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.

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.

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.

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

I rely heavily on RSS feeds to get my daily fix of news. As you can see above, I don’t read a ridiculous amount of feeds but enough to keep me busy most of the day. One of the problems I’m starting to notice is that I’m spending a lot of time online just to keep up. I’m not sure how other people use RSS but i read everything that comes in. Maybe not “read” it all but definitely skim over the article. In the last 30 days, I’ve read over 24,000 articles. Thats a lot of reading and a lot of time invested to not fall behind. This reared its ugly head during my trip to Macworld this year. The internet at the hotel was so bad it was just about unusable unless it was early in the morning. So while I tried to keep up on stuff, I fell behind to the tune of about 3,000 unread items by the time I got home. It took me hours to just get through everything and catch up.

I’m finding I want to be doing more stuff on and off the computer but feel tied to my RSS reader. Catch up on podcasts, blog, World of Warcraft, watch TV shows, Netflix, workout, play my Xbox 360 and Nintendo DS, photography etc. I work nights so my time is split up between before work and after so I can’t just do a lot of stuff.

I’ve been bouncing around news readers for awhile, Bloglines, Newsgator, NetNewsWire, endo, NewsFire, Google Reader to name a few in the past months. I’ve settled on Google Reader due to its web interface so I can access my feeds from both home and work. It’s missing some nice features of desktop clients but its ability to be “everywhere once” outweighs everything else. One feature I missed was Dinosaurs in NetNewsWire. Basically It showed outdated feeds that haven’t updated in awhile.

Enter Google Reader Trends.

It shows statistics based on your feeds. This includes what your reading, what your starring and what your sharing along with subscription based stats such as frequently read and inactive. Inactive is what I’ve been missing. It shows me the Top 10, 20 and 40 feeds that haven’t been updated.

So starting today I’m going to “trim the fat” as they say. I’m going to start deleting feeds that I don’t really need or want to keep up on. This should help me feel less tied down and hopefully free up some more time do so other things. I’m also going to start using the Sharing feature in Google Reader to share what I find interesting. You can see my Shared page at http://www.google.com/reader/shared/17007536064916393533. You can even subscribe to it to keep up to date.

My current OPML file is up on Share your OPLM if you’re interested in what feeds i read. This is the original file I will be trimming. I’ll post my new file when I’m finished.

What are you doing? Probably the first question most us ask anyone when we talk to them. Enter Twitter.

Twitter is a web service that allows you type in what your doing at that exact moment and have it uploaded into an RSS like feed. You can see what your friends are doing and they can see what your doing. You get get friend notifications by either the web, have an IM sent, or SMS their cell.

You can send you updates via web, IM and SMS or if you like, you can use a standalone app like TwitterPost or a Dashboard Widget like Twidget. I prefer a combination of IM and the dashboard widget. One problem I have getting Twitter to work on my Blackberry Pearl. AIM uses SMS messages so I don’t want to use that. GTalk would be an option as I have it installed but Twitter only allows one IM protocol to be active at one time. I’m just waiting for a mobile Twitter site or a Java app. They even have a Wordpress Plugin that will post when making blog entries. i got pretty tired of it after a day or so tho. It was buggy and didn’t work well with ecto so I uninstalled it.

I found Twitter while trying to get my Lifestream working (which it still isn’t and cant seem to figure out why) and now al ot of people are starting to use it including Nick Starr, Thomas Hawk, Robert Scoble and Kristin Pishdadi.

Please feel free to add me, I’m at http://twitter.com/jadedhalo, and I’ll add you back.

UPDATE: Shoutout to Elling over at Life of Elling for a Writely invite.