Moving from Google Calendar to iCloud

 Apple, Google Calendar, iPhone  3 Responses »
Oct 182011
 

There’s a lot of awesomeness about Google Calendar. I’ve been using it, synced to my iPhone, iPad, and Mac, for pretty much everything but my work calendar (stupid Exchange). I used it so much that I even built a Greasemonkey script to automatically create Google Calendar entries from Evites. That’s not necessary any more (Evite finally added it natively), but it’s safe to say I used Google Calendar pretty exhaustively.

Over time, working with Google Calendar across all those devices became a bit tougher. It’s not really Google’s fault–I just wanted to do some stuff that wasn’t as easy to do. Syncing across multiple devices with all of them being able to read/write/update entries became a crapshoot as to whether or not an update would work. Weirdness with iCal (on the Mac) where all of a sudden it couldn’t authenticate to Google’s servers. I’m not sure where the fault lies (probably both on Google and Apple: Google tends to do some stuff non-standard; Apple seems to sometimes not handle non-standard stuff very well), but it would go flaky every now and then.

That being said, it still worked very, very nicely. Mostly. iOS 4 made it even easier when they added native Google Calendar syncing.

But, in iOS 5, Apple released iCloud, and with it, the chance to simplify a bit. I could drop some of the workarounds to go native Apple. So, as risky as that sounds (remember MobileMe … or hell, remember the trouble just downloading and activating iOS 5?), I decided to bite the bullet and move my calendar out of GCal to iCloud. Just one less thing that could go wrong…for better or for worse.

Google makes it very easy to get your data out. Within a minute, I had downloaded my .ics file with all of my historical events. Over to iCal, import, and boom.

It would fail every time.

After a bit of digging (using Console.app), I could see this error:

iCal: Component boundaries mismatch (VALARM VEVENT)

That lead me to think that maybe Google’s ics file had some sections that didn’t match right (I’m pretty smart, eh?). Thanks to Google’s search engine, I was able to figure out why Google’s Calendar wouldn’t give me my data.

I uploaded my ics to this iCalendar validator. I helpfully told me places where the file didn’t parse properly. Using my favorite text editor (hosted on Google’s code repository–is there anything these guys don’t do?), I fixed the problems.

Voila. Everything imported nicely. Moments later, I had my calendar on iCloud.com, on my phone, and on my iPad. Working exactly the same as it was before, but now I get to more easily take advantage of some of Mac OS’ and iOS’ niceties (data detectors, applications creating calendar events), and I can to take one “sync” out of my chain.[1]

  1. Unless of iCloud craters and I go rushing back to Google.  ↩

 Posted by Ryan Toohil at 6:24 pm

Steve Jobs

 Apple  No Responses »
Oct 082011
 

Tumblr lqhr46trpa1qz9917o1 500

(from http://jmak.tumblr.com/)

Over the past 10 years or so, like many folks, I’ve become (or re-become) an Apple fan. The first computer I ever used was probably an Apple IIe or IIgs, at a friends or at school. Loads of Oregon Trail, other text-based games, and a bunch of Carmen San Diego.

Then, as I got older (and here we’re talking ten or twelve), I moved into the PC world. I liked building machines, replacing parts, screwing around with trying to move memory around with the autoexec.bat and config.sys so I could run the latest game. And that’s a huge reason I ended up with computers being my vocation. Apple got me in the game, the late 80s/early 90s PC world made me a tech geek.

But then something changed. Well, a couple.

I graduated college.

I got a job.

I no longer had time (nor the desire) to upgrade to the latest drivers, or deal with the incompatibility between my new graphics card and my sound card. I didn’t want to deal with poorly developed software that caused my machine to blow up just because I wanted to use a scanner or play a game.

It started slow. I got a second-gen iPod in, I think, 2002. It cost $500 for 10GB. I had to buy a FireWire card for my PC to even use it.

