Spanning sync is a program that lets you sync your iCal and Address Book with Google Calendar and your Gmail Contacts. For those of you who need a discount code, here you go:

For those of you who don’t know what Spanning Sync is, here’s some info:

Synchronize iCal and Address Book with Google Calendar and Gmail Contacts. Share calendars and contacts among multiple Macs. And while you’re at it, connect Google Apps to your iPhone or iPod.

Sync Calendars and Contacts
What if you could combine the speed and elegance of iCal and Address Book on your Mac with the power and simplicity of Google Calendar and Contacts? Now you can.

Spanning Sync keeps your iCal calendars in sync with Google Calendar and Address Book in sync with your Gmail Contacts, so you get the best of both worlds.

Full Support for Google Apps
Spanning Sync offers full support for Google Apps. So whether your organization is a one-person company or a 40,000-person university, your enterprise calendars and contacts are seamlessly and securely connected to your Macs.

Stay Organized Across Multiple Macs
If you’re lucky enough to have more than one Mac, keeping your data organized can be a challenge. But Spanning Sync makes it simple to organize your calendars and contacts: just sync all of your Macs to the same Google Calendar account.

So whether you’re using your Mac Pro at work, your iMac at home, or your MacBook on the go, your calendars and contacts are always up to date. And since Spanning Sync is licensed per-person not per-computer, you can install it on as many Macs as you like without paying more.

iCal Sharing Has Never Been Easier
Need to set up a shared iCal calendar for your group? Spanning Sync makes it easy. Just create and share a Google Calendar, then sync it with iCal on your Mac. Changes made in Google Calendar show up in iCal—and changes made in iCal show up in Google Calendar.

The Best Way to Connect Google Apps to iPhone
Syncing your Google calendars and contacts with your iPhone is a breeze. Just use Spanning Sync to sync Google with your Mac and iTunes to sync your Mac with your iPhone. Since Spanning Sync takes full advantage of Mac OS X Sync Services, it all just works.

International Support
More than 100,000 people in 58 countries1 have used Spanning Sync. And since we intend Spanning Sync to be a useful service for not only English speakers but every Mac user in the world, we’ve localized the service into German, French, and Japanese, and plan to eventually support all 16 languages in which Google Calendar is available.

-Taken from SpanningSync.com

Spanning Sync connects Mac OS X’s iCal and Address Book to Google Calendar and Gmail Contacts, and allows you to share calendars and contacts between multiple Macs. It includes full support for Google Apps, and connects Google calendars and contacts with your iPhone. Check out the screencast on their web site for a great demo of how it works.

Use this link to save $5 on any Spanning Sync order:

http://spanningsync.com/?r=T8T9XR

This recent debut of the Microsoft Office 2010 Technical Preview (s msft) was exciting to many, including myself. However, as a long-time Microsoft Office user, the news that the online component of Office 2010, Office Web, won’t be ready for technical preview until later this summer was a bit of a buzzkill.

If you’re running Office 2003 or Office 2007 and you can’t wait for Office Web, there are some applications available that can help you get your Microsoft Office data into the cloud, via Google Apps (s goog) or Zoho Business. These applications can give you piece of mind that your data is backed up and accessible anywhere, and can also help you test the waters for a full migration to a web office suite.

Syncing Applications
While syncing can be a somewhat of a dark art (even with established applications, getting your data to sync properly can be tricky), here is a roundup of some of the more popular syncing apps:

• Google Calendar Sync lets you sync your Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook calendar data. Unfortunately, Google Calendar Sync does not yet support Google Tasks.
  
• Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook let you sync Microsoft Outlook email, contacts, and calendar with Google Applications Premier Edition. Unfortunately, installing Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook disables the ability to search Outlook data.

Microsoft Office Add-Ins and Windows Applications
There are a number of Microsoft Office add-ins that enable you to move your Microsoft Office data to the cloud, including:

• Zoho Plugin for Microsoft Office enables you to access and edit Zoho documents and spreadsheets offline using Microsoft Office. You can also publish local documents to to the cloud via  Zoho Share.
  
