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July 4th, 2008
02:53 am - Personal Information Management
Since getting my new MacBook, I've been trying to pull off the pure Mac play - sticking with the stock applications, choosing integration over individual features, trying to work with what I'm given. It's mostly worked out pretty well, but it's taken a bit of tweaking. At this point, I'm working on a combined Mac/Google solution.
The ingredients are: MacBook at home, Ubuntu Linux at work, iPod, cellphone, old Palm Vx. Of the last three, I figured I should be able to at least ditch the Palm. It's a workhorse, but it's old and doesn't play well with the Mac. I could go for the iPhone 3G in a few days. That would kill off all three, plus my digital camera. Tempting at $199, but the $100 $60 a month service plan is nuts for the amount I'd use it. It would take some sort of radical lifestyle or professional change to justify that. I'm not above throwing money at problems, but that's just profligate.
Getting all my info off the Palm was pretty straightforward. Jpilot let me save all the calendar and to-do info as .ics files. After a small but annoying bit of tweaking to DOS-format and rename them, they uploaded smoothly into iCal. Similarly for the contacts and Address Book. That was one of the big wins - having all of my addresses, phone numbers, email and IM in the same place. Once that was all done, it all synched seamlessly to my iPod. Nice. The only snag (Apple developers, listen up!) is that the To Do list displays on the iPod in alphabetical order, not by priority. Come on guys; what are you thinking? Notes were also a bit awkward. You have to mount the iPod as a drive and save them as files in a "Notes" folder. No application integration there. Still, it might make sense to start storing To Do lists as Notes. If I work with them regularly, I may get used to them. So that's awkward, but not a killer.
The killer turned out to be that I can only sync the iPod to one machine. The whole philosophy of the Palm is that you can go from home to work and keep your core info in sync. Even on Linux, there was a decent client that I could run either at home or at work. The iPod will really only talk to my home machine. That's kinda control-freakish. It means that when I'm away from my MacBook, I would need to write down appointments on paper or something, and enter them in when I got back. That's annoying enough that it got me playing with Google Calendars.
Google Calendars are pretty slick. You can have multiple calendars, set up different access constraints for them, and view them in a single display. My girlfriend and I each have personal calendars that we share with each other, and then I have an "events" calendar that's open to the public. There's probably also a middle ground for friends: Stuff that isn't really private, but I don't care to have strangers knowing, like who I'm having dinner with tomorrow.
iCal lets you set up read-only calendar "subscriptions". So I re-exported my calendars, uploaded them to Google, deleted them from iCal, and slurped them back down as subscriptions. From there, they synched to my iPod just like before. I was also able to set up a subscription to our calendaring software at work (Zimbra). That's gravy. Normally, I only have to worry about meetings and such when I'm in the office and have access to the calendar directly. But it is nice to have them on the iPod with audible alarms and all.
While I was at it, I discovered that Google Calendars has a handy text messaging (SMS) interface. You register your phone with them, and then you just send messages to "GVENT" (48368). Sending "day" gets a response with today's events. "happy hour at 5pm tomorrow" creates a new event. You can set up events (individually or by default) to send you a text message alert. So if I'm going out without my iPod, I can have my cell phone remind me when it's time to move on to the next round of fun. I don't actually see myself using that a lot, but it's nice to have as backup.
I watched Merlin Mann's "Inbox Zero" Google Tech Talk video the other weekend, and I've gotten all fired up on that. I'd been letting stuff just pile up in my Gmail inbox because I don't actually get much mail there. Gmail doesn't use the normal folder setup, but it has Labels, which let you do much the same thing, and a bit more besides. So I got everything tagged and archived in short order. Set up a few basic filters to handle list mail that I only need to check every day or two. They're not super sophisticated, but they do the trick. An empty inbox is a nice feeling.
I also started playing with Google Docs. I haven't done spreadsheets or presentations yet, but the documents are nice. They strike a good balance between features and simplicity. I'm a little paranoid about storing all this stuff on a free "beta" service, so it was nice to find that you can easily export them as HTML (and relatively clean HTML at that).
