not all who wander are lost
Even so many years later I still feel a strange dark hollowness surrounding the events of that day. That anyone or any group would place such little value on life is beyond my comprehension.
To all who lost what cannot ever be regained I can offer no soothing balm to heal those wounds, only a shared feeling of such deep sorrow and a feeling of such intense shame to be part of such a violent human family.
Not happy with my new iPhone not auto-syncing my Google Calendar I did some investigation, and here’s what I discovered. If you let your iPhone sync calendars with your Mac, they are considered “desktop” accounts and not synced over wireless or 3g. And this is true even if the calendar account is a CalDAV calendar like Google calendar that should auto-sync over the network.
The fix, for those of us who want to sync a Google Calendar (or any CalDAV based calendar) on our iPhone and have it auto sync over the network regardless of how the calendar is edited, is this:
For those wanting to sync a Google Calendar the credentials are:
)That’s it. You now have a fully functional 2-way syncing calendar. Note: this will only sync the master Google calendar. If you want to sync any sub-calendars you need to replace the URL in the ‘Advanced Settings’ screen with the specific URL of the Calendar ID for those calendars. You can get the Calendar ID in the Calendar settings section of your Google Calendar account. Simply follow the above steps and then once setup, edit the advanced options to add the sub-calendar URL.
As I’ve had more time with my iPhone and have delved much deeper into it’s settings I have noticed a few places where Apple certainly missed the ball. Now, I’m still very happy with my iPhone. It has enabled me to be a lot more mobile and still be responsive to clients and colleagues during my work hours. It has also become invaluable for my personal time, as I think I have shot more video of my son with the iPhone than I have with our Sony HandyCam. The iPhone is just there and I can be shooting video in a matter of seconds…so I do.
That’s right. This first shortcoming was easy to avoid. Apple does an exceptional job fretting over the little things. The small details that take a product from good to great. Their user interface details are so well thought out that I can’t believe they missed this one. I cannot play my WiFi networked iPhone’s music over my Airport Express ‘Air Tunes’. How did they miss this??
Every Mac in the house can send it’s iTunes output to my WiFi connected stereo in the living room. And since I see the iPhone more as a Mac than an iPod or even a phone, how do you explain the omission of this feature?
I don’t know, either. Let’s hope iPhone OS 3.1 addresses this.
Okay. I understand that AT&T is using the whole iPhone OS 3.0 thing to push their ‘enterprise data’ package, which is a load of crap, honestly…data is data, what constitutes one packet as being ‘enterprise’ while another is ‘consumer’. But, I get it. AT&T provides the network, so you play by there rules. But iCal on every desktop Mac can do 2-way sync with Google Calendar via CalDAV, why remove that feature from the iPhone version of iCal?
Like I said, I get the Enterprise Data thing. AT&T wants another way to tack on another few bucks per month to the bill. Fine. Google Calendar is not a default setup on the iPhone (or any Mac), and requires additional configuration (and a Google account). That alone should have been enough to say “let’s leave it alone, if they know how to setup Google Calendar let them have full 2-way sync”. The fact that they went out of their way to make it a single direction sync really annoys me.
Of course, a way around this is to setup your Google Calendar on your Mac and sync to the iPhone. Anytime you edit your calendar from iCal on your Mac it will sync. If you need to add an appointment on your iPhone, use the web interface and then open iCal on the iPhone to have it pick up the sync. Voila…a (kludgey) 2 way sync.
Oh, and if you couldn’t tell, I refuse to pay for MobileMe. It provides almost no functionality I really want, other than calendar syncing. I have servers I use for web deployment, ftp, document sharing, et al. I don’t need an overpriced Apple solution that also includes calendar sync. And…I certainly don’t need another email address (I have 10 of those already…at least 10 that I can remember).
So, every time I connect my iPhone to my Mac to sync iPhoto opens and asks to import the same photos it imported last time. What about “I already have those” does iPhoto not understand. Apple needs to set some sort of trigger within the iPhone itself that tells the Mac whether or not there are new photos on the iPhone that need to be synced up. I’m getting tired of iPhoto interrupting me every time I attach my iPhone to my Mac. I keep telling myself that I need to go turn off the ‘auto open iPhoto’ option, but I use that with my cameras all the time and would much rather have Apple step up to the plate and have the iPhone communicate to the Mac whether it needs to launch iPhoto or not.
So, there you have it. 3, admittedly nit-picky, iPhone shortcomings that have been bugging me. None of these are real deal breakers for me, and I know they are all easily addressable in software updates. Apple has made a killer product in the iPhone – I truly see the future of the Mac (and all computing) in this device. I tell everyone who asks about it “the phone part of the iPhone is just a small part of what this thing is all about”, and it’s true. You don’t fully get it (grok it) until you use one for a while.
