B. Mann Consulting

I'm still using Spanning Sync to sync my local calendars to Google. Calendaring is the main sync issue for me: my phone syncs with my local iCal, and then my local iCal syncs to multiple calendars that I have. This is still a bit tricky, since I have a personal Gmail account as well as multiple Google Apps for Domains accounts. My main request is to support multiple accounts and use the "native" login for that account, rather than having to use one account that has access to all calendars. This does work for calendars, but doesn't work for contacts: your contacts will be synced to only one account.

For calendars only, if you have a Series 60 phone, there is also CalSyncS60. This lets you sync directly from your phone to Google calendar. Except, I never got it to work quite right, and I don't have a data plan at the moment, so syncing would be mainly at the home or office where I have wifi.

Me showing Monique the magic of flagging and unflagging and showing how it changes the starred / unstarred in the Gmail web interface. Photo by Duane Storey, you can buy some great photos of Vancouver from him.

I've spent this past week or so having switched to using Gmail's new IMAP interface. I had switched to using the web-only interface for perhaps the last year or so, and it worked quite well for me. POP3 doesn't cut it when you have multiple machines (laptop and home desktop) and devices (Nokia smartphone, iPhone, etc.). And that's exactly what the IMAP protocol was invented to take care: keep folders, messages, and other status (read / unread, flagged, etc.) synced across multiple devices.

I wasn't sure whether I would like going back to using a desktop email client. And it's been great. Email is fast, I can go back to having a couple of drafts open as separate windows to remind me to get to them today, and so on.

Gmail's labels become folders....with a few funky side effects, in that thinking of them more as folders rather than things you might use multiple labels for will be less confusing.

A big thing I miss: I'm so used to the Gmail search interface that I find myself typing "from:Some Name" in Mail.app's search box, rather than typing the name and then clicking the "From" button. I bet some enterprising soul could do a good job of an AppleScript or something that could change this to work Just Like Gmail Search.

OK, enough just talking about the outlines. Head over here for extended instructions on setting up Gmail IMAP for Mail.app or your iPhone, which has the excellent extra tips of "mapping" your Gmail Trash, Junk, Drafts, and Sent folders to the right folders in your local app, and everything "just works".

Those of you with iPhones (or Nokia phones or any other device that can talk IMAP to get email) will want to go this method, so you can actually quickly manage email on the go and have all those changes reflected when you get back to some other device.

Now what? Well, I need a way to sync my contacts in Gmail to my local Address Book. A Plaxo plugin already takes care of synching between machines, and the standard Bluetooth iSync syncs to mobile.

Continuing with the geo theme, I've got a post brewing on what Google is doing and what this means for the growth of geo in general. I tried to get momentum for geo-related stuff for this past February's Northern Voice...but I think I was off by at least a year. Herewith some interesting links and examples of what you can now do with Google and maps.

For example, you can add your own business listing to local (and others can even review it, here's the entry for Bryght in Vancouver), and the Google My Maps now makes it really easy to create your own custom maps (e.g. here is my start of Drupal events around the world). My Maps even lets you add "mapplets" -- different layers that folks create -- here's the directory, I'm a fan of the Flickr Mapplet.

I've been looking for a central place that I can trust to "store" my geo-related information. While I still like 43 Places, it's certainly not going to be the only place I put geo-related data. Can I use Google to just act as a giant store for all my geo-related data, and pull it out, remix it, display it elsewhere as needed?

So, my phone was ringing off the hook this morning with people wanting feedback on the announcement that Microsoft Canada is opening a software development center here in Vancouver.

What's my reaction? It's great! Microsoft Canada has been taking some interesting steps lately, like hiring David Crow, who kick started the Toronto tech scene over the past few years. It was great to catch up with him at the Microsoft Expression launch event I attended a couple of weeks back.

Yahoo missed the chance to have an engineering team here when they moved the entire Flickr team down to San Francisco (the last big tech acquisition here in town, rumoured to be around $40M). Google has spoken with some local universities, but they tend to be computer science snobs, so they went for the more well known Waterloo (also to keep an eye on RIM, which being in the mobile space is going to become increasingly important).

I see the Microsoft lab here in Vancouver as an increasing acknowledgment that "stuff is happening" here. We've got a unique mix of creative and tech people, big companies and start ups, and world events like the 2010 Olympics that are going to put us at center stage.