• WebWorkerDaily covered OffiSync, which allows you to use Google Docs file storage and collaboration from a Microsoft application toolbar.
• Google Docs Uploader is a simple Windows application that enables you to upload Office documents to Google Docs using a simple drag-and-drop interface. You need to be running the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 or higher.
  

Hosted Applications
Moving your Microsoft Office data into the cloud doesn’t necessarily mean using Google Apps or Zoho Business. We covered the launch of Microsoft Online Services, which provides hosted SharePoint and Exchange services. I like the thought of Exchange and SharePoint hosted in the cloud, although my experience with SharePoint hosted through third parties has been less than favorable. As Online Services is hosted by Microsoft, I’m hoping it will provide a better experience. Microsoft Online Services makes these services more accessible to freelancers and small- to medium-sized businesses that lack the personnel and resources normally required to run them.

Applications for Neglected Mac Users
I count myself as one of the Mac (s aapl) users stuck in Microsoft Office. As Darrell Etherington wrote about on TheAppleBlog, Mac users are going to have to wait for the Office 2010 goodness. However, there  are some third-party applications available that can help put your Office data into the cloud while you are waiting:

• Spanning Sync can sync iCal and Address Book with Google Calendar and Gmail Contacts.
• MobileMe can sync Microsoft Office data from Office on the Mac to the cloud. Unfortunately, I encountered way too many issues with MobileMe after its amateurish launch so I didn’t renew my account. Apple tried to be everything to everybody and stumbled when it came to cloud computing; my plan is to revisit MobileMe in a year to see if Apple has gotten its act together. MobileMe is a fee-based service.
• GDocsUploader, previously covered by WebWorkerDaily, is nothing more than a small applet that enables you to upload documents to Google Docs via a drag-and-drop interface.

Can Microsoft Office and Web Offices Coexist?
While these third-party and vendor applications, add-ins and services may seem like a rag-tag bunch, they do build a case for coexistence of the desktop-bound Microsoft Office and the various web office suites, although sometimes there are incompatibility problems. I’m hopeful that the interaction between Office 2010 and its web components will provide a smooth round trip for my documents from Microsoft Office on my desktop to Office Web, without the file compatibility issues from using third parties.

How do you use Office with the cloud?

I’ve never been as organized as I currently am with the combination of my MacBook Pro, iPhone and Google Calendar. Sure, before I crossed the line to Apple (s aapl), I had tried to use Thunderbird (with Lightning’s Calendar plugin) to keep organized, syncing to my Windows Mobile phone, but it was always clunky and slow and not worth the effort when things didn’t “Just Work.” Since tasting the sweet Apple pie, I now have multiple Google (s goog) calendars shared with my wife and synced to both of our Macs and iPod touch/iPhones with Spanning Sync. We are now totally organized, and it’s awesome.

However, like any data system, it’s a case of garbage in, garbage out. The combination of data corruption and synchronization is one that can wreak total and utter havoc on the most organized of people, rendering us as useless as a fish out of water. To combat the potential of this scenario, the folks over at Spanning Sync have released a public beta of its new utility, Spanning Tools.

Spanning Tools is a preventative maintenance suite, analyzing your critical data, alerting you of potential problems, and allowing you to take the appropriate action to eliminate the threat before it manifests in corruption. Spanning Tools comprises three separate utilities.

Calendar Cleaner

Calendar Cleaner scans your iCal databases looking for duplicate events and those with malformed dates. It strongly suggests backing up your iCal database first — neatly providing the backup and restore functionality within the application.

Contacts Cleaner

Like the Calendar Cleaner, the Contacts Cleaner scans your Address Book for dodgy data in your contacts. It checks for duplicate contacts, duplicate email addresses, contacts with only a single name or a space in a name field (which can cause problems with synchronization). In all cases, you have multiple ways to fix the data (such as using “???” for a blank name, converting to a company contact, removing the space, replacing it with a hyphen, etc). As with Calendar Cleaner, it also has built-in Address Book backup and restore functionality.

