michael’s thoughts

collected

Created My Google Profile

Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009

I had an unofficial New Years resolution for myself to update this site more often.  So far I’m not off to a great start in 2009.  I have created a Google profile for myself, as Google now includes profiles in their search results.

It’s funny; I don’t have a particularly common name and yet results about me never come up at the top of searches on my name.  I blame the Canadian librarian who I apparently share my name with.  He seems to be interviewed a lot.  One of these years I’ll have to work on pushing up my PageRank.  But it doesn’t look like it’s going to be this year.

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Categories: tech | Comments

Does Google’s Mobile Sync Replace Sync in a Blink?

Monday, March 2nd, 2009

I’ve written a lot here about the iPhone Sync in a Blink application.  Recently sync_in_a_blink_logoGoogle has released their own mobile sync solution.  It masquerades as an Exchange server from the iPhone’s perspective and offers automatic wireless over the air syncing.  While running Sync in a Blink to manually sync contacts is not a huge burden for me, I’m always up for services that make my life easier.  So I’ve set up Google mobile sync for the iPhone to compare it to Sync in a Blink.

While Google mobile sync does indeed sync my contacts automatically, it does not provide the same sync quality as Sync in a Blink.  I had forgotten that one of the things that drove me to Sync in a Blink originally was that many of my contacts do not have email addresses.  Unfortunately, Google’s sync algorithm still seems to key everything off of the email address.  Which means that notes or updates that I add on the iPhone do not propagate to my Google contacts database when those contacts do not have email addresses.

I suspect I’ll turn off mobile sync and go back to using Sync in a Blink.  I may try to get them working together, although my initial attempt at doing that clobbered my contact list and I ended up having to restore my iPhone from a backup.  So I’ll be more careful if I decide to go down that road again.

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Categories: iPhone | Comments

Sync in a Blink Now Supports Contact Group Editing

Monday, January 12th, 2009

I downloaded version 2.1 of Sync in a Blink last night and to my delight, the app now sync_in_a_blink_logosupports editing contact groups.  I had written about my somewhat complicated procedure for putting contacts into a specific contact group and then sycning with Google contacts.  Having this capability integrated into the app is definitely better.

Unfortunately the ability to see contacts not already in a group is not working for me.  It crashes every time I attempt to refresh the contact list.

I’m not sure if this is due to my having a large number of contacts or for some other reason.  I’ve posted on the Sync in a Blink support forum, so hopefully someone from the company will reply soon.  I will be very glad to be able to automatically filter and determine which contacts are not in contact groups.  With over 320 contacts, it’s a huge pain to keep track of that manually.

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Categories: iPhone | Comments

Using Sync in a Blink with Google Contact Groups

Monday, December 29th, 2008

The latest version of the Sync in a Blink iPhone app supports Google Contact Groups.  This is a wonderful feature addition, as Google adds all correspondents to its “Suggested Contacts” group which then sync down to the iPhone which probably isn’t desirable.  I don’t really want all the mailing lists and support email addresses I correspond with to show up as contacts on my iPhone.  By creating an “iPhone Contacts” group, I can avoid that problem.

Unfortunately, the way contact groups are supported on the iPhone and their interaction with Sync in a Blink is not entirely intuitive.  After configuring Sync in a Blink to only sync the “iPhone Contacts” group, I found that newly created contacts on the iPhone were not syncing back to Google.  I initially thought this may be a limitation of the iPhone, but it’s not.  There is a way to make this work.

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Categories: iPhone, tech, tutorial and how to | Comments

SaiSuke – Google Calendar Sync for the iPhone

Tuesday, December 23rd, 2008

As I’ve written before, I am a big user of Google Apps for Domains services.  This includes e-mail and contacts, but also calendar services.  I have tried a lot of online calendar services, but Google’s calendar meets my needs the best.  The big down side has always been the lack of proper mobile support.  Google does have an iPhone interface to the Google calendar system, but it’s very limited in functionality.

When I got the iPhone I was hoping to be able to sync it with my Google calendar via iTunes, but no such luck.  That may work on the Mac version of iTunes, but it does not on iTunes under Windows.  So I haven’t had good access to my calendars on my iPhone.  Until about a week ago.

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Categories: iPhone, life, tech | Comments

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