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]

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.

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.

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.

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.

Why would you need to replace iOS’ built-in podcast management? There’s only one reason, really: if I want to get new podcasts on my device, I have to physically sync it (or go through a ridiculous process of finding that podcast in the iTunes store and downloading it or syncing it). That’s annoying.

So, what does Instacaster having going for it?

• It’s got the basic functionality you need (stream, download, play, pause, double-speed)
• It’s got OPML support (as of version 1.2) to let you easily (not quickly, but easily) add your podcast subscriptions
• It let’s you pseudo-automatically download new podcasts right on your phone, without having to sync it

That last bullet is pretty much the big one. You can refresh your list of podcasts (on 3G or wifi) and pull down any new episodes, reasonably quickly. So, if you’re away from your computer and need something new to listen to, there’s always something available, and it’s easier than the iTunes phone interface.

What’s not so hot?

• The interface isn’t the most straightforward thing ever. Expect a good bit of “oh, that’s what that button does” and “wait, why isn’t this thing cached on my phone” until you figure it out. It’ll only take you a few tries.
• It’s hindered by a fundamental limitation: the iOS APIs won’t let you add songs into the device’s music library. That means that I have to listen to these tracks inside of the application. That’s fine, but it makes it much harder to listen to stuff through my car’s iPhone interface. I have to keep track of where I was at for when I get to work and switch to using my computer and headphones (whereas podcasts in the iPod player simply sync their location and you’re good to go.)

The app is $2, so regardless of the limitations, it’s worth it to me to have the convenience, but if you’re on the fence, wait until you see iOS 5. It wouldn’t shock me to see the podcast interface overhauled, rendering the app obsolete.

Weather app uses notifications to display info on home screen: “We are all familar with the red iOS badge that displays the number of missed calls or unread emails on your home screen. The Fahrenheit – Weather and Temperature on your Home Screen app takes advantage of this notification system to display the temperature on your home screen. It’s a clever use of Apple’s built-in system that does not run afoul of the App Store guidelines.”

Ha, this is very, very clever. It’s a workaround that shouldn’t have to exist (and, I’m guessing, won’t have to exist after iOS 5 is released). But it’s still super clever.

(Via TUAW.)

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My new TV is the same size, but it’s a nice flat, LED LCD TV. It’ll use less power, it’s small and is nicely mounted on the wall rather than taking up half of the living room, and does not have the glare problems the previous TV did. Oh, and it does the fun modern stuff like use HDMI and stream Pandora and all that jazz.

So, for a little bit of money, I was able to upgrade my TV, regain a bunch of space in my living room, clean up my entertainment center from 5 or 6 sets of component and optical cables, to a nice and tidy few feet of real estate, less cables, and a very different way of watching TV.

Let’s set aside the easy stuff. Hooked up via component cables to my TV are the Xbox 360 and Wii. My Xbox 360 is an old model that doesn’t support HDMI (which would have reduce yet another set of cables). The Xbox 360 used to be my streaming Netflix player and DVD player, which for any of you who have one, know that you get great picture and sound, balanced with a ridiculously loud fan noise.

Next up is the new Blu-ray player (which I got cheap with my TV). As someone who just didn’t think it mattered enough for me to go to Blu-ray, I was mostly wrong. It’s a remarkably better picture than DVD, but I’m not sure, in the long run, that it matters …

… because of the interwebs and cable.

The other two items hooked into my TV are the Comcast HD DVR (HDMI) and the nice, new Apple TV (a Christmas gift from my wonderful girlfriend, also hooked up via HDMI).

The DVR is pretty self-explanatory. We pay too much for cable, but in return, we have a ton of HD programming. It’s basically the live sports, network TV, and occasional cable movie player. Live, we really only watch sports. Celtics/Sox/Pats — stuff you can’t watch streaming (at least not legally, or in good quality). Recorded, we watch a bunch of shows (How I Met Your Mother, Parks & Recreation, Community, etc). And, occasionally, we record a movie off of HBO or watch one on On Demand.