Sync Tune-Up

The last utility, Sync Tune-Up, provides a window into Apple’s Sync Services, allowing you to see exactly what applications are registered with the service and have access to your data. This gives you an easy method to disable a rogue application that you think is causing a problem, or that you just don’t use anymore.

Sync Tune-Up also provides some last-resort trouble-shooting options to Reset your sync data if things have stopped working completely.

Great Potential

Spanning Tools has great potential as a preventative maintenance utility with critical organization data. I consider it akin to keeping the chain well-greased on your bicycle. The folks at Spanning Sync haven’t announced if Spanning Tools will be a paid product when the final version is released — but in the meantime, the public preview has worked flawlessly for me by identifying some potential issues and presented suitable fixes. I can sleep a little better at night in knowing my organizational data is solid.

Spanning sync is a program that lets you sync your iCal and Address Book with Google Calendar and Gmail’s Address Book. For those of you who need a discount code, here you go:

For those of you who don’t know what Spanning Sync is, here’s some info:

Synchronize iCal and Address Book with Google Calendar and Gmail Contacts. Share calendars and contacts among multiple Macs. And while you’re at it, connect Google Apps to your iPhone or iPod.

Sync Calendars and Contacts
What if you could combine the speed and elegance of iCal and Address Book on your Mac with the power and simplicity of Google Calendar and Contacts? Now you can.

Spanning Sync keeps your iCal calendars in sync with Google Calendar and Address Book in sync with your Gmail Contacts, so you get the best of both worlds.

Full Support for Google Apps
Spanning Sync offers full support for Google Apps. So whether your organization is a one-person company or a 40,000-person university, your enterprise calendars and contacts are seamlessly and securely connected to your Macs.

Stay Organized Across Multiple Macs
If you’re lucky enough to have more than one Mac, keeping your data organized can be a challenge. But Spanning Sync makes it simple to organize your calendars and contacts: just sync all of your Macs to the same Google Calendar account.

So whether you’re using your Mac Pro at work, your iMac at home, or your MacBook on the go, your calendars and contacts are always up to date. And since Spanning Sync is licensed per-person not per-computer, you can install it on as many Macs as you like without paying more.

iCal Sharing Has Never Been Easier
Need to set up a shared iCal calendar for your group? Spanning Sync makes it easy. Just create and share a Google Calendar, then sync it with iCal on your Mac. Changes made in Google Calendar show up in iCal—and changes made in iCal show up in Google Calendar.

The Best Way to Connect Google Apps to iPhone
Syncing your Google calendars and contacts with your iPhone is a breeze. Just use Spanning Sync to sync Google with your Mac and iTunes to sync your Mac with your iPhone. Since Spanning Sync takes full advantage of Mac OS X Sync Services, it all just works.

International Support
More than 100,000 people in 58 countries1 have used Spanning Sync. And since we intend Spanning Sync to be a useful service for not only English speakers but every Mac user in the world, we’ve localized the service into German, French, and Japanese, and plan to eventually support all 16 languages in which Google Calendar is available.

-Taken from SpanningSync.com

Idag har jag tagit steget fullt ut och synkat mig totalt mot Google. Det innebär att min e-post, kalender och adressbok är identisk hos Google, i min dator och i min mobiltelefon.

Jag har tidigare synkat e-posten på detta sätt mot Google, men det var inte förrän alldeles nyligen som de införde denna möjlighet för kalendrar och adressböcker.

Att synka sig mot Google är rätt så enkelt. Deras dokumentation täcker det mesta, men det var en liten sak som inte framgick så tydligt. För att få tillgång till Google Sync så måste man ställa om administrationsgränssnittet i Google Apps till engelska.

I samband med detta så passade jag även på att uppgradera till Premium-versionen av Google Apps. För 315 kr/användare/år så får man med Premium tillgång till fler/bättre/roligare funktioner, 25 GB utrymme/användare och en SLA på 99,9 % (på svenska betyder det max 8 timmar och 45 minuter nedtid/år).

