With the launch of MobileMe they pitched that they would “push” my calendar down to my phone from the MobileMe cloud. Problem is that it doesn’t push down my subscribed calendars. There have been many work-arounds people have suggested, but none of them are clean , easy, and free as of yet. Apple does sync these calendars between computers (if you have two Macs for instance), but doesn’t push the events to prevent duplicating.

Why can’t Apple treat the iPhone/iPod Touch like another Mac and sync the subscribed calendars but not the events? Both of these devices have the ability to connect to the internet and retrieve the feed data so MobileMe doesn’t need to push the data down. This avoids the duplication issue and still allows us to have our subscribed calendars. At this point my trial period expires on October 9th, and while I enjoy all the features it does have, I am finding it doesn’t replace my web hosting package (I did think I could do more with iWeb) and without my calendars it doesn’t seem worth the cost.

Which brings me to another issue I only thought of today. Once I signed up for MobileMe all my music and applications I bought through the iTunes store were being logged under my MobileMe user name and not my Apple ID that I had previously established. If I let my MobileMe account expire, will I still be able to use my applications and get my application updates or will Apple no longer recognize the user name? If the application is free it doesn’t matter, its the ones I paid for that I want to make sure work.

UPDATE:

After writing this post, I began digging around my RSS feeds and trying to catch up. I came across a reference to the service Calgoo being free now. Using Calgoo and Google’s Outlook sync I was able to achieve my holy grail of sync. Technically I don’t need the Google product, but I was already using it, so there was no need to change. Google also supports CalDav now, but requires that you be on iCal 3.x which is only available to Leopard owners (I am still running Tiger) and has several known issues.
Calgoo offers a desktop application that creates connectors between calendar services. It works with Google Calendar, Outlook, iCal, 30 Boxes and Sunbird. I set up the application on my Mac at home and connected a new calendar called Work to the feed from Gcal for my synced work calendar. So on a regular basis (every hour) the Google sync grabs my Outlook calendar and puts it on Gcal. Then (also on an hourly basis) Calgoo grabs the feed from Gcal and puts it on my iCal at home. When MobileMe sync runs it updates the web calendar and my iPhone. The caveat is that my Mac has to be running at home in order for me to use Calgoo.
While this solution does work for me, it would still be simpler for Apple to allow the iPhone to fetch calendar feeds like iCal does. And It still hasn’t convinced me to pay for MobileMe yet.

In my current work environment we are building Java web applications and while I can and do run them locally, it can take a while to put the build up, take it down, modify it and put it back up. Since most of my work is front end focused I spend a lot of time in Firebug testing things before taking the build down to update.

When Firefox 3 launched on Tuesday, I diligently downloaded and installed it. I played around with it a little and saw that Firebug wasn’t updated for it yet. So I packed it away and pulled out Firefox 2 and got back to work. Then I started having tabbing issues. I have had to restart my PC three times because my tab button on my keyboard stops working in Firefox 2. Additionally, if I am in Firebug’s CSS live editing window  and highlight a property it automatically deletes the property when I tab out. Becoming increasingly frustrated I dug around and saw they now have Firebug updated for Firefox 3 but in a beta format (although is it beta 3). so like a good little boy, I installed the new extension and booted Firefox 2 back up.

One of the beautiful things about Firebug is the ability to turn on and off various properties. However in the new beta on Firefox 3 this is causing the entire browser to crash. So here I come Firefox 2, wait what is this…the new beta is incompatible with Firefox 2 BUT deletes the old version on install. Come on guys, if you are going to not be functional, you can at least not touch my previous install.

By the way, what is with Firefox 3 not importing all my bookmarks from Firefox 2 on install? It captured my IE and Opera ones, but ignored the ones I actually use.

I just received a notification from Schmap.com saying they want to use my Cleveland National Forest image for an upcoming edition of the application. The terms look ok even though there is no pay. They do link to my Flickr account and only use a thumbnail, so I will use the publicity.

If you are not familiar with Schmap.com (I am not) they make a free web and desktop application that combines Yahoo! Maps and a travel guide. There are suggested places to visit and activities to do along with photos of the area. It appears as there are some reviews as well. It may be a good resource to check out if you are traveling.

Update:

It looks like they did accept my photo to use for their California guide. You can see it here.

1. It only syncs Outlook events I schedule, so all the meetings that people set up that I need to attend I still have to manually sync.
2. It only syncs the primary Google calendar.

Well it looks like issue number one no longer exists. I am not really clear if this an update or just a case of poor documentation, but looking around today I found out how to make this work. Item number two on this page explains it in detail but the short is this:

1. You must first associate your Outlook email address (this is my corporate address) with your Google account.
2. When setting up the syncing program on your Windows machine, enter this address as the one to sync AND NOT your Google Gmail address as you would think.
3. Run sync. This will add all of your Outlook appointments that you either organized or are a guest on to your Google Calendar. It will also pull down all your appointments on your Google Calendar primary calendar and place them in your Outlook calendar.

While still lacking in the ability to sync multiple calendars from Google to Outlook or to add to Google those meetings set up on a distribution group, this is much closer to the holy grail and accomplishes what I was trying to do. I now have the ability to automatically sync my work calendar (in Outlook) to Google which I then use the iCal subscription URL to import to my Mac’s calendar and sync to my iPhone. Now I have my complete calendar (with a few minor exceptions) on my phone (my true goal) and accessible via the web if I don’t have my phone (Google Calendar).