The Apple TV is basically the streaming Netflix player. It’s so tiny, and so quiet, and has a much easier to navigate Netflix experience than the Xbox. At this point, I think 90% of our Netflix movies are TV or movies we stream, rather than the physical DVDs (which let me downgrade to the 2-out plan, upgrade to Blu-ray, and reduce our overall bill).

But, the other thing the Apple TV lets me do is take advantage of all of the DVDs I’ve amassed over the 12 years or so that I’ve had a device that would play DVDs. I’ve got a full bookshelf of TV shows and movies that, by and large, site unwatched unless we get the urge to run through a series of Veronica Mars or Buffy. The real reason that we don’t watch move of them is purely that it’s a pain in the ass. You’ve got to go grab the DVD (and if it’s a TV season, all 6 of them), throw them in the DVD player, sit through the menus, watch a few episodes, switch discs, sit through more ads and menus, etc.

The Apple TV obviates that. It’s not perfect, but with a spare computer, and a bit of time, you can make your own On Demand service. I’ve slowly been ripping TV shows and movies from my collection, throwing them onto some storage, and then using the Apple TV to stream them. Want to watch a particular episode of The Simpsons? Just turn on the Apple TV (which takes zero time), click it, and seconds later you’re watching it.

If you’re a media-holic like I am, it’s pretty close to life-changing. When Netflix movies show up now (on DVD), I’m more likely to throw it in the computer, rip it, and then watch it on the Apple TV. Why? One, I can get that done while I’m watching a bit of TV, or eating dinner. When it’s done ripping, I don’t have to sit through any of the stupid ads or menus. I can just watch the movie. And, if I get tired, I just pause it, go to bed, and can pick it up in the same exact spot tomorrow. (Better yet, if I grab another $100 Apple TV, I can pick up streaming it in the bedroom.)

All the pluses, the sunshine, puppy dogs, and happiness in mind, the ripping process isn’t easy. And it’s time-consuming. And, depending on your view of things, not strictly legal. (In my mind, this is pretty much fair-use. I either own or rent the movie. If I own it, I can do what I please. If I rent it, I don’t keep it. I watch it and delete it.)

Someone smart will combine Handbrake and MetaX or Subler into a nice app that rips, tags, and sticks your content right into iTunes. Today, it’s pretty ugly, especially for TV shows.

But, if you’ve got that spare computer and some hard disk space, it’s worth it. You just do it as a background process, throwing a DVD (or ripping a few to your drive), compressing them, and sticking them into iTunes. You can watch them on your TV, sync them to your iPad/iPhone, and slowly work your way towards cutting the cord with the cable company.

I’ve reached the point where, I think, if NESN or Comcast SportsNet were available outside of the cable company, I could cut the cord. ESPN streams over the Xbox (though not everything); most network shows are on Netflix or via the iTunes Store; almost all movies are covered via Netflix, the iTunes Store, or VUDU (the HD streaming service that syncs right to my TV and looks damn good).

If Hulu Plus were to come to Apple TV (or do AirPlay via the iPad), I could replace the $100+ cable bill with $25-30 of Hulu/Netflix/occasional iTunes purchases and watch everything I watch today. That’s probably where we’re headed, and the media companies are going to have to do it right, or they’ll lose like the record companies did.

In any event, I’m pretty happy with the way things ended up, and can’t recommend the Apple TV enough, even if you just want a small, quiet, streaming Netflix player.

And he turns me on to OmniFocus‘ free sync server, and themes. So now my OmniFocus looks bad-ass to go along with keeping me sane by allowing me to throw everything I need to do in it.

Basically, every day, I find out something new about OmniFocus that makes my life a bit easier.

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In both cases, that means whatever I was working on gets dropped, back-burnered, ignored, whatever. I used to deal with that by leaving emails flagged in my inbox, writing emails or post-its to myself, or, wellll … just forgetting what I was working on before.

