In this episode, Katie and David tackle managing contacts and calendars on your Mac and iOS Devices.
Links of note
Setup Google Sync on an iDevice
Sync Yahoo Contacts with iDevice
Sync Yahoo Contacts with Address Book
Enable Google Calendar in iCal
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Find Katie and David at Macworld Expo 2011
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Another great show, thanks!
How do you deal with sending out calendar invites on the iPhone and/or iPad?
Thanks David & Katie for another excellent show.
Apropos the topic of Contacts & Calendars I thought you and your listeners might be interested in a program I just started testing call Contactizer Pro. It’s a project management solution that leverages iCal, Address Book and Mail’s database to view and filter all your Contacts, Calendars & Mail in one location. But even more important it allows you to create Projects that link the pertinent information from all of these sources. The ability to link specific emails, tasks, calendar events and client info to one particular project is invaluable.
It syncs using mac sync services and so far hasn’t given me any of the problems that sync services is infamous for such as duplicate entries. It’s a very thorough program and allows for categorization, dividing Projects into discrete steps and more.
As I said I’m just starting to test it’s capabilities and I’d be interested to hear what you or your audience think about it’s usefulness.
Being lucky enough to live in San Francisco, I plan on attending Macworld Expo next week and I’m really looking forward to seeing your presentations.
I love smart groups on the address book, but somehow it doesn’t sync to my iphone. Is there anyway to do this? Great show as always.
The podcast always show up in Stitcher you may want to mention that as well.
For us living in a country where all scheduling is around the week number, I.e. Macworld is week 4 this year, Week Calender http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/week-calendar/id381059732?mt=8 is a nice iphone app.
It has a lot of other nice features also including week view and a more flexible “repeating” settings.
Another great show. Using smart groups to keep up with birthdays is an awesome idea. It really shows you how powerful simple software can become when its in the hands of a savvy user.
Like David and Katie, I also make use of notes for storing information about people, but I’ve found that the Note field is useful for my non-people contacts, too.
I seem to keep adding email addresses for web services (e.g. Pinboard, Evernote, Instapaper, and more). Each of these has a specific syntax that I often forget. So, it finally hit me a few months ago, that I should just put instructions (even templates) in the notes field for each of these. That way, it’s easy to find directions–right where I would expect them to be.
Hi David and Katie. Congratulations on producing such a consistently great podcast.
I wonder if you have any insight into solving a problem we have with Macs and calendars?
My wife uses Gmail for Email. But she needs to use Yahoo calendar for her online calendar (as her boss likes to use the web-based Yahoo calendar).
A key workflow for her is when someone Emails a calendar appointment and she needs it to appear in the Yahoo calendar as soon as possible.
For years she successfully used to use Windows and Microsoft Outlook 2003. Her Gmail Email would arrive into Outllook via pop and any calendar invitations would then be automatically added to the Outlook calendar. Then she used a utility called Yahoo Autosync to synce her Outlook calendar to the online Yahoo calendar. Job done.
However… Yahoo then released the All New “Improved” Yahoo Calendar but inexplicably removed all capability to sync with Outlook! How on earth they can call that an improvement is beyond me, but there it is.
Anyway, I thought this would be a great opportunity to migrate my wife across to the Mac platform, on which I thought iCal should readily sync its calendars with Yahoo using CalDav. Sure enough, I was easily able to set up a CalDav connection to show the online Yahoo calendar within iCal.
But then I ran into a problem when trying to implement y wife’s key workflow and I don’t understand enough about it to know if it’s soluble.
The problem is that when someone sends her an calendar invitation over Email to her Gmail account, the .ics attachment shows an option to add the appointment to iCal (so far so good) but it seems it will only add it to the iCal calendar that is associated with her Google account. There doesn’t seem to be any way to make it add the appointment to the Yahoo CalDav calendar shown in iCal. Also, it doesn’t even seem to be possible to copy or duplicate that appointment out of the Google iCal calendar and into the Yahoo iCal calendar (from where it would sync to the online Yahoo calendar over CalDav)
To reiterate, her key workflow is to receive an appointment request on her Gmail Mail account and have it appear soon afterwards in the online Yahoo calendar. I was hoping Mail and iCal would be able to achieve this, but I can’t make it happen.
Is there a Mac Power User technique I can employ to make this work?
Thanks in advance for any help, and thanks again for providing such a great show.
Storm.
Thanks for another good show this week. I didn’t realize Address Book had an option for related names, and I’m glad to see that. I had been using the Notes field for that, and it was cumbersome. I wish, though, that there was some way to link contacts that were related instead of only having related names available. Anyone know how to make that happen?
Good show. I use exclusively the software that comes with the Mac, with one exception (two after this show!). I have Things, which does re-occurring to do’s and can automatically export them into iCal (and from there, everywhere else) So, they are really only one time to do, but the same one timer appears every day, week or whatever.
That said, I do NOT recommend Things. It really doesn’t do anything else very well and it’s WAY over priced. But, if you already have it, you can use it to get your re-occurring events on iCal without getting busyCal (which even with the promo code is almost as overpriced as Things.)
The second thing I use, after this show, is busy to do, which is only 2 bucks, and really does the trick.
Just a couple of quick notes about using Google for Sync’ing your contacts and calendar: 1) Google has a great merge/duplicate finder accessible right from the contacts website. It’s probably the best duplicate eliminator/merge tool I’ve seen in this space. 2) You can set up either Calendar or Contact sync’ing without adding email (i.e. you don’t have to add google as an exchange account)
http://www.google.com/support/mobile/bin/answer.py?answer=151674 shows the way to do it with the calendar and it’s very similar for contacts.
Thanks…
I kind of think you missed the boat with Daylite. I use it as the nerve center for my law office, complete with managing case status, court calendars, etc. I can add a hearing to my calendar in court on either my iPad or iPod Touch, and it syncs so both my secretary and I have it on out desktop calendars almost instantaneously. Changes to contacts also sync. I can link contacts to individual events in the calendar, so I can print out a report before court showing who is involved in which hearings. I’m a bit surprised you did not think it even merited a link.
As usual – good show guys.
A question for y’all regarding contacts. My wife and I share the same iMac – is there anyway that we can have different address books? Everything seems to point to the one book. I have seen suggestions about logging on as different users, but I am not going to be able to persuade other her to have to log in each time!
Rich
David & Katie,
Do you (or anyone else reading the comments) know a way to publish an iCal calendar that shows only blocks of time scheduled, without all the details on the event (name/location/etc.)? I’m trying to find a way to show when I am busy/available without disclosing all the details that I put in my calendar entries.
An earlier version of iCal had this option, but I cannot seem to find it anywhere now.
Thanks
Would love to hear a show or solutions for small businesses. We’re a creative agency and use Daylite, but will be leaving it behind for google calendar (more extensible and faster). However, I can’t seem to find a solution for sharing contacts within the company. Address Book on our xserve doesn’t really support having approx 4,000 shared company contacts – it’s only a good tool with a small number of contacts with a small amount of people. Please help!
Great show David and Katie! Check out this iPhone app. To me by far the best iPhone app for contact management.
http://itunes.apple.com/au/app/groups-sms-mail-manage-contacts/id300891442?mt=8
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