Countdown Clock Live Wallpaper

As much as I hoped that my Round 2 entry for the Last Call for Google I/O 2011 would win me a ticket to the conference, it wasn't in the cards. Still, I'm making lemonade from lemons. I've modified my entry to display as a live wallpaper, and I've added a bit of configuration so that a user can set whatever target date they would like to count down to. The Countdown Clock Live Wallpaper is available on the Android Market.

White - Now Available for Android

I was listening to This Week in Tech on commute and heard Baratunde Thurston comment that he would like to see an app called White in response to COLOR. I was inspired, and today released White on the Android Market :-)

Download today! https://market.android.com/details?id=com.onesadjam.white

Google Sync

After I gave up my BlackBerry, I switched back to using my Dell Axim PDA. I'm very happy with it, and I'm having great luck with Windows Mobile 6.1 One thing that I have struggled with is to find a way to synchronize my mobile calendar, contacts, and e-mail with my Google calendar, contacts, and e-mail. Actually, I should not include e-mail, as that was always easy to do. You can synchronize either via POP or IMAP, whichever you prefer.

So next up was calendar synchronization. My goal was to find a solution that would synchronize my work calendar with my google calendar, and both my Google and work calendars onto my PDA. The first app I tried for this was Google Calendar Sync for Mobile Devices (GCSfMD). This is an application that runs on a Windows Mobile 5.0 or later device and synchronizes the calendar data on the PDA with the Google Calendar. The advantage here is that my work calendar would sync to my device, and then GCSfMD would modify the calendar to also include my Google Calendar appointments. Unfortunately GCSfMD is a one way sync. If I change an appointment on my Google Calendar my device is updated, but if I change an appointment on my device, the Google Calendar is unaltered. So my next attempt was to use Google Calendar Sync. Although the two have very similar names, they behave in very different ways. Google Calendar Sync synchronizes your Outlook calendar directly with your Google Calendar. It is a two-way sync, so if you update either your Outlook Calendar or your Google Calendar, the updates are synchronized between both. This is a great app, and I have gotten great use out of it the last few weeks.

This left contact synchronization. There simply is no good solution for synchronizing Outlook Contacts and Google Contacts. Likewise, the only application that I found that will synchronize my mobile contacts with Google Contacts is OggSync.

Fortunately, today Google released Google Sync. Google Sync works with Windows Mobile and iPhone devices to synchronize both the Calendar and Contacts with your Google data. Best of all, it required no installation on my PDA! I simply modified my ActiveSync setup to point to the Google Mobile server, and everything synced up perfectly.

A couple of questions you might have:

• Why not just use the device web browser to check the Google sites directly?

That would be perfectly acceptable...if my device were a phone. It isn't, and I don't want to pay the extraordinary rates carriers are asking for all you can eat data service. By synchronizing my device, the data is available offline. So even if I'm in the car I still have access to all my calendar, contact, and e-mail data.

• How do you merge the data?

I still need Google Calendar Sync. Google Sync will sync your device data with your Google data, but it will not merge with your Outlook data. I still use Google Calendar Sync to merge my Google Calendar with my Outlook calendar. There is still no solution for merging my contact data, but I'm okay with this because I can live with only having my personal contacts on my device.

• Can I sync my device with both Google and Outlook?

At this time, no. Windows Mobile and iPhone both restrict you to a single synchronization source. You'll need to decide how you want to approach it. For me, I've chosen to make Google my primary data provider, and I sync all of the other data with Google. You may prefer to sync with your Outlook data, in which case you will need to find alternative applications to sync up.

In an ideal world, my device would sync and store all of my various calendars, contacts, e-mail, and data from as many sources as I wanted. Until then, the combination of Google Sync and Google Calendar Sync will fill the void.

Windows 7 Beta Gadgets and User Account Control

If you are running the Windows 7 Beta and have turned User Account Control (UAC) completely off, you may have noticed that the desktop gadgets no longer work. Turn UAC back on, even at a minimum level, and they start working again. Want to have them work all the time? Just add this little registry hack:

[hkey_local_machine\software\microsoft\windows\curentversion\sidebar\settings]
"sidebardockedpartsorder"="0x1,0x2,0x3,0x4"
"allowelevatedprocess"=dword:00000001

No need to restart your machine, just run the desktop gadget gallery and your gadgets will magically reappear.

Twitter on Windows Mobile

I've been playing around with Twitter the last couple of days. I can see the allure: short form updates. It is much easier to send a 140 character or less tweet than it is to compose a blog entry. I think the two forms (blog and tweet) don't necessarily compete head to head, as a tweet is more useful for a status update and a blog is a better venue for elaboration.

Since I'm back to using my PDA (Dell Axim x50v running Windows Mobile 5), I was looking for something that would allow me to track and post updates from it. I first tried Quakk. It certainly looked pretty, and it was able to pull in my friends timeline. A couple of things made me continue looking though. First, the Quakk interface looks great on the QVGA (320x240) screen of most PDAs, but on the true VGA (640x480) of my Axim all of the offsets were messed up. The bottom text was layered on top of the update text. Add to that the second issue: it wasn't able to send a tweet. Every attempt received the same error message, regardless of the update type.

In searching for an alternative I tried PockeTwit. The screenshots really don't do this app justice. It has a very "iPhone" feel in that you can use your finger to scroll through updates. This app correctly pulls in my friend timeline and allows me to post updates. The interface is formatted beautifully on the VGA screen. The application is compatible with Windows Mobile 5 and 6 devices.

If you are a twitterer and have a Windows Mobile device, I highly recommend it. You can follow me at http://twitter.com/JadeMason.

Google Calendar Sync

I am giving up my BlackBerry in at work and reverting back to the use of my PDA (thus the previous posts looking for a cell phone).  As part of this process, I've been looking into different ways of keeping sync'ed, both with my work items and home items.  I tried an open source product called GMobileSync from RareEdge.  On paper it had everything I wanted - it would pull appointments from my Google Calendar and put them on my PDA calendar, and would also push appointments on my PDA to my Google Calendar.  This would allow me to use my PDA as a single source for all of my home and office appointments (and would allow my wife to easily check my availability for doctor's appointments or schedule me as away for any family related things).  Unfortunately, the execution is quite there.  The code is at version 1.3.6, and while it will update my PDA with appointments from my GCal, it won't go the other way (NullReferenceError).  I considered grabbing the code and debugging it, but I'd rather have a solution that just works out of the box.

Enter Google Calendar Sync from Google.  This application runs on the desktop rather than on the PDA, but it does 2-way synchronization between your Outlook calendar and your Google Calendar.  This is perfect, because my PDA syncs with my Outlook calendar anyway.  Now all of my work appointments show up on my Google Calendar, and all of my personal appointments show up on my Outlook calendar.