Det finns även alternativ till Google Sync. Ett sådant, som David Svensson tipsade mig om, är Spanning Sync. Ett annat alternativ, som Microsoft erbjuder, är Live Mesh.

Att vara synkroniserad på detta sätt är hur fint som helst. Jag har t ex varit lite frustrerad över att inte ha tillgång till min kalender i mobilen, när jag varit ute och sprungit (på möten), men nu är det ett minne blott.

Det här med synkronisering av e-post/kalendrar/adresser är egentligen inget nytt. I den större/mer traditionella affärsvärlden har det existerat länge. Men lösningarna för detta har varit rätt så dyra och komplexa (vilket kan förklara varför det här är populärt i Norge).

Det enda som saknas nu är en möjlighet att synkronisera all data mot Google. Men det kommer förmodligen rätt så snart. Till dess är kombinationen Google Apps och Google Sync en billig, snabb och enkel lösning för att synkronisera och förenkla vardagen, både som företagare och privatperson.

Spanning sync is a program that lets you sync your iCal and Address Book with Google Calendar and Gmail’s Address Book. For those of you who need a discount code, here you go:

For those of you who don’t know what Spanning Sync is, here’s some info:

Synchronize iCal and Address Book with Google Calendar and Gmail Contacts. Share calendars and contacts among multiple Macs. And while you’re at it, connect Google Apps to your iPhone or iPod.

Sync Calendars and Contacts
What if you could combine the speed and elegance of iCal and Address Book on your Mac with the power and simplicity of Google Calendar and Contacts? Now you can.

Spanning Sync keeps your iCal calendars in sync with Google Calendar and Address Book in sync with your Gmail Contacts, so you get the best of both worlds.

Full Support for Google Apps
Spanning Sync offers full support for Google Apps. So whether your organization is a one-person company or a 40,000-person university, your enterprise calendars and contacts are seamlessly and securely connected to your Macs.

Stay Organized Across Multiple Macs
If you’re lucky enough to have more than one Mac, keeping your data organized can be a challenge. But Spanning Sync makes it simple to organize your calendars and contacts: just sync all of your Macs to the same Google Calendar account.

So whether you’re using your Mac Pro at work, your iMac at home, or your MacBook on the go, your calendars and contacts are always up to date. And since Spanning Sync is licensed per-person not per-computer, you can install it on as many Macs as you like without paying more.

iCal Sharing Has Never Been Easier
Need to set up a shared iCal calendar for your group? Spanning Sync makes it easy. Just create and share a Google Calendar, then sync it with iCal on your Mac. Changes made in Google Calendar show up in iCal—and changes made in iCal show up in Google Calendar.

The Best Way to Connect Google Apps to iPhone
Syncing your Google calendars and contacts with your iPhone is a breeze. Just use Spanning Sync to sync Google with your Mac and iTunes to sync your Mac with your iPhone. Since Spanning Sync takes full advantage of Mac OS X Sync Services, it all just works.

International Support
More than 100,000 people in 58 countries1 have used Spanning Sync. And since we intend Spanning Sync to be a useful service for not only English speakers but every Mac user in the world, we’ve localized the service into German, French, and Japanese, and plan to eventually support all 16 languages in which Google Calendar is available.

-Taken from SpanningSync.com

Hi everyone, it’s the Geeky Grad here and I’m an addict. I have a Macbook Pro, a Time Capsule, two iPods, an iPhone and an AppleTV. Yes, before you ask I’ve got serious fanboy issues. However I’m less than impressed with MobileMe, so much so that I’m moving away from it.