So...Yahoo and Google...when are the labs coming to town? And, unlike Microsoft who are rumoured to be going to boring Burnaby or Richmond -- stick a center downtown somewhere. Gastown and Yaletown still have lots of room for you!

If you tune to Global TV for the noon show, I may be on there. I've also briefly talked to Business News Network, so we'll see if that's a go for the evening slot. Busy day....

Update: I got a small clip on Global TV in the noon show, which re-aired at 5pm and 6pm. I didn't manage to get the digital version of that clip, I'll update again if I can get a copy. I did end up getting interviewed by Howard Green from BNN (was formally Report on Business TV). It was myself and Bernie Magnan, Chief Economist for the Vancouver Board of Trade. The clip was up about an hour after the show, and I managed to find this direct link to the episode. I'm about 5 - 7 minutes in, and unfortunately it will only play on Windows as far as I can see.

So, everyone is writing about the Google Apps Premier Edition. Lots of partners have announced services that integrate with Google Apps today -- see the Google Enterprise Solutions gallery for what's available today.

I've complained before about Google's messed up identity system (it's not fixed yet). And it looks like SXIP is now doing the same thing that it provides for Salesforce: identity management.

I've pinged the folks at SXIP to find out more. Their press release points to SXIP Access, which is their, dare I say it, "previous" solution vs. the OpenID bandwagon? Or maybe not?

Update: I got the scoop from Lori Pike at SXIP: "At this point in time there's no relation between [SXIP Access] and OpenID or SXIP 2.0/DIX." -- and likely there will be a blog post that explains a bit more.

OK, I've talked to several people about this now and everyone is feeling the pain. 2007 means no more free ride for Google. No, they're not evil....they've just seriously messed up their infrastructure to the point that it is utterly broken.

Darren describes the situation quite well. I know that Jeff has the same issues, with an extra fun one trying to connect to people with Google Talk. Both Jeff and I have talked to people we know inside Google, but they haven't been able to find anyone on the "inside" who knows more.

Here's my screenshot (extended description on Flickr) of being logged in twice with the same address:

Public acknowledgement of the broken-ness? Not that I can find. Response to "regular" channels? i.e. this is critical and I can't use Docs/Spreadsheet? None.

Google, what's the plan? I'm not asking to switch to OpenID or allow OpenID logins or any sort of *crazy* talk like that...I just want your existing identity structure to work, to allow me to combine or retire accounts as needed, and not have everything be broken.

Be nice to have a name or pointer to the person/team that is working on this...there are many people willing to troubleshoot and work on this. 

Seems I set off a bit of an avalanche of feed reader switching (and lots of comments on the first post), so I thought I would post an update.

Short answer: it's working for me, and this is almost entirely due to how well the mobile mode works. I can now easily fit feed reading into a few spare moments. Starring items is how I mark them for followup. 

I do have some issues / wishlist items for Google Reader...but rather than list them, I'll send you off to read Jame Healy, who has a great wishlist (and he just fell in love with Google Reader Mobile). I actually found a bit of a solution to the whole del.icio.us sharing issue: Gordita. That link, thanks to Bill Burcham, will create a bookmarklet for you that will let you bookmark items in del.icio.us from your Google Reader page. Now I can go through and bookmark all my starred items.

Alex Harford wants "oldest first" ordering.

Greg Fox doesn't trust online-only apps (comment):

gmail was pretty crappy for a week and a bit for me.  Hard to sell me on the idea of an online life when service outages can just take everything away.  At least with desktop tools I can see offline content.

If google or someone else could create an online store for feeds, and read vs unread items that I can synch from my desktop(s) that would be useful.  On the road provide a nice UI.  Perhaps google reader already does this.  Don't know since I haven't checked it out. 

 As far as authenticated feed handling goes, I hope that if they add that feature, they handle it correctly.  Some sites authenticate their feeds because it is a pay-for service.  Google reader needs to consider the share feature in light of that.

Re: online only. With my new "business class" mobile phone (and, er, my grandfathered unlimited data Fido account), there are very limited places where I am truly "offline". I agree that more offline or synch services are warranted...but we're still in early days for feed reading in general. Troy Angrignon and Paul Kedrosky have some offline/online thoughts lately.

