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My one year subscription to Spanning Sync is coming up and while I’ve been very happy with the program itself, the $25 a year or $65 one time fee doesn’t. Last year I opted for the one year subcription as Leopard hadn’t been released and I was hoping for some built in support for syncing iCal to Google. Well that didn’t happen. This year at Macworld, BusyMac showed off a beta of BusySync 2.0 which supports syncing to Google Calendar… all for $19.95 for 1.x and a free upgrade 2.0 when released. Thanks to a 50% coupon code, Google Calendar syncing only costs me $9.98. Due to the different way each program uses to sync iCal and Google Calendar, its not as straight forward to switch to BusySync.

1) Backup. This is the most important step. Go to iCal > File > Export and save each of you calendars.

2) Disable .Mac calendar Syncing - You should not use both BusySync and .Mac to sync calendars between the same Macs. This will end up causing you to have duplicate calendars.

3) Turn off Spanning Sync. Make one last sync with Spanning Sync then go into System Preferences > Spanning Sync and uncheck the “Sync with Google Calendar” box.

4) Decided where you want to “host” your calendars. This is where most of the work is done. Spanning Sync requires you to create parallel calendars in iCal and Google Calendar and map them to each other. BusySync uses a Publish and Subscribe model where one side is the host and the other side is the client. We will need to delete any calendars that are not the host. In my example, I had 2 calendars in iCal, one called Home and Work. Google Calendar had 2 calendars called Alec Peden (default calendar that you cannot delete) and Work. I mapped Home > Alec Peden and Work > Work. To BusySync, that would be 4 different calendars. We only need 2. Since you cannot delete the default calendar in Google Calendar, we will want to delete the calendar in iCal that you had mapped to it. In my case, it would be the Home calendar. All the other calendars you have, you just need to decide where you want the host calendar to be and delete the corresponding calendar. Since I use Time Machine to back up iCal, I decided on using iCal’s calendars as the host. It honestly does not matter which one you decide.

3) Install BusySync 2.0.

4) Setup which calendars to sync by going to the System Preferences > BusySync and click the Google tab. Place a check mark next to the calendars you want to sync. Keep in mind you can have host calendars in both iCal and Google Calendar. To read more about which calendar is the client and host, visit BusySync.

5) Sync. Everything should be setup and ready to sync. Your first sync may take a few minutes but you should start to see the calendars you checked show up in both iCal and Google Calendar. If everything worked out the way you want it, go ahead and uninstall Spanning Sync by Ctrl+Clicking the icon in System Preferences and choose “Remove”.

Note: If you run into any problems. Delete the problem calendar(s), recreate a new blank calendar in either iCal or Google Calendar, check the box to sync it in BusySync and once its sync, import the ICS backup you made in step 1 into iCal.

Jott is one of my favorite new services this year. Dial a 1-800 number, say who I want to Jott to and speak. In a few minutes my voice is translated into any number of web services Jott supports. Today they added support for Google Calendar so now I can create appointments when I’m on the run by just dialing a number and speaking. Saying “Steve Job’s Macworld Keynote at 9 am on January 15th” is a lot easier than logging into Google Calendar and typing that all out on my iPhone. Thanks to Jott I can now blog, tweet, add a todo and create an appointment without typing a word. Best of all Jott is free.

So Google gobbled up Finish microblogger Jaiku today. I’m a user of Twitter but I do have a Jaiku account and actually like what Jaiku is doing. They offer more of a Twitter+LIfestream experience that Im interested in but just like Pownce, all my friends are on Twitter so thats where I am. One of the more interesting features that Jaiku does is Jaiku Mobile, which offer integration into your cell phone. Only Nokia phones are supported at this time but here is an excert right from Jaiku about what Jaiku Mobile is:

Jaiku Mobile works like the phone’s regular phone book, and enhances the standard contact list with presence information. It displays the buddy icon, availability, latest Jaiku message, and location for you and your Jaiku contacts in your contact list. It enables you to

* Browse and post Jaikus
* Add comments
* Share your availability based on your ring profile (green light = ringing, yellow light = vibrate, red light = silent)
* Share your location (neighborhood, city, country) based on cellular network towers
* Share your calendar events (if you don’t want to share your calendar, Jaiku only displays your status as “busy” when an event is active)
* Share who you’re with based on nearby Bluetooth devices

Imagine that you pull up a contact on your iPhone and it shows the person is at work based on the cell tower they are on. But it also shows that their last update says “Lunch” so you know you can call. Or it reads their calendar and marks them as busy because they’re in a meeting. That’s epic. There has been a lot of take about a gPhone from Google and I can only wish something like this makes it into there. Even better would be Google and Apple getting together to make this work on the iPhone.