A little while ago, Google (s goog) released a free iCal-to-Google Calendar sync tool called Calabaration. I don’t believe that Calabaration works very well, given how it generates a new calendar group within iCal and has limitations on how the Google Calendar can then sync to MobileMe. So I reached out to BusyMac, the makers of BusySync, and Spanning Sync, makers of the Spanning Sync application, to see if they wouldn’t mind me reviewing their products. Both companies happily agreed. Here’s what I learned:

Commonalities

Each one:

• Installs as a preference pane in the System Preferences.
• Is very easy to configure.
• Has fantastic support. Also, hats off to both developers for answering so many of my questions and for helping me to diagnose some key problems with sync services.
• Doesn’t appear to have any tangible impact on system performance.
• Works with MobileMe, enabling you to view/edit your Google Calendar within iCal, on the MobileMe web site and via an iPhone (s aapl).
• Has excellent instructional videos, tutorials and documentation.
• Let’s you perform a reset of the application so that you can start over with clean settings.
• Has exceptional logging so that if you do come across a problem, it is easy for the developer to help resolve it.

Differences

• BusySync’s primary function is to enable direct editing of iCal calendars in small business environments. The Google Calendar sync feature is just another bonus to the overall package.
• SpanningSync not only syncs with Google Calendar, it also Syncs with Gmail Contacts. Granted, if you have an iPhone, Apple’s Address Book also lets you sync your contacts with Gmail. The key difference here is that SpanningSync also syncs the contact photo.
• Pricing. BusySync has a base price + potential upgrade price model. Spanning Sync has a subscription model or an optional flat-fee price.

BusySync – Details

Once you install BusySync, you can configure it via the preference pane. If you are running BusySync as a single user, the only real benefit is syncing your local iCal calendar with Google Calendar.

However, if you are in a multi-user environment, this is where BusySync really shines. In the Bookspan household, we have two Macs and using BusySync solves a key problem: With the three of us, we have many schedules to maintain. Here’s an example:

Using BusySync enables my wife to directly edit my calendar and vice versa. And we both can sync our updated calendars to MobileMe, enabling us to see the calendar info on our iPhones.

We can also make edits offline and BusySync will automatically update the other user’s calendar once the computer is online again. This is also handy, as my wife doesn’t leave her MacBook running all day.

Lastly, setting up Google Sync is pretty trivial. You just provide your Google credentials, specify which calendars you want to sync and BusySync does the rest. Here is an example:

Of course, no software is perfect. It would be great if BusySync supported the ability to sync iCal ToDos. BusySync also can’t sync meeting attendees from iCal to Google Calendar. However, BusySync will sync alarms and meeting attendees from Google Calendar back to iCal.

Spanning Sync – Details

After you install Spanning Sync, you can also configure it via a preference pane. Like BusySync, setting up Google Calendar Sync is very easy. Once you provide your Google credentials, you then specify which calendars and contacts you want to sync and Spanning Sync does the rest. Here is an example:

If you really care about how your Address Book Contacts sync with Google, then Spanning Sync is the tool to have. Using the product, you can specify which contact groups you want to sync, or all contacts. Further, Spanning Sync is intelligent in the way it handles name formatting between Address Book and Google:

The developers are trying to figure out a way to enable Address Book Group support when syncing. If they can achieve this, it would be a minor miracle, as syncing between any Sync Services enabled application does not support this (for example, Microsoft Entourage and Address Book).

During my testing of Spanning Sync, the developer released a software update that improved memory usage by 4 times! As an added bonus, syncing performance was also significantly improved.

Finally, just like BusySync, the Spanning Sync application cannot sync iCal ToDos. Further, Spanning Sync can’t sync meeting attendees from iCal to Google Calendar. However, also like BusySync, the Spanning Sync application will sync meeting attendees and alarms from Google Calendar back to iCal.

Conclusion and Recommendation

Both of these products are solid applications that can easily meet your needs. If you are looking for more capability than what Google provides with their CalDAV sync tool Calabaration, then you can’t loose with either BusySync or Spanning Sync.

In order to make BusySync most effective, you’ll need at least two licenses which will run you about $50. This is not inexpensive, although when you look at the value, it’s pretty reasonable. Further, the Developer has not charged for an upgrade in the history of the product.

By comparison, Spanning Sync is a $25/year subscription (which includes all upgrades per year) or you can pay for an unlimited license for a total of $65. I personally am not a fan of annuities, so if you plan to buy Spanning Sync, I recommend the unlimited license. Interestingly enough, Spanning Sync recently introduced a new incentive pricing program. They call it Save 5 + Make 5 — essentially each referral you make saves your friend $5 and you receive a $5 bonus. Not bad.