Your point about "sharing" of for-pay features is, I think, the same as for any other reader: I can easily re-post or otherwise share that content. 

I actually was checking out the Gmail - Google Reader integration via a Greasemonkey script...but this won't work for me. I use mainly my "business" email which is Bryght's Gmail for Domains....but then it tries to use THAT version of my "identity" for Reader, as well. Hey, Google, did I mention you're STILL really screwed up about identity? 

Lastly, I still need something on my desktop for authenticated feeds. I'm going to try out a few other readers to see if they fit this very specific task. My interaction with these feeds are primarily of the sort where it's *really* important whether or not I've actually read them...that is, more like a "to do" list rather than the information trawling I do with my main public feed subscriptions. On the list so far are NewsFire (not free, but gorgeous UI) and RSSOwl (free, open source, cross platform, and home page built with Drupal :P).

I've been a long time user of NetNewsWire -- the best desktop news aggregator app on any platform. But I'm switching to Google Reader.

Reason number one is portability. Forget synching...it just doesn't work reliably, and I don't like NewsGator's online version at all. I'm now on my Nokia E61 phone a lot, and the mobile version of Google Reader works great 

Reason number two is that I want to share. My delicious postings are one of the main ways I've been sharing lightly -- light blog posting in general, except for brief spurts like today. I think that Google Reader will make it easier for me to share. For example, here are all the postings I've gathered in my "bryght" folder. It's not ideal --  I can only tag, star, or share items, without leaving any commentary as I do in delicious -- but I expect it will get better.

The big downside of Google Reader? No authenticated feeds. I have many beefs with Google and the way they're dealing (or not dealing, as the reality is) with identity: this lack of support for authenticated feeds seems another aspect of this. 

I made this post originally with Blogplanet, a Java app for mobile. It may end up being one of the few mobile apps that I actually keep around.

But what do I mean about mobile apps vs. the mobile web? Well, we talk a lot about web applications, but we usually think about a full desktop and browser supporting them. The mobile web can be thought of as being the web optimized for mobile devices, or we can think about how web-based applications should be evolving to work well with mobile devices.

Then there are mobile apps. Many of them are, indeed, written in Java for that mythical write once run anywhere, although in the mobile world it's more like write once, endlessly test, tweak, and optimize everywhere. The platform specific apps tend to be richer and more polished -- e.g. Series 60 apps for the vast variety of Symbian phones out there. ShoZu is a pretty good example, but even there, there is Seres 60 vXX where incompatibilities creep in.

So, I've been using both the mobile web and mobile apps on my new E61. And the mobile web is winning. Much of that is due to Google.

Gmail? Works great in HTML (*not* mobile) mode using the built in browser. Google Reader has a mobile friendly mode. Google Maps actually doesn't work very well / at all, and I actually used Mapquest. But, then there's a mobile app for this -- downloadable Google Maps for Mobile. Chalk one point up for mobile apps.

So why would I use Gmail instead of the built in email client? Which I could even configure with Blackberry push email? Well, one reason is that Gmail for domains is my main email, and I heavily label / sort my email. On the mobile, using POP3, it just grabs everything.  I don't see myself using the built in email client until Gmail (or another system I use) supports IMAP.

Going forward, the browser on my mobile device will, like the desktop, continue to be the most important application on there. Are you developing for mobile? Well, forget it...you're developing for the web, some of it just happens to have slightly smaller screens.

I've been spending a lot of time lately looking at video online. Part of it has been technical, and part of it has been thinking about what is needed and where it is headed. I was involved with IPTV / video over IP back at Nortel, and a lot of things actually haven't changed.

As if video on the Internet wasn't hot enough already, the whole Google buys YouTube has upped the fever pitch to...well, something hotter than fever :P

So, for starters, go and read (and link to!) Kevin Marks' five point plan to save use from Flash video. He included "crappy" in the title, and he's right, but...well, it's what works today.

And that's what will stop us from getting any further. Getting stuck in the "works today" mindset is a bad thing. When you sit down to build something new, you're really never building it for today...you're building it for today AND for the next little while. Somebody has to take a chance on figuring out the future. 

In any case, I very much agree with all of Kevin's points. The phrase "detection script" makes me shiver a bit, and Flash is still the only platform solution if you want one integrated application that has interactivity built into it as well, but for straight up video, we can do better, and should be trying to.