BusySync works differently than SpanningSync. Instead of a service, it works directly with Google Calendar with no intermediary service. It does not suffer from any of the issues I had with SpanningSync (forgetting to sync, forgetting which calendars to sync after an upgrade, stopping working when an upgrade was required - BusySync has Sparkle built-in, and alarms sync).

I’ve had two issues with BusySync so far:

1. A “BusySync Conflicts” calendar has been created a few times on my Tiger desktop; this contains events that BusySync apparently isn’t sure what to do with. I haven’t seen this with either of my Leopard machines, so it may be a bug/issue with Tiger.
2. One of my Leopard machines stopped syncing for a time entirely. I tried the “Reset Sync History” options, tried unchecking and rechecking the calendars to sync. It stayed broken for about a week. Finally I deleted all of the calendars locally, reset everything, and re-added them from Google. Since then, smooth sailing.

If you need to sync iCal and Google Calendar, I recommend using BusySync based on my experience so far.

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I first brought it with me on a quick trip to LA last month, then again last week when I went to Ohio to spend some time with the ShareThis team. This last trip, it really came in handy.

I arrived in Ohio late, and around 12:30am local my drive to my hotel was interrupted by an accident on the freeway. After about 45 minutes parked, we were turned around and directed back to the previous exit. Of course, I didn’t have directions to the hotel from this exit - just hit the “avoid roadblock” button and Bob’s yer uncle.

The GPS is nice around town, but It’s in my travel bag to stay.

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Advantages (over the MacBook Pro):

• Smaller and lighter, of course.
• The battery life is much better.
• It fits a lot better on the plane, especially when the person in front of you decides to recline into your space.
• It doesn’t get as hot during use.
• Smaller/lighter power cord.

Drawbacks:

• The battery takes a long time to charge. I was a little more paranoid about this than I needed to be as it turns out. With wireless off on the plane, and the screen not too bright, I was getting reports of 5+ hours available.
• The screen is smaller/shorter, which resulted in me hunching over more while using the machine. Bad for my back/shoulders.

The overall impression is that for me it’s an incremental improvement while traveling on more than a day trip. I generally pack the following gear in my backpack:

• Laptop
• Power cord
• Mini surge protector
• Targus lap desk (I have the old while model)
• Bag of goodies including my EVDO modem, wireless router, and various cables and adapters
• Noise reduction headphones in their big ‘ol case
• One or two magazines

At the end of the day, the couple pounds and space in the bag that the Air affords me over the Pro is nice, but can get a little lost in the shuffle.

On the flip side, I absolutely love the size and weight of the Air in day to day use. I’ve gone to a smaller bag and don’t carry as much around with me when I’m local, so I really notice the difference.

1. I plan to be sell the MacBook Pro soon and replacing it with a Mac Pro at the office. I don’t need two laptops. [back]

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Here are the reasons I’m turning Spanning Sync off (for now):

• It would somehow decide not to do scheduled syncs for long periods of time (8+ hours, sometimes days) with no notification to me. I’d have to go look for issues when I realized things were out of sync.
• Every time I upgraded it would forget which calendars to sync. This meant I’d have to reselect all of the calendars on every machine and it would take a very long time to do the first sync again.
• When an upgrade was required, the app would just stop working. It wouldn’t tell you this - you had to open the preference pane to discover the reason why.
• Event alarms did not sync, and there was no setting (that I could find) to set default alarms for items being synced in to iCal. This resulted in me being late for things because I rely on those reminders.

I’m hopeful that this will be a temporary departure from Spanning Sync, and that in a couple of months when I try it again I’ll be able to rely on it. It was a very handy service when it was working and now that we have over-the-air sync between Google Calendar and the BlackBerry, this would really make a nice solution.

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Love ‘em.

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However, over the last couple of months I’ve started using it as a business tool, and it’s been incredibly useful.

1. Take a screen grab.
2. Scribble all over it - arrows, comments, boxes, etc.
3. Paste it into an e-mail and send.

It’s filling a very nice niche for me.

