Jim Panttaja

Mary and I want to share our calendars. We have utilized Google Calendars, and now have subscribed to those in iCal. This allows us to edit the calendars in Google (or send invitations from Outlook, Entourage or other sources), and then view them (read only) in iCal. We have a Google Calendar for each of us, and a joint one. In iCal you right click in the Calendar pane (left hand pane) and choose subscribe, entering the iCal URL from Google Calendar. It isn’t a perfect solution – but works for the moment.

I had hoped with a 2 megapixel camera, that we could use ScanR – sending faxes, entering business cards, and OCRing documents. But for the moment, Apple is resizing the images to 640×480 before emailing them (to ScanR) – which isn’t enough resolution for ScanR.

I am now using my iPhone to view my eBay to check on items I am selling, Google Analytics to check on access to our web site, and the TextDrive admin site to administer our hosted system.

I have added both an Exchange email account, and my personal email account (hosted by TextDrive) – as IMAP accounts. This does allow me to have folders that I save items to on my iPhone – so I have a way to ‘store’ files of interest – spreadsheets and other items. It seems like there should be an independent folder system – but at least I can save content.

Note that the iPhone is turning out to be, primarily, a read-only device. There are limited places that you can write stuff: add contacts, add calendar entries, send emails, take pictures, add crude notes in the Notes application.

The map is quite useful. Although we travel with a GPS device (a portable one that can work in the car – as well as tell us how far, how fast and how high we have gone on our bike), we found the iPhone quite handy. It can give us a map of any of our contacts (I keep contact info for my 2700 closest friends on mine) by clicking on the address in the contact. You can then use that as a from or a to for a trip. The iPhone does not know its own location – so you have to provide both ends. But you now have directions – including a list you can step through. I click on the ‘car’ in the bottom right of the map page, and you get an overlay of traffic conditions.