bradKELLETT

I see it all the time – some new blog post detailing how to sync your Google calendar and contacts to somewhere, usually to the iPhone, using some new 3rd party service or crazy trick. Many people suggest NuevaSync to sync directly to the iPhone, or using CalDAV to get your calendars to iCal so they can be synced through iTunes.

Fact is, they are missing a key feature of Google apps that lets you sync to a lot of places, including the iPhone, directly and with push updates – Google supports Microsoft Exchange for both contacts and calendars.

With the Exchange support, you can get push updates to any device or application that supports Exchange, including Outlook on the desktop and the iPhone with v3.0 software and above. It doesn’t get around syncing to iCal (unless you’re already on Snow Leopard, which supports Exchange out of the box), but it’s damn good for mobile devices.

Here are the instructions for setting it up on the iPhone, and you can use the server settings from there to set up any other device/app that supports Exchange.

(Yes, an update. I know it’s been a while, but I will try to blog more regularly.)

While I understand Google had to do a lot behind the scenes to ensure that actions mapped into Gmail properly, it has been a long wait for long-time Gmail users like me to get IMAP support in Google’s mail product. I’ve been using Microsoft Exchange for email for a while, but with my reshuffling of jobs, I found I no longer need the advanced features that it provides. Instead, with the new addition of IMAP access (a necessity in my books), I decided to save myself the money on Exchange and switch to Google Apps, and as such, back into Gmail.

This decision left me with a conundrum – how to get my bank of email out of the clutches of the MS empire and into the supposedly less evil Gmail. While my mailbox is not the largest around, weighing in at around 2GB, this was still a daunting task. IMAP support certainly made this easier, but finding the right application to do the move proved difficult.

I tried Outlook 2007 itself, Mozilla Thunderbird, Entourage, and Eudora with varying success, from Outlook’s constant timeouts on the IMAP connection, to Thunderbird ending up with messages without subjects or senders due to Exchange mangling headers. The solution came from an unlikely source: Windows Mail.

Windows Mail is the replacement to Outlook Express in Windows Vista, and was able to import email directly from the Exchange server through Outlook, then upload it to Gmail through IMAP. While the process was slow (around 10 hours for all my email), it managed to get the job done perfectly, without any timeouts and with the complete messages intact. I did not expect much from Windows Mail, but it pulled through in the end, and if Thunderbird wasn’t so damn good, I would consider using it as my full-time email client.

I now have Thunderbird with the Lightning calendar plugin syncing to my Google Apps Gmail and Google Calender, complete with all my email and calendar entries from Exchange. I still fire up Outlook and use the wonderful RemoteCalendars to pull down my Google Calendar for syncing with my iPhone and other devices, but other than that I am totally satisfied with the free alternative to Exchange.

I took the plunge yesterday and installed Windows Vista Home Premium on my notebook, and overall I am relatively impressed. I have had the betas sitting around for some time, but never installed them. My notebook is my full-time work and pleasure computer, so I did not take this move lightly. I am not going to write a massive review, there is plenty of that around the internet, but I will note down my impressions so far.

Pros

• The new effects are nice, and not too intrusive.
• I completely agree with Greg Hughes, everything does run considerably faster. I have been having performance issues with Outlook 2007 since the betas, but finally it runs at a normal speed. Unlike Greg, I do run Aero Glass.
• The Sidebar is nice, but see below in the cons section for my issues with it.
• Flip 3D is mainly eye candy, but I like it.
• The updated user security model is welcome, and even being a power user, I think I will still get some benefit out of it. The administrator authorization boxes are very intrusive though, blacking out everything on the screen but the dialog box.
• While Vista seems to take longer to start up, it resumes from sleep and hibernate much faster than XP.

Cons

• I am not convinced about the Aero Glass look. It is nice, but the way window title bars go black when they are maximized doesn’t sit well with me.
• Windows Media Player is ugly, ugly, ugly with Aero Glass. Way too much transparency.
• While it is nice, I feel the Sidebar could have been better implemented. I am a fan of sidebars, but the one included with Windows Vista can look quite messy, as sometimes gadgets don’t seem to line up well. I also hate that you can’t resize gadgets or the Sidebar itself. I’ll be running with it for a few days, but I am not sure if it will be a permanent fixture. I used an application called Desktop Sidebar some time ago, and it was a much better solution.
• I cannot for the life of me work out how to undock toolbars from the taskbar. I used to run with a toolbar docked to the side of my screen with the quick launch bar and my desktop icons in it, but I now can’t do that.

I will probably add to this list over the coming days as I discover new things that I like and that annoy me. The above is not a comprehensive list of all the pros of Vista, just the things that make me say ‘hmm, that’s nice.’

Driver support has so far been quite good. The only problems I had were with my notebook’s built in camera and the 3.5mm sound jack not working, but a quick visit to the HP site to download different drivers fixed both problems.

An interesting thing that I would normally just pass over happened to me a couple of days ago: I was talking about Windows Media Player with a friend of mine, and when I told him he should upgrade to the new version 11, he did not know that Microsoft made it, and as such asked where he could download it.