I see they’ve started noting this use case on their site as well, though the styling and focus of the site remain on the consumer.

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Note: Make sure you get the latest version if you are running Leopard.

I’ve been using Spanning Sync for the last couple of weeks. In general, it’s worked pretty well but there are a few caveats.

• The ability to create events in iCal when GCal is down is really nice. I’ve started using iCal a lot more for data entry again. The 6-10 seconds to load GCal turns out to be enough of a delay for me to use the local app.
• This bug is annoying.
• Some events have been mysteriously duplicated.

However, there is one issue that may cause me to ditch Spanning Sync until it is addressed: alarms from GCal do not sync to iCal.

I need alarms on my iCal events. I’ve been through this before and I know I need them. I even wrote a script to add alarms to the GCal iCalendars because I realized I needed this in the past.

Even with the Google Notifier and the SMS notifications, I’m nearly missing phone calls or calling in a couple minutes late. I need my iCal alarms with their nice pop-up windows and snooze features.

So far, I’m sticking with Spanning Sync. It’s pretty good overall, and is probably going to get better. That is, until I miss my next phone call and start to rethink this again.

1. For example, this wouldn’t happen it wasn’t a service. [back]

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A normal EVDO card is great when you’re out around town and/or traveling alone, but if you’re with a group¹ it can be a bit of a pain to try to share the connection. Also, the USB card that I have is a bit of a battery drain on my laptop - sometimes this is an issue, sometimes it isn’t.

I’m trying the CradlePoint CTR350 EVDO to WiFi router as a solution to this. Simply plug your USB EVDO card into it and it creates a WiFi network using your EVDO connection. Now the group can share the EVDO connection, and my battery life is extended by just using the WiFi antenna instead of powering the USB EVDO card.

The CradlePoint device is actually smaller than I expected, and the power brick is an acceptable size - good choices for a device touted as a travel router. The configuration screens are the typical fairly ugly router screens but everything seems to work pretty much as expected and as advertised.

All in all I’m quite pleased with this device thus far, and plan to keep it in my everyday gear bag.

I bought the CradlePoint from the good folks at 3Gstore, who helped get it delivered to me in Hawaii. This is the second purchase I’ve made from them and I have nothing but good things to report; highly recommended².

UPDATE: I’ve got no hard data to back this up, but my laptop seems to do a lot better with simultaneous data transfer through the WiFi router than it does connected directly to the EVDO modem. I’m not sure what is balancing the transfer better (the router or the WiFi on the laptop), but given the choice I’d rather connect through the CradlePoint router. This is a bit of a surprise.

1. Or if the power goes off in your office while your whole team is there, which happened to us a couple months back. [back]
2. I don’t get any referral kickback from them and I am not affiliated with 3Gstore.com and EVDOinfo.com except as a happy customer. [back]

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• Chrysler Crossfire - topless fun
• Dodge Nitro - underpowered unresponsive
• Jeep Liberty - surprisingly satisfactory

Share your two word reviews in the comments.

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Interestingly, I think this is a movie I’d never have actually seen if it weren’t for Netflix. I’d heard great reviews of it from several people, but for some reason it just wasn’t clicking with me and I wasn’t that excited to watch it. If I was still going to the video rental store to get movies, I doubt I’d have ever chosen it over something else.

However, based on the good reviews I’d heard I stuck the movie in my Netflix queue a few years back, and eventually it bubbled to the top and arrived at my house. This is an interesting feature of Netflix - sending me movies I don’t actually want at the moment, but am glad I watched afterwards.

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When I priced cell service a little while ago, I really couldn’t even consider AT&T/Cingular, but now that I have an EVDO card and I’m not trying to use the BlackBerry as a modem there are two big differences:

1. I don’t need the $35-40/month option to use the phone as a modem (which doesn’t work right with a Mac anyway).
2. I don’t need as fast data rates to the device.