In any event, it was not a particularly good way to manage my time.

People have been hyping the “Getting Things Done” methodology for the last few years; it’s been almost impossible to avoid the hype in the tech corners of the internet. It seems to be a pretty good philosophy for keeping track of what you’re working on and working on the right stuff. In a nutshell, you either:

• Do it right now
• Ignore it completely
• Put it somewhere that you’ll know to do it later
• Make someone else do it

Nothing groundbreaking, but a good framework.

The problem was, I was doing that all through email, which meant that (on good days) my inbox would be flooded with 10 or 12 flagged items (reminders to do stuff), with more stuff piling on top. Manageable, but not a particularly good way to do stuff (and it ensured that certain things would never get done until someone came and bitched at me).

Then OmniFocus came out for the iPad and I saw some videos and I said “a-ha!” This is what I need to manage all of the crap that flows into my inbox. I grabbed the Mac download and tried it out for two weeks. I spent a couple of hours on a Saturday morning throwing a bunch of my to-do items into the inbox, organizing them, setting up projects, and adding due dates.

It took a week or so to get the hang of it.

And that’s what the folks at The Omni Group expect. They give you a two week trial so that you’ll dump your life into it, get the hang of it, and then need to pay them a reasonably high price (but, so far, worth it) to keep it going.

Now, every morning, I run through my to-dos for the day. Anything that isn’t pressing, I’ll either take the due date off of completely (so that it’s not in my face), or I’ll push it back to an appropriate day. As stuff pops up in my inbox, I grab it and throw it into OmniFocus and then clear it out of my email.

It’s a nice system.

It goes a lot deeper than that, but even if you just use it for breaking down your tasks, that’s probably worth it.

Rather than having 20 flagged emails in my inbox, I head to work and look at my work to-do list, and I’ve got the list of things that are past due, due today, and due over the next few days. When someone asks me “hey, do you have time to work on X“, I can give them a quick rundown of what’s on my plate and ask them which stuff can get pushed off.

Throw in the fact that I’m also managing all of my personal tasks (buying groceries, remembering to clean the kitchen floor, calling to get my wisdom teeth out), and you can pretty quickly see how the value adds up. Oh, and fun stuff like recurring tasks … say, posting to a blog that you’ve left wilting on the vine.

OmniFocus just happens to be the app I ended up on. There are others out there (as well as a million and one ways to do it using Outlook, Gmail, text files, etc).

This tutorial is what got me hooked. If you have 30 minutes, see if the philosophy at least makes sense.

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.

Unfortunately, it meant that my previous script iteration would now continually add alarms, leading to each entry having 3 or 4 alarms. Turns out that updating a local iCal calendar and adding an alarm actually updates that same info at GCal. Which is awesome (but was unexpected).

So, I made a small tweak to the script, which makes it run a bit faster and makes sure that you only get one alarm on an entry:

Try this instead:

tell application "iCal"
  set theCalendars to {"Cal1", "Cal2"}
  repeat with theCurrentValue in theCalendars
	tell calendar theCurrentValue
	  set theEvents to every event
	  repeat with theCurrentEvent in theEvents
	    tell theCurrentEvent
	      if not (exists sound alarm of theCurrentEvent) then
		   make new sound alarm at end /
		   with properties {trigger interval:-15}
		  end if
	    end tell
	  end repeat
	end tell
  end repeat
end tell

That basically means it won’t add another sound alarm if the entry already has one. Much handier. In fact, you could just take that script and have it run every few hours (either cron’d or via iCal), and not have to worry about the iTunes Sync script.

My main calendaring info is in Google Calendar, like a lot of folks. This is great because I can access my calendar from anywhere, on any computer, most cell phones, etc. It gives me a central way to maintain a calendar and have access to it pretty much all the time. I subscribe to my Google Calendar in iCal on my Mac, which gives me native calendaring (one-way, at least) that’s always up-to-date with the data in the Google cloud. It’s nice.