But Steve Jobs had gotten his foot in the door. The iPod did one thing, and it did it well: it played music. The interface required no instructions, no learning curve, no explanation. It. Just. Worked. (It also lasted me 3 or 4 years. And I’m pretty that if I turned it on right now, it would work.)

One iPod lead to another iPod (a Shuffle, then a 5th Gen iPod). Then, I got sick of dealing with a crappy PC at work and bought myself a MacBook Pro. My re-entry (after 20 years or so) into real Mac computing.

I’m not going to tell you that Macs are better because of superior hardware or software. I’m not going to tell you that everything about a Mac is better than a PC. I won’t tell you that Steve Jobs was some sort of deity of software design.

What Steve Jobs got, and what he eventually made me realize, is that my time and my experience are worthwhile. It’s worth paying a little bit extra to get a computer that just sort of does what it is supposed to. That has an interface that makes sense. That doesn’t make me worry about configuration or setup. That does the little things right. Whether it’s a computer, or a music player, or a video player for the TV, what’s valuable isn’t the technology, it’s the technology’s ability to get out of the way and make my life better, easier, faster.

As a kid (and even now, a little bit), futzing around with a computer is an enjoyable pastime. Your time, as a kid, just isn’t quite as valuable. When you have a job, and maybe a hobby or two, or a family, your time is your most valuable asset. Your time allows you to do what you dream–build a company, a family, play a sport, start a charity, whatever it is. Steve Jobs sold time.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.[1]

  1. 2005 Stanford Commencement Address  ↩

 Posted by Ryan Toohil at 5:58 pm

MacBook ProAir

 Apple, Mac, Technology  No Responses »
Sep 112011
 

I’ve got a 2 year old MacBook Pro (15-inch) that I use as my work and home machine. It’s got my canonical iTunes music collection, my photo collection, all of my archived mail, files, whatever.

It is the one machine to rule them all.

I try to do a lot of smart stuff to keep my machine and data safe, since pretty much everything I care about is on it. I have a Time Machine backup that I keep up-to-date religiously. I sync a collection of documents to Dropbox as an off-site backup. The music and photos get sync’d to another machine on my home network.

Nothing groundbreaking, but I try to do what I can to keep this machine happy and healthy.

Over the past few months, as often happens, software upgrades and new applications put a little extra stress on the hard drive and CPU, so things started to get just a bit slower. Things might stutter a bit as I scroll down a web page, or flip between applications. Just enough to annoy me while I worked and make me look longingly at Katie’s MacBook Air with its nice solid-state drive and near instance application loading and boot up.

So, I tried to do the best thing I could do, short of buying a new machine and having to go through all of the work to make that new machine the machine. I SSD-ified it[1].

Well, first, actually, I found out that I could upgrade the RAM to 8GB. $45 later, I had my shiny 8GB RAM kit, took the 10 minutes to install it, and in the couple of weeks since I installed it, my machine has gone into swap a grand total of 500 times (or so). In the couple of weeks before that, it’d gone into swap millions of times. Score one for memory.

The final step was the actual SSD-ification. I found a reasonably good deal on 256GB SSD (at MicroCenter, and grabbed a USB enclosure for the disk I’d be removing at the same time for $8). When I got home from my excusion, I loaded up Carbon Copy Cloner, and cloned my existing data onto the SSD. About 2.5 hours later, I had this nice SSD with all of my data on it.

Again, another 15 minute surgery to the laptop, and I had removed the old drive, placed in the new SSD, and closed things back up.

This machine now flies. iTunes starts in seconds. Excel opens up in seconds rather than minutes. It boots up and loads up my settings in less than a minute.

It’s a giant MacBook Air.

And, at the same time, I’ve now gained a nice backup drive (remember that USB enclosure). Every week or so, I can clone off my entire drive and have a 3rd backup of my data.

All in, the upgrades cost me about $450, which is less than half the cost of buying a brand-new low end MacBook Air, and about a quarter of what a new MacBook Pro will cost. I’m guessing I’ve added at least another year or two to the life of this machine.

It’s probably one of the easiest and most productive upgrades you can perform on your aging laptop.