It has been a week since I finally gave into the allure of Apple’s latest update and went to the local Apple store to purchase an iPhone 3GS. After a week my gut reaction is: how did I ever get along without one of these!
What kept me from upgrading my aging Motorola Razr was the fear that a smart phone would make me too accessible. There would be nowhere to hide when I needed to get away. The reality of the situation is that I now feel a lot more comfortable getting away, knowing I can still be in touch. I also can leave the office when I am expecting an email, knowing that I can get my email on the road (sans laptop) and reply from just about anywhere.
I’m still getting into the whole ‘App’ thing. I installed Facebook and a couple Twitter apps. I even found a cool little metronome (something every musician should have on their iPhone).
So, any purchase that feels like a good idea and seems to be more useful a week after it was purchased is a winner in my book. No buyers regret here.
The world wide web has leveled the playing field in so many ways for individuals & companies. You no longer need a 6 figure budget to market worldwide. You no longer need to spend thousands to connect a group of like-minded people. You no longer need to be a designer or programmer to develop a digital experience for hundreds, thousands or even millions of potential users. Oops! Maybe that last one isn’t a good thing.
That’s right, the “everyman’s web” mentality also means that there is no skill set entry requirement for the designer or developer of the everyman’s web. Anyone who has spent any significant time browsing the web will have seen countless bad design ideas with confusing & disorienting user interfaces. And this holds true for some business & municipal sites that should know better (and have the budget to do better). So, you may ask, what should be done to remedy this problem?
The answer to this dilemma is standardization. That’s right. We need to standardize the user interface of the web so that a web interface is immediately recognizable and understandable. Much like we are accustomed to the interface of programs on our computers, we should be accustomed to a standard look & feel for a web interface.
Now, I’m not saying every website should look the same. What I am saying is that any user should be able to visit any website and all the interface elements (everything the user will interact with) should be obvious and familiar. Think about the menubar on your computer. For a Mac user the menu bar sits atop the screen and never moves, providing all the necessary functionality for whatever program you may be in. The same holds true for the Windows menubar, though it lives atop each window (a slightly poorer use of Fitts’s law, but it seems to be serviceable enough).
The problem is, not enough graphic/web designers realize they are not interface designers. Most don’t even realize that there have been volumes written about human interaction with objects in 2D and 3D space, going back to 1954 and a certain Paul Fitts.
It’s a monumental task. Who’s going to take on the challenge? Yahoo!, that’s who. I have to applaud Yahoo! for stepping up to the plate and beginning a process that is long overdue: standardizing the user interface of web sites, particularly in regards to interactive items. They saw the problem and are providing a solution. And while I am not saying they have perfected their user interface library, they are at least starting down the path to a clean & consistent web experience. The Yahoo User Interface project is a giant step in the right direction and I hope more developers and designers jump on the bandwagon of clean & consistent user interface.
So, the next time you sit down to design a website interface, do everyone a favor and take a few hints from the helpful folks at Yahoo! by implementing their user interface library where it makes sense to. I even downloaded all the YUI stencils from Graffletopia for OmniGraffle so I could be sure to have all the interface elements available to my when I wireframe and design a user interface.
I was sitting on the couch playing my guitar this evening. My 2 year old son was sitting on the chair across from me playing “his” guitar (my baby Taylor). He would strum the guitar on his lap and sing along with me (using any words he could think of). He occasionally stopped to look at me with a huge grin on his face to say “I’m a good singer!”.
It was cute. What struck me was how much I don’t do this with him. In fact, I spend so much time working with technology that I sometimes stop feeling like a musician at all.
This evening was odd, because I suddenly felt inspired to do some of those musical things I had left behind to “be the good father & husband” and to “provide for my family”. All lies to myself. I was just afraid to allow myself to be the creative person I really am. And now I am feeling such a pull to be “the old Steve” and pursue that part of me again.
Oddly, this all comes on the heals of starting to take better care of myself; exercising regularly and eating better. Maybe that has something to do with it, maybe it doesn’t. All I know is that I feel inspired like I haven’t felt in a long time. So much so that I have decided to resurrect my second album project. I released my first album, Wasted Time, in 2000. I was planning on getting the second one out there in 2003. That never happened. I wrote songs for it, recorded some of them and then just became occupied with other things.
My thought right now is to work towards finishing the album and to then release it under the creative commons license to make it freely available for people to listen to.
Oh, and the working title for the second album has been Hurricane Season for years. I’m sticking with that…for now.
Just booked it today. I’ll be performing as part of the Singer/Songwriters Sessions. I don’t know who else will be performing, but I imagine there will be some other good music too.
I go on at 7:30 pm, and will be sending out some emails to let people know and (hopefully) get a few supporters in the crowd. I should have more details soon.
Mark your calendars and come on down.
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