So far, it’s been going pretty smoothly on the new device. Some thoughts I’ve collected over the last few days:

• The EDGE data transmission making my speakers pop is really annoying.
• It’s not that much smaller than the 8703e, but it feels that much smaller.
• The trackball takes a little getting used to.
• They keyboard isn’t quite as good as the 8703e - more reminiscent of my Treo.
• The speaker (especially the ringer) is a lot louder.
• You can now use alt+letter (then keep typing letters) to search your address book on the Phone screen - awesome!
• AT&T’s coverage is better than I expected. They were so poor in the Bay Area, I’ve been pleasantly surprised here in Denver/Boulder.
• Shoot, I forgot I’d be losing GPS in Beyond411 - the GPS maps never worked well for me on the 8703e, but the “search where I am” ability in Beyond411 was really useful.
• This is the first phone I’ve had with voice dialing capabilities. That’s pretty darn handy.
• The only time I really notice the EDGE data speed in Google Maps.
• My GrandCentral number rings about 5-10 seconds faster on the AT&T phone than it does on the Sprint phone. Very nice.

I’m probably going to make the switch but I’m going to give it a full week with AT&T, just in case. The 8073e will likely end up on Craig’s list.

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I don’t want the AT&T Wireless service - or more accurately, I don’t want the monthly fee of the service. I know I can cancel the service within 30 days without paying the $175 early termination fee, but I don’t know if they will demand their iPhone back or not. Of course the bigger question I haven’t found answered yet - will the iPhone work in wifi mode, etc. once it has been activated but no longer has an active plan.

From their TOS:

30-DAY CANCELLATION PERIOD/TERMINATION
You may terminate this Agreement within thirty (30) days after activating service without paying an Early Termination Fee. You will pay for service fees and charges incurred through the termination date, but AT&T will refund your activation fee, if any, if you terminate within three (3) days of activating the service. Also, you may have to return any handsets and accessories purchased with this Agreement.

Really it would be smart for them to let me keep it - if I decide I love the iPhone and want to use it as a phone I’m this close to being their customer. If they won’t, I’ll have to return the iPhone and perhaps pay a $50 re-stocking fee. Not a huge risk.

My first impressions:

• The Apple Store employees are glowing they are so happy to be selling these.
• They recognized my credit card number and emailed my receipt to me from the Apple Store. I had it on my BlackBerry before I left the store. Slick.
• It’s a little heavier than I expected, especially compared to the Nokia N95.
• The screen is gorgeous.
• It picks up smudges and fingerprints like mad.
• The keyboard is actually worse than I feared. I’d let myself believe they might have actually pulled it off and made it usable.
• There is no way this can replace my BlackBerry, at least not yet.
• I use copy-paste on my mobile device pretty often.
• It’s a pretty great iPod.
• I like being able to play music and video through the speakers.
• The camera predictably sucks in low light.
• There doesn’t seem to be a way to turn off the phone/cell connection and keep wifi on.
• Activation was completely painless and took less than 1 minute.
• More companies should have online activation like this - of course, I bet many of them would screw it up.
• “iTunes” is becoming more inaccurately named every year.
• The scrolling and pinch are indeed pretty cool.
• I can’t believe they thought crunching all of the iCalendars into a single calendar on the iPhone was a good idea. It’s on a small screen like the iPhone where I really want to be able to turn on/off calendars.
• I don’t see why some of these apps don’t have screens that rotate.
• The YouTube widget is pretty well done.
• Tabbed browsing in mobile Safari is excellent.
• I wish I could copy/paste the user agent from the web page content in Safari, but it’s good to know that sniffing on “iPhone” will do the trick.
• It was really smart to keep the dock connector port the same. I simply replaced my old iPod dock with the iPhone dock (plugging it into the same USB cable).
• I have to think about which of my playlists to load on the iPhone.
• The iPhone really makes me appreciate the keyboard on my BlackBerry.
• I hope I can load a “wallpaper” onto this via iPhoto. That has to work. Yep, it does.
• The UI for the timer app is genius.
• I’m already annoyed at the limited configurability¹ of it.
• Where is my “auto-upload to Flickr” feature like all the Nokias have? I guess I can send them via e-mail.
• Some of the interface niceties in here are really impressive.
• After a little experimentation, I’m upgrading my rating of the keyboard from “horrible” to just “bad”.
• Seriously, is there no way to set a Signature or remove the “sent from iPhone” on e-mails? Ah there it is. The lack of scroll bar removes a valuable interface hint - I didn’t realize there were more options on the Mail screen. There needs to be some sort of indicator that there is more stuff below the current screen.