So I think that may be the winning combination. I could also look at the iPod Touch option, which would give me a way to enter data on the go. Right now, the only problem situation on the horizon is DragonCon, where I have to track a whole lot of events, and I'm not planning on lugging my MacBook along. It could be handy if they would publish an ics file with the complete schedule before we got down there. Maybe a separate one for each programming track or room. Hmm...
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Comments:
The iPhone plan I use is only $60 per month, not $100. I know they have more expensive plans, but I figured the lower one would work for you as well.
Ah, sorry - I got muddled on that. So it would take a less extreme lifestyle change to justify that. My current plan is only about $7 a month, so it's hard to beat that.
But the money alone doesn't explain that, does it? I think I have some gut reaction to the idea of always being tethered to the electronic world. It's appealing to have that at my fingertips, but also a little alarming. I see people who are always poking at their Blackberries, and I don't want to be like that. It's like permanently having this distraction from the world around you. You know that thing about how it's hard to focus on a complex task if you think you might be interrupted? Sometimes I feel that I can't think straight in front of my computer, and I have to go away with a pen and paper.
I have to say that the thing I *like* about the iphone is that it's possible to turn off the phone, or turn off the entire thing. (The treo required removal of the battery to turn the damn thing off.) I've had it in airplane mode (all RF off) for *days* and didn't notice.
I do fiddle with it more than I wish I did, but on the other hand I pick it up less than I used to do with the treo, and it is a *lot* more useful. the gmaps interface is lovely- it maps the object of the search, but you also get the address and the phone number. It's saved me more than I would have thought. It's not better than sliced bread. But it is more utilitarian than I thought it would be.
It's is possible to crack the sapphire crystal (unlucky drop), but fortunately it doesn't actually interfere with the phone at all- the touch interface still works, even across the break, and it doesn't interfere with the visuals either. So, props for mildness of degradation, too.
OTOH, the present network sucks. it will be interesting to see how the 3G and 2.0 improve both.
The new plans for the 3G version are $10 more for the base level and don't include any SMS messages, so anyone who doesn't avoid SMS completely will probably want to spend at least $5 a month to add that.
[Existing rate plans for the first generation iphone are not changing.]
i've been really struggling with gmail's labels system because when you create a lot of them it's just not as tidy onscreen as collapsible folders. you may want to check out the firefox add-on called "Better Gmail 2" which adds some cool stuff, including sub-labels that mimic folders.
also if you're down with the Inbox Zero stuff you may also want to delve into the "GTD Gmail" add-on. i'm using both add-ons starting this week but i'm not yet convinced they play well together so i don't recommend stacking them :\
for her birthday this year, madison shared a google doc with our family which listed all the presents she wanted, haha.
i've heard of a program called "tune ranger" that you can use to sync your ipod to multiple machines? dunno if it's any good.
also, google needs "google tasks." thanks.
that's called Google Notebook.
i want something much more richly featured, thanks.
I am addicted to Google Docs. I use them for both personal and work stuff. Yesterday we had a phone call meeting with 4 of us all in different locations. We all were in the same Google spreadsheet while on the phone so we could add and see changes immediately.
I also use Google Calendar for all my scheduling. The only downside is I have no portable solution beyond being able to login on any online browser.. but that actually works pretty well for me. The only thing I carry around is a very basic Nokia cell phone. I was addicted to my Palm for years.. but then I lost it (yes.. in my car.. under the seat) for a few months around the time I fell in love with Google Calendar and after I found it again I just couldn't be bothered.
Google Calendars are pretty slick.... My girlfriend and I each have personal calendars that we share with each other ...
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa ..... WHO IS YOUR GIRLFRIEND?!?
You, silly... :) Not that you seem to be using it, though... Edited at 2008-07-04 05:47 pm (UTC)
I went with Google Calendar over iCal because it is easily hooked up to other calendars. So I can see Saki's stuff on my calendar and vice versa.
We use Google Docs for things, but the spreadsheet interface is pretty crappy. It's a but slow, and if you get yourself into a crappy internet connectivity situation with lag, you can wind up losing the changes you put in. Also, I think there is some weirdness with Firefox 3 - looks like the rows don't align perfectly with the row numbers on the left side. I wouldn't be surprised if that got fixed soon though. |
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