#gtd


Sync iPhone and Google Calendar via NuevaSync

I have been tin­ker­ing around try­ing to get GCAL­Dae­mon work­ing again after the update to Leop­ard, but it just hasn’t been the same from its for­mer self of 1-to-1 sync. Thought you can find dif­fer­ent appli­ca­tions that may allow you to do this, it’s one thing to get it for free and do through the power of the crowd. But things have been look­ing grim lately as get­ting GCAL­Dae­mon to work with Leop­ard is still up in the air. Enter NuevaSync.

Nueva­Sync allows direct, over-the-air, native syn­chro­niza­tion of cer­tain smart phones and PDA devices with pub­lic PIM, and cal­en­dar­ing ser­vices includ­ing Google Cal­en­dar. Nueva­Sync does not need any soft­ware installed on your device because it uses syn­chro­niza­tion pro­to­cols that are already built in.

I had given it a chance. It requires you signup w/ nuevasync.com. Yah, I know its another account to keep track of from the many ser­vices out there, but hey… if it works—it works. The setup is pretty sim­ple. You pretty much just have to fol­low the instruc­tions which were writ­ten in terms of a 7th-grader—easy enough.

A cou­ple of facts that I found out along with NuevaSync’s FAQ:

  • It cur­rently sup­ports the fol­low­ing mobile devices:
    • Apple iPhone 2.0, iPhone 3G and iPod Touch 2.0
    • Win­dows Mobile based PDAs and smartphones
  • You’ll be doing push/fetch to NuevaSync’s “Exchange Server”
  • Adding an alarm noti­fi­ca­tion on an event will default to a “Pop-up” reminder in the event’s Google Cal­en­dar (gCal) ver­sion. Vice-versa; you’ll need to select “Pop-up” as the type of remind when cre­at­ing the event in gCal in order to have it also avail­able in your iPhone.
  • Hav­ing your iPhone’s set­ting of “Push to OFF” and “Fetch to Man­u­ally” will still enable to Nueva­Sync to per­form its job while allow­ing you to save your iPhone’s mojo.
  • It can sync to mul­ti­ple cal­en­dars under your gCal account of those Cal­en­dars you have a per­mis­sion to write to. You may find out which ones via going to the Nueva­Sync sta­tus page.
  • Even though you can sync with mul­ti­ple cal­en­dars, cre­at­ing an event in your iPhone would default to your main cal­en­dar. This you can say would be a step back if your try­ing to keep things very orga­nized and cat­e­go­rize your events (i.e. Per­sonal, Work, Project A, Project B, etc.).

Sounds good right? So, if you aren’t really using more than one cal­en­dar or don’t care if the events from your write-permitted cal­en­dars are merged together into one in your iPhone, I’d def­i­nitely rec­om­mend you to give Nueva­Sync a try. But don’t worry, they have that item in their TODO:

So when will you sup­port mul­ti­ple cal­en­dars on the Apple devices?
Soon, it’s one of our top new fea­ture priorities.

Any­ways, I hope this helps. Please do let me know if you hap­pen to find new, inter­est­ing things about it. Have a good sync!

To-do List in Google Calendar

It seems that I am find­ing Google Cal­en­dar (cur­rently being referred to as gCal by technopiles) an alter­na­tive to Out­look lately. Even though I wish that Google would fin­ish up imple­ment­ing some kind of sync­ing between gCal and Out­look already. But luck­ily, there’s a “hack” that helps out in that side of things. I guess its enough to hold me down for a bit till some­thing from Google comes about.

Any­ways, one of the other things that I was hop­ing gCal to have was a sim­ple to-do list(s), aka. Tasks for those Outlook-oriented peo­ple. As I was Blingo-ing for an inte­gra­tion of some kind of to-do list with gCal, this arti­cle was on top of the list by Matias Pelenur. It does the job using JS, GM and Fire­Fox. Although at the moment, it only saves your to-do list per GM install; locally that is, per com­puter. But there are a cou­ple of workarounds that can be done to make it store to ser­vices such as Ama­zon S3, gCal itself, etc. as noted by Matias.

Sup­pos­edly, Google men­tioned the avail­abil­ity of an “Account Authen­ti­ca­tion Proxy for Web Appli­ca­tions” fea­ture that will be inter­grated with their gCal API in late April… this past April in fact. I guess we’ll just have to wait for an update on Matias about that, or from Google regard­ing their own home-blended to-do list inte­gra­tion with gCal.

Protopage Reboots

protopage-v2

Pro­topage just seems to keep get­ting bet­ter and bet­ter. Lately, they updated to ver­sion 2.0. That’s “2.0″ as in “Web 2.0″—HA! *snicker* OK. I admit, it’s still too early on the week for such fool­ish word­ings but all is fair in the land of web tech­nol­ogy and blogging.

Mean­while, Pro­topage jam-packed their release with a slew of new fea­tures. Some new fea­tures that stood out for me were:

  • abil­ity to add new pages
  • rounded cor­ners on panels
  • new color schemes for panels
  • and rich-text editing

There are plenty more that I still have to try out. So, if you missed my write-up on Pro­topage last Sep­tem­ber and still haven’t tried it out—it’s not too late to do so. By the way, did I men­tion that it’s FREE?!

Do you need another rea­son to jump in and have a look at it? If so, then lets just say that the BBC cov­ered Pro­topage. Any­ways, what’s a bet­ter rea­son than to just help you get orga­nized in life.

Keep it simple—and FREE!

Coolest Homepage Ever by Protopage

Protopage - Ajaxified start pages

So what can be the coolest page you have ever been to on the net? Well, its sim­ple. The one that you just cre­ated and cus­tomized. How you may ask? Why not find out over at Pro­topage.

But what exactly is it?

Pro­topage makes it eas­ier for you to get to your favorite web sites.

Cre­ate a page, put your links and sticky notes on it, and save it as your new browser start page.

With my expe­ri­ence, in the quick 10 min­utes of using it, its more for those that need to eas­ily trans­port their sticky notes from home to work and vice-versa. Its an alter­na­tive for those of us who don’t have time to make a per­sonal home­page where to-do-lists, new web links and lotto num­bers might reside. A cool thing about it is—its AJAX­i­bil­ity (just made it up, don’t wear it out).

You can change the lay­out of your notes; the color of your background/foreground; the image/wallpaper of your home­page; and many more. All of this in real-time. By the way, did I men­tion that its FREE!

The only thing that might be of a “fine-print” mate­r­ial would be this part (below their reg­is­tra­tion form):

We ask for your email address so that we can send your pass­word to you if you for­get it, and to send you occa­sional news about Pro­topage. We respect your pri­vacy. You can opt out of the Pro­topage news emails at any time.

Oth­er­wise, go give it a try. I’m pretty sure it’ll be of good use for those always on-the-go. As well as those who are always in need of a ser­vice that helps them man­age this clutter-verb we call “web-surfing.”

12