  1. There’s a great guide to this over on Ars Technica.  ↩

 Posted by Ryan Toohil at 4:12 pm

Christmas Comes Early

 Apple, new hotness, Nintendo, Technology  2 Responses »
Jun 072011
 

Hands-On: With Wii U’s Touchscreen Controller, Nintendo Could Radically Change Games | GameLife | Wired.com: “As Link duked it out with a giant hairy spider on the TV screen, we could see all sorts of secondary info on the controller screen: the dungeon map, Link’s health bar, the items he was carrying. These icons no longer cluttered up the TV screen and got in the way of the high-definition visuals. The cool part was this: With one tap of an icon on the touchscreen, the images flipped. Suddenly, seamlessly, the game was running on the touchscreen and the map, etc., was on the television.”

Aahhh. So awesome.

Notification Center: “You get all kinds of notifications on your iOS device: new email, texts, friend requests, and more. With Notification Center, you can keep track of them all in one convenient location. Just swipe down from the top of any screen to enter Notification Center. Choose which notifications you want to see. Even see a stock ticker and the current weather. New notifications appear briefly at the top of your screen, without interrupting what you’re doing. And the Lock screen displays notifications so you can act on them with just a swipe. Notification Center is the best way to stay on top of your life’s breaking news.”

Ahhhhh. Awesomesauce.

iTunes Match:”Here’s how it works: iTunes determines which songs in your collection are available in the iTunes Store. Any music with a match is automatically added to your iCloud library for you to listen to anytime, on any device. Since there are more than 18 million songs in the iTunes Store, most of your music is probably already in iCloud. All you have to upload is what iTunes can’t match. Which is much faster than starting from scratch. And all the music iTunes matches plays back at 256-Kbps iTunes Plus quality — even if your original copy was of lower quality.”

Knockout.

Apple and Nintendo should just marry each other. They would have kids as cute as baby pandas, but who hit baseballs like Albert Pujols, and dominate basketball like LeBron James.

 Posted by Ryan Toohil at 1:38 pm

BOOM-SHAK-A-LACKA (NBA Jam on the iPhone)

 Apple, Apps, iPhone  No Responses »
Apr 232011
 

On Friday, a bunch of sites mentioned that EA was having an Easter weekend iTunes Store. An assortment of EA games were at reasonable prices (then again, a bunch of EA’s games are shite, and they should pay me to play them).

But, 99 cents for NBA Jam?

It didn’t really matter how bad it might have been, because that’s a price I couldn’t possibly pass up.

And, oh, how it is awesome.

To be fair, let’s start with the bad.

  • As with almost any iOS action game, the controls are an on-screen joystick and buttons. It doesn’t matter how well they’re implemented, it’s still a shitty control scheme and probably the weakest part of iOS as a gaming platform.
  • If you’re not wearing headphones, your hand is going to cover the speakers and you won’t hear the sound.

Photo 2

That’s pretty much it.

What’s awesome? Everything. The rosters are pretty up-to-date and full of awesome unlockable and hidden players (Bird and McHale, Spud Webb and ‘Nique, Stockton and Malone). The gameplay is simple enough that the touchscreen controls, as cumbersome as they might be, work well enough. The graphics are fun and solid. The sound is good, and has brought back the announcer (or at least a sound-alike) from old-school NBA Jam.

Photo 1

Basically, it’s the same old NBA Jam with prettier graphics, modern players, and it’s on a device that fits in your pocket.

Oh yeah, and it’s 99 cents.

Photo 3

If you enjoyed NBA Jam at all when it was in the arcades or on the home systems in the 90s, you’ll like it now. There’s a difficulty that works for everyone, you can pause a game at any point and pick it back up again. There’s a campaign mode that let’s you work through all the teams, unlocking players and special attributes as you go.

NBA Jam for the iPhone will be your favorite time killer for at least a couple of weeks.

Go buy it. Now.

 Posted by Ryan Toohil at 10:22 pm
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