FoxBoom!

It would be nice if the “Birthdays” calendar was updated independantly of iCal.

If I add a new contact with a birthday on my iPhone, that birthday doesn’t appear in Google Calendar (via BusySync) until I open iCal.

This is not the best.

Every month, the top two search phrases that people hit this blog with are “foxboom” and “westward bound”. I have no idea why people would be searching for the first, but I guess the second is down to kinky little buggers.

Another big one is a barrel of variants on “payment processing is temporarily unavailable”. which is thanks to Apple sucking at web services and having to take their credit card services offline for 23 hours out of the day and leaving us poor suckers to plead for help online. In fact, I even got two hits from “apple support sucks” last month. And “google calendar sucks on iphone” and “mobile me is down”, and “mobile me contacts disappeared” and “mobileme resize problem” and “fuck apple”… man, all this MobileMe hating!

Wow… I’m even the fifth result on Google for “fuck apple”.

And some things are just totally unpredictable. Like being on the first page of results for “norm abram icon”. Or being the top match for “orona fursuit”.

God, I love you guys!

Also, if you choose to access your Google calendar in iCal via CalDAV, you cannot edit that calendar’s events on your iPhone.

Poop.

If you try to access your Google Calendar in iCal via CalDAV, but iCal tells you “account information not found” or “calendar (whatever) bould not be found”, then check your calendar URL. You probably copied it from the support page with a space on the end.

And yeah, that’s “bould”.

D’oh!

You know what sucks about keeping a calendar?

On my iPhone, I prefer the native calendar application to the Google Calendar web application. On my laptop, I prefer the Google Calendar web application to iCal. I want to be able to create and edit events on the iPhone application when I’m on there, and in Google Calendar when I’m not. On top of that, I need my calendar to be published online so I can import it into my work calendar in the office, and so my housemate can see it.

So far, I’ve had to ditch Google Calendar, and just sync my iPhone with iCal, and have iCal automatically upload my calendar to a private server so my housemate and work can get to it. The problem is, I need to remember to open iCal every time I sync my iPhone, otherwise changes I’ve made on it don’t get uploaded immediately.

This is too much hassle. Like, way too much.

I’ve downloaded the trial version of BusyMac. I’m hoping to be able to use the iPhone native calendar and Google Calendar together, depending on where I’m logged in, use Google Calendar as the public version, and publish my calendar on my LAN via Bonjour.

Yep, that’s nice and simple… kinda. If it works!

What’s a guy to do?

Back in the old days, I kept my personal calendar in iCal, and published it to .Mac so I could view it in Outlook at work.

This was great until .Mac went off line for a month and chewed through my e-mail and wouldn’t give me my calendar backups back (bitter, moi?), so I moved over to Google Calendar, which was brilliant, apart from losing the beautiful iCal interface and the automatic “birthdays” calendar generated from the Address Book.

But now, I have the iPhone calendar application. Google Calendar’s iPhone interface is almost as good, but not over GPRS.

So I figured it was time to go back to iCal so I can sync with the iPhone, but to see if I can publish my calendar somewhere outside of .Mac. I noticed iCal has a “publish to private server” option, but it seems to be WebDAV rather than FTP, and as great as my hosts are, they don’t support WebDAV.

I did a spot of research, and found a couple of free WebDAV hosts, but before I could sign up for any of them… I found out that iCal actually can publish through FTP after all.

Awesome!

As the obnoxious bag it came in tells me, I’ve “got it”. But rather than “it” being something as pedestrian as, say, syphilis or a Segway, it’s an iPhone.

A quick note for O2 staff: it’s a little worrying when you respond to “I’d like to buy an iPhone please” with “A what?”. And whilst I appreciate you taking the time to share your sales script with me, I’m afraid there really isn’t a polite way of saying “dude, I’ve been obsessing over this thing on the Internet for months — just take my fucking card and let me pay”, so I apologise if I came off a little short.

But now I have it! And so far, I think one of the smallest design considerations has impressed me the most; when I got home, I had a moment of dread when I realised the activation process would probably need to know my O2 account details (at least an account reference or something) to transfer my existing number, and I had no idea where all that paperwork was. I figured I’d go through the process up until that point, then try to find what I needed. But — joy to Apple’s work-out-of-the-box mentality! — when I chose to move my existing number to the iPhone, it asked for that number, then SMSed a PIN to it to prove I own it. When I entered that same PIN back in, that was proof enough and the iPhone was activated.

Whew!

In a nutshell, it’s awesome. I still need to figure out a cool way of using my del.icio.us bookmarks on it, since I don’t use Safari and thus syncing with its bookmarks is not useful. Gmail works beautifully without any fucking around, and the built-in calendar is kinda redundant when Google Calendar works so well and puts my events on the web too. Google Reader formats itself well for the iPhone, but it’s a tad confusing.

Everything else works as well as everyone else has already said. I get on very well with the keyboard and the camera is great as a portable (but then, I have a Canon 20D in tow for anything that matters). And with mad props to the BBC News team, my first SMS message was “my shoe is beef”.

Dudes, .Mac has eaten my address book and calendars, and is currently chomping through my incoming e-mail.

My new e-mail address is jon@foxboom.com, which points at GMail. I’ve shifted my appointments and reminders to Google Calendar, and I already keep my bookmarks on del.icio.us.

I’m pretty pissed at spending £69/$140 a year to backup my Really Important Stuff, to then have it totally fail. I’m even MORE pissed that my support tickets have been totally ignored.

The main point of all this is that my e-mail address has changed to jon@foxboom.com. Rar.