disappeared again. Not good enough from the usability experts.
(7) No trial versions of apps. Some developers have gotten around this by releasing "lite" and "pro" versions. RTM have even made the app free but the service chargeable. Clever. But I don't understand why the app store doesn't have a mechanism for time limited versions of apps. I'd certainly be trying a lot more software and, likely, would end up buying more.

And some things I'm just loving
(1) Getting Google calendar to sync via push is brilliant. Thank you Google.
(2) Double click iPod access. It's a little thing, but it's functionality I use very often. Especially as it doesn't require unlocking the device.
(3) When apps require location, the unit seems to find location extremely quickly.
(4) Apps that are streamlined front-ends to web services I use regularly. Over and above the obvious candidate (Facebook), there's Remember the Milk, Evernote, TripIt, eBay and Amazon. Sure, this could all be done on the mobile websites, but the apps provide additional functionality and ease of use. This was one of my biggest reasons for choosing iPhone over the N900.
(5) The app store Genius function. No need to explain, it's just brilliant.
(6) My toddler daughter can already swipe through the photo albums and is coming to terms with some of the kids apps. She's not even two and she's already asking to play with it "Daddy - photos" or "Daddy - wheels on the bus" and "Daddy - Itsy bitsy"

And one or two that are in the middle
(1) Apps that are just dedicated site viewers. A few of the websites I visit regularly have iPhone "apps" that are no more than dedicated viewers. I'm not sure what I think of these. The  "tired of Apple" crowd will say that with a fast and easy to use browser make apps like this redundant. I guess the iPhone advocates will say simpler = better = faster. For me, the jury is still out.
(2) I'd like Apple to take a leaf out of INQ's book and integrate social media a bit better. Merge my address book and Facebook contacts. Place Facebook calendar entries into my calendar. Maybe this is one for the Facebook app developers rather than Apple themselves?
 
Nov 19 / 5:29am

iPhone day 3 - some observations

This is not a review, there are plenty of those, so these are just my thoughts. I like it, a lot. Mostly I like the range of apps. I knew I would, so no surprises. If you're reading this note you're probably a fan or at least interested in the device so instead of raving about all that is good (of which there is plenty), I'll share some frustrations I'm having (based on my experience as a long term Nokia and Palm user).

  1. I think the keyboard should show lowercase and uppercase letters instead of the highlighted shift key
  2. I am suprised at the extra effort to get third party apps like SplashID and HanDBase to sync. This should be built into iTunes, Palm had sync agents integrated into HotSync years ago
  3. Inability to properly handle background processes is annoying. I'd like to run a GPS tracker (for photo geotagging) but still use the device for other things. My Nokia N82 could do this.
  4. I think the main keyboard should have @ and . These are used so often for email addresses.
  5. I'd like a text shortcut option. On the Palm, with a specific squiggle you could write contractions which automagically extended, like Word's AutoCorrect feature. For example, I often write my email address, so I'd love to press "shortcutkey drem" and it resolves to "davids@email.address".
  6. The outbound email signature is applied across all accounts. I often email to blogs through bots and I wouldn't want a signature on these emails. I would be happy to setup a second version of an account with no signature enabled for this, but it's not possible

 

Also, a few things I've not yet worked out...

  1. I haven't managed to get Outlook contacts 2007 to sync to the device. I tried the latest updates to both iTunes and Outlook. Thing with Apple is, if it doesn't work - there's no hacking about to get it to work. I fell back on syncing my Nokia to Windows Address Book and syncing that into the phone.
  2. I have an unsent message from an account I've subsequently deleted. I don't know how to get rid of the unsent message notification. This is really annoying me.
And I just found out that Orange aren't currently doing Visual Voicemail in the UK. What's that about?

 

I'm still discovering so I might followup in a few days with some more.

 
Jul 6 / 11:38am

Testing from posterous

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David Reinhardt - david@reinhardts.net
http://www.retaggr.com/page/davidreinhardt

 Mobile photo blog: http://mymobilestream.blogspot.com
Travel blog: http://teddybok.blogspot.com
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