I’m going to wait and see what Google has in-store for Jaiku just like everyone else but if you are on Jaiku and would like to add me, my username is the8thsign. If you a Mac user, check out the Twitterific-esque client Juhu.

Using iPhone and your Gmail account? Then you have certainly noticed the annoying phenomenon of your send messages showing up in your iPhone Inbox. Luckily, I have seen this problem before with my Blackberry and was able to fix it. Unlucky for you, there is no fix for this on the iPhone. I repeat, THERE IS NO FIX.

Apple has a support document which outlines this problem and how to fix it here. This only fixes part of a bigger problem. First we need to understand what Recent mode is. This is right from Google’s Help page:

If you’re accessing your Gmail using POP from multiple clients, Gmail’s recent mode makes sure that all messages are made available to each client, rather than only to the first client to access new mail.

Recent mode fetches the last 30 days of mail, regardless of whether it’s been sent to another POP client already.

If you use multiple Email clients, then Recent Mode is a must and you will want to keep it on. For argument sake, lets say you only access Gmail POP from your iPhone. Turning off Recent Mode will fix one problem, and only one. Sent Email from your iPhone ONLY will not show up. Emails sent from other POP clients and the Web interface still show up in your iPhone’s Inbox.

This happens due to the way threaded conversations work in Gmail. With a Blackberry, you can set up a BIS Filter for all emails with your address in the from field to not forward to the Blackberry. We have no such luxury with the iPhone since it doesn’t support filters. And don’t listen to the people who say to create a filter in Gmail to delete your send messages. It will prevent the emails from showing up but the messages will get emptied from the Trash after 30 days and threaded conversations will no longer be useful.

As of now we have a few half-assed workarounds that degrade Gmail functionality. So unless Apple updates the iPhone with an internal filter when using Gmail or Google releases full IMAP support, us Gmail/iPhone users are stuck with this.

Remember the Milk is the first 3rd party web app to make use of Google Gears for offline access. RTM is the 2nd app I use on a daily basis to be given the offline treatment; the other being Google Reader. Since Google Gears was released, I’ve switched back to Firefox just so I could play around with it and now I’m back to a Firefox as my main browser. Firefox 3.0 plans to bring all web apps offline and I’m now seeing how this kinda access is going to change the web once again. My guess is the Google Gears code is going to be giving back to Mozilla to incorporate into Firefox. Now if they can just release Gmail and Google Doc and Spreadsheets as offline apps I think I’d be in my glory.

Last month I started cleaning up my RSS feeds in the hope of making them less of a chore. Well, its been one month since then and I have deleted 72 feeds that have saved me 10,000 articles a month. This has helped me keep my RSS feeds manageable and I no longer feel like I’m a slave to Google Reader.

One of the biggest things I did was remove digg from my RSS reader. Why? Well first off it was my highest traffic feed, so deleting it helped save me hours a day and 2nd, I also go to digg.com anyways to digg articles. There was no real reason to have it in my RSS reader. So now what I do is once a day goto digg.com and look through the last few pages digging and reading as I go.

I can still trim a little more in the way of feeds but for now I’m a lot more productive during the day as I’m not tied to my RSS reader all the time. If I delete my new top traffic feed, techbargians.com, I can save another 2500 articles a month and probably some money too since I won’t see all the great bargains that I “must” have.

If you visit this page via RSS, you may not of noticed I’ve added a “shared articles” link to my link bar. What this is is a link to my shared items on Google Reader. I use this to keep track of what article I want to follow up on or read later. So now you can see what I’m reading too. You can even subscribe to it via RSS. Since I’m constantly adding and removing items, subscribing to the feed feed might be the best way to keep up.

[Link to my Google Reader Shared Items page]
[My OPML file]