There’s lots of little things that, if tweaked, would just make life a lot nicer . . .

For instance . . .

The Google Calendar sync tool should support syncing Outlook to secondary Google Calendars, not just your primary calendar. That would mean I could drop SyncMyCal which runs in my Outlook-only Parallels Virtual Machine. I’d have a nifty, no-click workflow to sync my Work calendar to my secondary Work Google Calendar, which get sync’d down to iCal and to my iPhone.

Better yet . . .

The iPhone should support syncing both iCal and Outlook calendars. It’s sort of a dumb thing that if you turn on Outlook calendar and contact syncing, that’s the *only* calendars and contacts you get. Why not keep them separate? If Apple added the ability to have your Outlook calendar sit right along side your iCal calendars, then I wouldn’t even need to sync my Work calendar up. I could just accept meeting invites on my phone and have everything work nice and happy.

Oh, and same goes for Contacts. Just let me sync my Exchange contacts as a separate group. Seriously.

Even better . . .

Apple Mail and iCal should build in real Exchange support. Then I could actually not run Outlook in my virtual machine all day. Instead, I could just use Mail and iCal as Exchange clients and have the most simplified workflow of all. Supposedly, this is going to happen in Snow Leopard. That would be awesome.

Making life even sweeter . . .

Google should fix contact management. I love Gmail. I use it for everything. I hate Google’s Contact stuff. It is awful. They tried to make it better. It didn’t work very well. But they’ve got the keys right in their hands … Social Graph. Imagine you gave Google some information about you that they could use some OAuth or other authentication means to determine that it is really you. So you hand them some keys to Flickr and Twitter and (if they can work out their differences), Facebook. Now, Google pulls all that information together and makes a nifty contact for you. Name, picture, email address, home address, work address, phone number, Twitter, Flickr, etc, etc. You only get as much information as the contact allows (if we’re not friends on Facebook, you don’t get my phone # or address).

Now, Google can do all this behind the scenes and give you a little button to “add so-and-so” as a contact. If I add them, they go into my Contacts section. Then, I subscribe to my Google Contacts like they’re an LDAP source or however else they want to get hooked into your setup.

Boom. All of a sudden I’ve got a real contact solution that’s continually updated.

Ok, sure, that’s a lot like what Plaxo promises. Except Plaxo really doesn’t work all that well.

So. When all this happens, I’ll have my calendars all seamlessly syncing together to my computer and to my phone. On top of that, my contacts (work and personal) will all sync nicely as well. And stay up-to-date, thanks to something like Social Graph or the like. Plus, Snow Leopard will mean I don’t have to run a Virtual Machine just to use Outlook (and don’t tell me to use Entourage … it barely works).

With my work life (and personal contacts) working so seamlessly . . .

I’ve got time to kill. I want to get through some movies or TV while I’m out and about.

Give me Netflix Watch Instantly and Hulu on my iPhone! Now that they’re on my XBox and Mac, I’d love them remotely. When I’m out eating lunch or riding in a car, I don’t need HD video. I just need crappy streaming video that will let me knock off an old episode of Newsradio or watch 15 minutes of a crappy movie.

But, if I don’t want to watch something . . .

Sometimes I just want to listen. The fact that the new version of the iPhone firmware lets you download podcasts is great. By why doesn’t it sync my entire podcast list and let me just quickly scan for a new episode of something I listen to? Even better, why not do something similar to Genius and recommend me a podcast I might like?

All that would be very cool.

Oh, and why can’t I sync stuff over bluetooth. That would be good too.

I’ve meant to use Skitch for a while, and finally got around to using it today. It’s pretty cool. For instance, you can do a search for “phpbb is a piece” and find some fun links:

Then, if you want, you can do some fun stuff to it. Like add some comments:

Tada!

Awesome. Takes about 2 seconds.

So, after yesterday’s post about the move to shareware of Aurora (which, again, I don’t begrudge the dev that–it just doesn’t fit into my plans), I got an email from Jerry of Embraceware, the creators of another Mac alarm clock app called Awaken.

Jerry had a good deal for me: a free copy of Awaken.

That’s pretty amazing. I’m a small little blog, written by a web dork. My readership is pretty small. But Jerry is the smartest of marketers. What better way to get the word out about your product than to get it into someone’s hands who’ll try it, write about it, and probably evangelize for it (just based off the fact that it was such a great out of the blue offer).

So I installed Awaken last night, and I woke up to this morning to Bloc Party. It works as advertised, has a pretty nifty interface, and has one feature that Aurora doesn’t: it doesn’t require you to turn off your screen saver password or turn on auto-login. Both of those lower the security of your Mac (particularly if you’re using a laptop, like me), and it always bugged me about Aurora.

Now, with Awaken, even though my machine was locked, the alarm clock turned on and work me up, allowed me to snooze it or turn off the alarm, and then I could go about my daily business.

I like that. A lot.

It’s a pretty app too (especially in full screen mode when you wake up). Here’s a taste (from Embraceware’s flickr account):

Awaken rocks a good bit. I’m probably going to move to it as my alarm clock–it’ll be a whole lot less abrasive than my blaring alarm clock from 1988 (that my girlfriend despises). And then I’ll probably start using it as my sleep timer too, since it’d be pretty cool to toss a movie into iTunes and have it shut down my Mac when it’s done.

Jerry’s done pretty darn good marketing here. I would probably have not even considered Awaken before, but now I’m evangelizing it. I love the internet.

You can check out Jerry’s blog for more info on Awaken.

Aurora’s a pretty cool app for the Mac. I don’t use it very often, but when I’ve been traveling, it’s been nice to have a backup alarm. As I do every day, I ran my little Application Update widget and got really excited when I saw a new release! New cool, free software!

I like things that are free.

Unfortunately, Aurora’s become a shareware app. Well, it’s not really unfortunate. It’s a cool app. I’m sure there’s people for whom it’ll be worth the $15. It’s just not for me; I don’t use it enough. So now I’m left to wonder “Do I keep the old version and get taunted by the AppUpdate widget every time there’s a new release? Or do I remove the old version and learn to live without it?”

Really, that’s what’s currently going through my brain. I think I might actually remove the app. It’s no offense to Aurora, I just don’t want to have that pang every time the widget displays new stuff.