Jim Panttaja

Mary and I are sharing our calendars on Google Calendar, and now I learn that I can easily interact with Google Calendar via SMS (Brady Forrest post on OReilly Radar: SMS to GCal).

You can send an SMS to 48368: ‘next’ gets your next appointment, ‘day’ gets today’s appointments, ‘nday’ gets tomorrows appointments. ‘help’ gets a short description of these commands.

You can create events by sending an SMS to that same ‘address’. You can send phrases like “Family party Saturday at Sally’s at noon” - and it will figure out what you have in mind, and create the calendar event.

This approach is much easier than opening a web page, navigating to the right place, and picking menu choices. I now have a running SMS ’session’ with 48368 (GVENT) - so it is easy to find on my phone.

Brady’s post includes a couple of other links for further information.

By the way, I have finished scanning through the electronic edition of iPhone the Missing Manual by David Pogue. I have the print version on order - but while traveling it was easy to zip through the online version on my Mac. There are a number of useful tidbits in here. There were answers to questions that I had asked (not that I asked David - but I asked the ether, and David came through) - and answers to questions that hadn’t occurred to me… If you have an iPhone in your life, you need this book.