Google Apps

Damn You Google!

| Richard

{shakes fist}

The other day, I turned up in Birmingham and realised I hadn’t packed a tie, so I needed to wander off and find one. Not knowing the area, but having found a likely shopping centre on Google Maps, I decided to fire up Nokia Maps on my Nokia N95-8GB and use its built-in GPS to give myself walking directions. I had been using this application quite a lot since the start of the year whilst wandering around Birmingham staying in different hotels and having to find my way on foot to a Client’s offices.

So I was disappointed to realise that my subscription to the navigation element of the app. had expired, so I reluctantly renewed it at the cost – whatever it was – and used it to find me way there and back.

Now I prefer the Google Mobile Maps application to Nokia Maps, but that only had driving directions and public transport … except that a couple of days after renewing, I saw an article which mentioned the directions on foot facility in the latest version of the software. Now downloaded to my mobile and yes, indeed it does have foot navigation. And it’s free…

Bugger!

Google Calendar Sync

| Richard

Woohoo! Back in July, I posted about keeping my calendars synchronised. And guess what? We’re nearly there!

All is explained in the Official Google Blog:

“…This was my life for a whole year before we started working on Google Calendar Sync, a 2-way synching application between Google Calendar and the calendar in Microsoft Outlook. I was probably the most excited person on the team when we started developing it, because now I can access my calendar at home or on my laptop, on Google Calendar or in Outlook. When I add an event to the Outlook calendar on my laptop, Google Calendar Sync syncs it to my Google Calendar — and since I also have Google Calendar Sync running on my desktop, the event then syncs from Google Calendar to Outlook calendar on my desktop. All of my calendar views are always up to date, and I can choose whichever one I want to use.”

Most excellent! Downloaded and installed. And I can access Google Calendar from my mobile and add appointments from there too.

Recording My Lap Times with a Calendar

| Richard

Calendars.

A necessary evil these days.  I can’t be bothered with paper ones in the same way that diaries never worked for me.

No, I prefer my good old Outlook Calendar. In the latest version, it can also be set up to synchonise with a webdav-enabled web server which is nice, except that you can’t then simply go to the URL and view your calendar online, for instance in an Internet café or on your mobile. No, the .ics file can be downloaded and imported by applications like Entourage or Outlook, but you can’t really read or amend it when you’re out and about.

When I can be bothered, I can synchronise my Nokia phone with Outlook when I’m back in the office, just as I can my iPAQ, so that’s useful, but it means I have to be around the base PC and have to manage the connection.

I can also export my Outlook calendar and import it into Google Calendar. That’s all very well and good but it’s a slow, manual process.

No, what I want is a calendar that I can amend at my desk. It’s automatically published at regular intervals to the web where I can choose to keep all or part of it private or restrict who can view it online. I want to be able to add to it or change it on my mobile with any changes being made to all the versions automatically the moment I’m in range, either of a decent high speed GPRS link or a 3G one. And I want to be able to update it through any web browser and have those changes propagated immediately to the PC and phone versions.

Surely that’s do-able? 

Search and Ye Shall Find

| Richard

…depending upon what you use to search.

Or so it would appear.

When I “upgraded” to Office 2007, Outlook “suggested’ I download and install Windows Desktop Search which they suggest is “Best in Class”.

Now I am already running Google Desktop and have been impressed with it.

Yesterday I tried out some Nero software (before removing it again as it didn’t do what I wanted) and that installed another search program that looked exactly like a re-badged version of Windows Desktop Search.

Anyway, I’d had ‘mixed’ results with Windows Desktop Search noting how the number of items searched would sometimes count down, or that the number of items to index would also count down without a corresponding increase in the number of items searched and indeed noting that it would continue to index my PC even when supposedly snoozing.

Couple all that with the way that it only seemed to want to know about the current Outlook post file and it began to take on the usefulness of a chocolate teapot; especially when you take into account the need to keep Outlook post files to an absolute minimum size in the latest version unless you want your system slowed down to less than crawling pace. Outlook 2007: bst avoided!

So the other day, I needed to find some access details I’d e-mailed a client a while back. I knew I wouldn’t find them in my current Outlook post file, so I opened the job-specific post file archive and asked it to search only to find that it hadn’t been indexed and none of the other search facilities in Outlook could help either. So I fired up Google Desktop and instantly found the details I needed…

I looked at the Windows Desktop Search preferences and manually added .pst files – curiously omitted by default – and made sure that the Archives folder was ticked to be searchable and after allowing Windows Desktop Search to catalogue everything unhindered – at the expense of it slowing down my system – I decided to run a little test.

I sent myself an e-mail from my Gmail account (excluded from my Google Desktop search items) with the name “Persephone Winterbottom” in the e-mail body. This came via a POP3 account into MailWasher Pro and thence into Outlook. I then opened an archive .pst file and dragged the new e-mail into it before closing it once more.

After both programs indicated they were up to date, I ran a search for “Persephone Winterbottom”. Now, you need to bear in mind that Google Desktop needs Outlook post files to be open to be searched whilst Windows Desktop Search shouldn’t if it follows the preferences.

And the results? Google Desktop returned a positive on the e-mail within the main Outlook post file. Not so good if you want to actually locate the e-mail in its archive but the program does return its contents within the browser window (which is good enough for me).

Windows Desktop Search still doesn’t seem to acknoweldge the e-mail’s existence whatsover, even days afterwards, so it’s been uninstalled here now.