While this didn’t strike me as odd at all for a start, in hindsight it really was quite interesting. This person, who is very computer literate and intelligent, took no notice that Windows Media Player came bundled with Windows XP, and used it based purely on its media merits. To me, this seems to completely oppose what was trying to be proven in the 2004 European Union anti-trust lawsuit that resulted in the creation of Windows XP N (a version of Windows XP without Windows Media Player bundled).

In this suit, it was ruled that Microsoft “…broke European Union competition law by leveraging its near monopoly in the market for PC operating systems onto the market for… media players,” [link] and by including Windows Media Player with the operating system it did not encourage users to make their own choice in a media player. Here is a regular user, one that probably has more knowledge than most (and an avid music listener at that), that made a complete and free choice of media player.

I’m not a lawyer, this is just some food for thought. Just because a piece of software is there, doesn’t mean that a user will not seek alternatives.

Edit: I should mention that I’m not getting a kick-back from Orb or affiliated with them in any way, this is just personal experience.

After we did the video demo of the Sling Media mobile beta running on a Motorola Q for MobileBurn, it got me thinking about place shifting. Things like the SlingBox aren’t available in Australia at the moment, so I didn’t really give it much more thought. Until I was contacted by the PR guy for Orb, that is.

Orb is a free (!) application for Windows boxes that will stream media over the Internet to pretty much any device you can think of. It supports WMV, Real, WinAmp, and 3GP formats, and runs though a personalized web page that works great even on small (read: mobile device) screens.

Having just received the Nokia E61, I thought I would check all this out. I loaded Orb onto my Windows Media Center box, and after a few configuration jitters, I was streaming both live TV and recorded TV to my Nokia. Orb plugs into Media Center perfectly, showing guide listings, program descriptions, everything. It also handles music and photos just as well.

If you are into place shifting, check it out, and kudos to Orb for making such a cool free application.

It seems that I’m not alone in my problems blogging with the Word 2007 Beta, detailed here. Ed Bott, in a post about a free AV for Vista beta testers, notes that when he tries to publish from Word 2007 to his WordPress blog his posts seem to disappear into the ether.

I don’t believe that this is a problem with posts disappearing, just that they are getting a post date of far into the past – in my case, it was December 1969. For everyone having trouble posting from Word 2007 to a WordPress blog, fire up your admin console and head to Manage > Posts and change the browse month dropdown to whatever is the abstract date.

Along with over 200,000 other people, I downloaded the Microsoft Office 2007 Beta 2 when it was released to the public the other day. In my job, I basically live in Word and Outlook, and as such was hesitant to install beta versions of these products. Nonetheless, I bit the bullet and did it, and overall my experience has been fairly good. Read more after the jump.

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I was invited to the Expression Web Designer (the much needed replacement for the terrible Microsoft Front Page) beta today, and so far my impression of the beast is not good.

And it hasn’t even finished installing yet.

After downloading the 250-odd megabyte install file and double-clicking like a trained Microsoft monkey (think Robert Scoble), the installer prompted me if I really wanted to proceed, then extracted the setup files, and promptly launched a progress dialog of the install. While I can understand that Microsoft may want to simplify the install process, there are absolutely no options related to the install. I have no idea where it is installing to, or what components are being installed. I’m quite annoyed with the product already, and I haven’t even gotten to the first launch.

Microsoft better change this for the final version, as I know I’m not alone in not liking installers that don’t give a hint of what they are doing.

Speaking of the install, this is taking freaking ages…

Update: Now that it has finished, it wants to restart the computer. This is a web design product, and I already had ASP.Net and any other things that may have been prerequisites installed, why should I have to reboot?

I have a Windows Media Center Edition PC that I use as my full-time machine, and have a Linksys Media Center Extender out in the lounge room that connects back to my box. It is a beefy PC (dual core 3.0GHz, 1GB RAM etc.) so this doesn’t have much of a performance hit for me when someone is watching TV and I’m trying to work. Overall, I was satisfied with the experience, until I got my Xbox 360.

The Xbox 360 has Media Extender functionality built in, and it absolutely trumps Linksys’ effort. Not only do you get the full MCE experience, including transitions, effects, and sounds, which the Linksys box did not (the interface was the same, but was just static – none of MCE’s niceties), but gone are any stutter problems I was having, and the video quality is much better.

In short, if you are thinking of getting a Media Center Extender and like gaming as well, the Xbox 360 is a great way of doing it.

Like a sheep happily wandering with the pack to the slaughter, I went out and bought an Xbox 360 yesterday. The Australian launch obviously was not as intense as the US one, as the box was only released yesterday, and without a pre-order, I simply wandered into a shop and picked one up. The assistant said that out of an initial shipment of about 80, they still had about 20 Premium bundles left.

So, here are my initial impressions.

Positive:

• The graphics are quite special
• Attention has been paid to the little things, such as the ‘Ring of Light’ that tells you which wireless controller is connected to which ‘port’
• The controllers are much more comfortable to hold than the previous Xbox, even with the Controller S of the original

Negative:

• The power brick really is huge
• The thing is loud when it spools up
• Everything in the Live Arcade costs money if you want a full version, it would be nice if they gave you some small games free.

For those curious, I bought a premium bundle with an extra wireless controller.

I’ll continue posting some of my impressions as the 360 and I get further acquainted, but for now its back to work for me.