Overall, I’m a little underwhelmed. So many of my friends were raving about the iPhone that I expected the experience to exceed what I’d been shown in the videos. It did not. It was nearly exactly what I expected from seeing the videos. Pretty much everything I thought would be great was, and everything I thought would suck did. Actually, perhaps the screen and video quality exceeded my expectations a little.

To be honest, I don’t think I’m the target iPhone user. If you’re a heavy BlackBerry user, you probably aren’t either. RIM can rest easy (for now), this initial iPhone is in no way a BlackBerry competitor. A hardware keyboard and copy/paste in a future version might change this in a hurry, but I’d even be unwilling to send text messages or post to Twitter from iPhone with any regularity. The actual phone upgrade I want is the BlackBerry 8300/Curve, but it seems like that won’t be hitting Sprint for a while.

So I’m glad for all of you who find the iPhone is the perfect phone for you, I think it will be a very nice iPod for me. I guess I’ll find out in the next couple of days if I can cancel the AT&T service and keep the iPod iPhone and if it will continue to work without a service plan.

1. Firefox doesn’t think that’s a word. If it’s not, it should be. [back]

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I’d been aware of Ian Landsman and his work on HelpSpot for a while, but hadn’t really investigated it thoroughly because I didn’t have a need for it at the time. Luckily, he saw my post on Mailroom and got in touch. After months of things not quite working as we wanted them to in Mailroom, we finally made the move to HelpSpot.

Naturally, a day or so before we cut over, Mailroom rolled out a big upgrade. However, we had already decided to make the move, so we never really even experimented with the new Mailroom features (a quick glance showed them looking better, but not everything we wanted). This should be a cautionary tale for web application service providers: lots of little upgrades are much better than an occasional mammoth upgrade. Showing your users that your product is alive and well and growing is important.

One of the main deficiencies with Mailroom from our perspective was the ability to set up reply templates and choose them when replying to an e-mail. Mailroom claimed to have an algorithm for choosing the right template, but it seemed to just suggest previous replies in reverse chronological order. Trying to get to a reply from a few months back was a tortuous “click through every single reply” process.

HelpSpot really excels at this. We’ve set up a few basic templates, organized them into folders, and it is extremely efficient.

The auto-assignment settings and reminders work very well too. A little “nag” e-mail if something hasn’t been taken care of is a great thing. HelpSpot also gives you nice admin reports showing the time to resolution on new requests and a bunch of other stuff that we really don’t use at this point.

If you’re looking for a web-based product to help your team deal with support e-mail, I recommend taking a look at HelpSpot and seeing if it will fit your needs.

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I’ve been using a OneBox account for this, and I’ve been quite pleased at the way it’s worked out.

My requirements:

• A toll-free number.
• Can set it to go directly to voice mail during non-business hours.
• Hunting (I think it’s called) - have it ring one phone number, then another, then another, etc.
• E-mail delivery of voice mail.

Pretty much all the services I looked at offered these things - they are standard VPBX functions. The reason I decided to go with OneBox is because they offer an Executive plan for a single user.

Most of the services I looked at started at around 3-5 mailboxes/phone numbers and pricing at about $50/month. Since I don’t need any of that (yet) $20/month is a lot better than $50/month.

The OneBox account doesn’t have fancy web 2.0 screens or nice Ajax interactivity, but (as far as I know) it’s been reliable and done exactly what I expected. There’s a lot of value in that.

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