Taking it one step further, I use SyncMyCal to push my Outlook calendar to my Google Calendar as well. (I would use the normal Google Calendar Sync application, but it only syncs with the primary calendar, and I’d rather keep my personal calendar and work calendar separate.) So, every day, before I leave the office, I click a little sync button and it pushes my Outlook info up to Google Calendar. Again, one-way sync, but it’s one-way from my primary source, so I’m not worried about it.

That means I’ve got my personal and work calendars all centrally located on Google Calendar, accessible from pretty much anywhere. Including my primary machine of my Mac, where iCal subscribes to all of my various calendars. It’s a wonderful system.

Except one thing. iCal doesn’t allow you to set alarms on subscribed calendars. At least not through the interface. That makes this wonderful sync system decidedly less useful. See, between my MacBook and my iPhone, I’m pretty much covered. One is with me most of the time. If I had alarms on my calendars, then I’d pretty much have a perfect setup.

It worked incredibly well with my Motorola Q (and The Missing Sync from Mark/Space), which would import all of the calendar items from iCal, and set default alarms on them on the Q. Beautiful.

Not so much on the iPhone. For a couple of months, I’ve just dealt with the fact that using Google Calendar put me in the middle of the two supported options: using iCal and using Exchange (which became available with the 2.0 firmware). I could see the calendar events on my iPhone, but they were never going to make that nice “bleep bleep” sound and let me know that I had a meeting or I had to be somewhere in a few minutes. It’s something I had taken for granted with previous smartphones, but just chalked up to a deficiency in the early years of the iPhone.

Except I finally got fed up enough to do some digging into AppleScript and found some pointers to adding an alarm to an event. I figured why not give it a shot on subscribed calendars? Maybe I could add some alarms to my subscribed calendars?

After poking around and playing with AppleScript (something brand new to me, I got this working):

tell application "iCal"
	set theCalendars to {"Subscribed 1", "Subscribed 2"}
	repeat with theCurrentValue in theCalendars
		tell calendar theCurrentValue
			set theEvents to every event
			repeat with theCurrentEvent in theEvents
				tell theCurrentEvent
					make new sound alarm at end with properties {trigger interval:-15}
				end tell
			end repeat
		end tell
	end repeat
end tell

Basically, we grab our two subscribed calendars (those are placeholder names, replace with your own subscribed calendar names), go through each entry and add a sound alarm 15 minutes before the event. It takes maybe 10 or 15 seconds to go through both of my calendars, but lo! I end up with alarms both in iCal and on the iPhone!

Bingo. Exactly what I need. I’m sure there’s something more elegant, but this worked for me.

The next issue, of course, was a “race condition” of sorts. My calendars update themselves periodically. If they updated before I sync with my iPhone, the alarms would be gone. How could I resolve that?

How about another AppleScript? I did a bit more googling, and of course, there’s a nice way to sync your iPhone (or iPod), via AppleScript. Why not combine both scripts and drop it into the iTunes script directory? That’s a brilliant idea!

tell application "iCal"
	set theCalendars to {"Sub1", "Sub2"}
	repeat with theCurrentValue in theCalendars
		tell calendar theCurrentValue
			set theEvents to every event
			repeat with theCurrentEvent in theEvents
				tell theCurrentEvent
					make new sound alarm at end with properties {trigger interval:-15}
				end tell
			end repeat
		end tell
	end repeat
end tell

tell application "iTunes"
	repeat with s in sources
		if (kind of s is iPod) then update s
	end repeat
end tell

Now, when I’m about to leave the house, I just do this:

That’s it. All of my calendar items, from Google Calendar, sync’d to my iPhone with alarms. It’s a beautiful thing.

And I wish nothing more than for iCal to render it useless my having a “add default alarm to subscribed calendar” checkbox.