Timothy Armes' blog

As a photographer I need to be very organised.  I have to manage my shoots, maintain contact with my clients and other individuals, keep up to date with my paperwork, etc.  However, generally speaking, and as my wife will attest, I’m not the most organised person. It’s not through a lack of desire to be more organised, it’s just that I’ve always lacked that tools that work for me personally.

All this has now changed. For the past few months I’ve been exceptionally well organised thanks to many services and technologies that have come to fruition, and these services are improving all the time. I hope that others my benefit from my tenacity in making this all work for me…

The major player in my newly organised life is Google. Google’s technologies are simply excellent for a number of reasons:

• They are very well thought out
• They have great user interfaces
• They are free of charge
• They are accessible from anywhere
• Most importantly, they are open.

Openness is an essential part of the Google philosophy; whereas many companies have previously tried to lock users into their system by using proprietary data formats and by limiting exportation of data, Google’s sensible “the data belongs to the user” approach, whereby the user can easily get their data out of Google, is one of the major reasons that so many people want use it!  Ironic, isn’t it?

I use Google as the synchronisation hub for nearly all my organisational needs.  GMail is my email service and also the central repository for all my contact information, Google Calendar is used to organise my schedule, Google Documents allow me access to information that I’ll need on the road, and I use Google Reader for reading my (long) RSS list. This is all well and good, but its the combination of Google with other technologies that makes this system work so well, so I’ll discuss each of them in turn in a moment.

The other key in my organisational arsenal is my iPhone. Having the internet, email, contact and calendars up to date and in my pocket the whole time is absolutely essential to the success of this system.

Email

In my opinion GMail is the best on-line email client there is. There are a couple of missing features (such graphical signatures) but these disadvantages are outweighed easily.  There are two killer features: the first is the unparalleled grouping of messages into conversations, and the second is the ability to send emails as if they came from external addresses. I have several email addresses that all feed into GMail (where they are labelled automatically), and when I respond the reply will be seen to come from that email address, and not my gmail.com address. This not only looks more professional, it also allows me to dissociate myself from GMail should I decide not to use the service in the future.

Obviously I can access my Gmail account from the iPhone. Since I wish to send emails from my own domain and not from the gmail.com address I used the iPhone’s ability to access GMail as a generic IMAP email server rather than using the built in GMail option.

Back on the Mac the obvious disadvantage of using a web based email client is that you don’t get handy message arrival notifications and you can’t drag and drop attachments onto the interface. One solution to is use Apple Mail to access the GMail account via IMAP¹, however you then lose the advantages of the GMail interface (better conversation grouping, labels, stars, archiving, spam reporting, etc). Fortunately there’s a fantastic solution to the problem – Mailplane. My biggest fear is that this app stops being sold….

Contacts

Until recently Google’s treatment of contacts was abysmal in that everyone that you ever replied to would be added to your contact list. In my case, since I reply to many support requests everyday, I had an enormous list of contacts that I didn’t personally know. Using Google as the central database for my contacts was out of the question.

This has all changed now. Google still stores all contacts (which does have advantages), but a subset of those can be manually moved into the “My Contact” list, and other lists can also be created. The “My Contacts” list is my central contact database, and this is synchronized with my iPhone using Google Sync Services.   Instantaneous over-the-air syncing is great – I rarely sync my iPhone with iTunes nowadays.  The only missing feature is the inability to synchronise groups other than the “My Contacts” list – I’m hoping that that’ll come soon.

I don’t personally synchronise my contacts with my Mac because I use Mailplane as the email client, but this is apparently possible.

Calendars

The Google Calender is a great example of using the web for collaborative purposes. All my calendars are hosted by Google, and it’s the same for my wife. I can see hers and she can see mine. It’s fab. Once again the calendars are synchronised to the iPhone using Google Sync Services. There used to be an annoying limitation of 5 synchonised calendars but this has now been lifted to 25 so the issue has become moot.

Note that Google Sync Services acts as an Exchange server to do its magic.  Since the iPhone can only connect to one Exchange account this would be a problem for those who already use one. The iPhone 3.0 software now allows you to subscribe to CalDav services (such as Google Calendar), so you can now continue to use Exchange and access the Google Calendars using CalDav. It doesn’t solve the problem of synchronising Google contacts however….

On the Mac I prefer to use iCal, and thanks to the excellent BusySync application I can synchronise my Google calendars with iCal.  BusySync is a very comprehensive and flexible calendar synchonisation solution for the Mac.  Another solution is the SpanningSync, but I don’t like this as much since is relies on access to their servers.

Tasks (To-dos)

Google has tasks, but for the moment I’m not keen on the implementation. Instead, I rely on the Remember the Milk service. My tasks are hosted there, and are synchronised with my iPhone in two ways:

• I use their iPhone Application to enter my tasks.  (I hope that they introduce push notifications soon).
• Tasks with due dates are subscribed to as a read only calendar (iPhone 3.0 software needed)

I tend to forget tasks easily if I don’t see them every day.  Again, Remember The Milk comes to the rescue with a GMail gadget that displays the tasks in the sidebar on the left.  I then use the Google Labs gadget that shifts the labels to the right hand side so that I don’t run out of vertical space.  Note that Remember The Milk also offer a firefox plugin, but since I want to see my tasks in GMail using Mailplane, I don’t use it.

I also Remember The Milk’s iGoogle gadget (more about iGoogle later….)

Finally, I subscribe to the tasks list from Google Calendar too.

Documents

Google Documents allow me to create and share simple documents, presentations and spreadsheets, and to access and edit them anywhere.  There’s no need to have appropriate editing software (such as Excel) installed on the machine. This is great for collaborative stuff.

When I wish to have full time access to native format documents (such as Excel spreadsheets) I use Dropbox. Dropbox allows me to maintain a centralised archive of documents and then have them automatically synchronised between any machines that I install the software on.  I can even read the docs on the iPhone.

RSS

By using Google Reader to read my RSS feeds I can, once again,  read and stay synchronised everywhere.  On my iPhone I use the Byline application to stay synchonised with Google Reader.

Bookmarks

Bookmark syncing is handled by XMarks.  This service allows me to synchonise my bookmarks between Firefox and Safari (and thus my iPhone) and also allows me to access my bookmarks directly from their site when I’m on another machine.

iGoogle

iGoogle is a customisable home page for Google, and I think it’s very underrated.  I use this as my home page, and it gives me a one page overview of my calendar, tasks (thanks to the above mentioned gadget), RSS feeds, etc.  I highly recommend it.

Twitter & Facebook

I stay in touch socially using Twitter and Facebook.  I’d never really used these services much before, but the iPhone changes everything…

A note about MobileMe

MobileMe may well be a great option for many Mac uses, and if offers some great services.  If I could pick and choose then I’d probably use it, however I don’t want to pay for a ton of stuff that I’ll never use.  GMail is a much better email web client, Bookmark syncing doesn’t work with Firefox, Back to my Mac is handled free by LogMeIn, and the free DropBox is better than iDisk in many ways.  If I could just pay for “Find my iPhone” I’d do that.

Summary

The above technologies work for me because my data is always readily accessible and always up to date.  Once set up it’s as smooth as silk and has been very reliable.  I’m sure that there are other options worth mention, and you can leave your thoughts in the comments.

1. IMAP allows email to be synchronised across all clients. For example, if I read or delete a mail on my iPhone it’ll be seen as read or deleted on the server or by any other client that I use. This is in sharp contrast to the utterly useless POP protocol. [↩]

This entry was posted on Monday, June 29th, 2009 at 8:00 pm and is filed under Business Practises. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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