In the Bookspan household, we have chosen BusySync because of the additional iCal functionality. However, that is not a negative toward Spanning Sync. In fact, if my wife and I didn’t need to edit each other’s calendars, then Spanning Sync would be preferred due to its ability to sync Address Book contacts with GMail Contacts (with the added bonus of syncing photos, too).

Spanning sync is one amazing program! For those of you who need a discount code, here you go:

For those of you who don’t know what Spanning Sync is, here’s some info:

Synchronize iCal and Address Book with Google Calendar and Gmail Contacts. Share calendars and contacts among multiple Macs. And while you’re at it, connect Google Apps to your iPhone or iPod.

Sync Calendars and Contacts
What if you could combine the speed and elegance of iCal and Address Book on your Mac with the power and simplicity of Google Calendar and Contacts? Now you can.

Spanning Sync keeps your iCal calendars in sync with Google Calendar and Address Book in sync with your Gmail Contacts, so you get the best of both worlds.

Full Support for Google Apps
Spanning Sync offers full support for Google Apps. So whether your organization is a one-person company or a 40,000-person university, your enterprise calendars and contacts are seamlessly and securely connected to your Macs.

Stay Organized Across Multiple Macs
If you’re lucky enough to have more than one Mac, keeping your data organized can be a challenge. But Spanning Sync makes it simple to organize your calendars and contacts: just sync all of your Macs to the same Google Calendar account.

So whether you’re using your Mac Pro at work, your iMac at home, or your MacBook on the go, your calendars and contacts are always up to date. And since Spanning Sync is licensed per-person not per-computer, you can install it on as many Macs as you like without paying more.

iCal Sharing Has Never Been Easier
Need to set up a shared iCal calendar for your group? Spanning Sync makes it easy. Just create and share a Google Calendar, then sync it with iCal on your Mac. Changes made in Google Calendar show up in iCal—and changes made in iCal show up in Google Calendar.

The Best Way to Connect Google Apps to iPhone
Syncing your Google calendars and contacts with your iPhone is a breeze. Just use Spanning Sync to sync Google with your Mac and iTunes to sync your Mac with your iPhone. Since Spanning Sync takes full advantage of Mac OS X Sync Services, it all just works.

International Support
More than 100,000 people in 58 countries1 have used Spanning Sync. And since we intend Spanning Sync to be a useful service for not only English speakers but every Mac user in the world, we’ve localized the service into German, French, and Japanese, and plan to eventually support all 16 languages in which Google Calendar is available.

-Taken from SpanningSync.com

Ein Grund mehr Spanning Sync zu verwenden: Der Support ist super! 

Bei mir waren plötzlich Kalendereinträge, die ich auf dem iMac hinzugefügt hatte, nicht mehr im iCal des AirBooks aufgetaucht. Nachdem ich den Fehlerbericht an den Support geschickt hatte, hatte ich die Lösung ruckzuck im Emailpostfach: Schuld war ein Sync Services Bug, der eigentlich mit 10.5.5 behoben wurde, bei mir aber trotzdem hängen geblieben ist….das Löschen des Kalender-Caches hat dann das Problem sofort gelöst.

Schon seit einer ganzen Weile nutze ich zufrieden Spanning Sync zur Synchronisation meiner iCal Kalender zwischen meinen zwei Macs und Google Calendar. Seit heute kann man damit auch bequem seine Adressbuchkontakte synchronisieren. Ein Feature auf welches ich sehnsüchtig gewartet habe. 

Ich kann das Programm jedem der iCal und das Adressbuch auf mehreren Macs nutzt nur wärmstens empfehlen. Seit zwei Monaten hat Spanning Sync eine Aktion gestartet, so dass man 5$ Rabatt erhält wenn man das ganze über einen Link eines bereits bezahlenden Nutzers kauft.

Der aktuelle Dollarkurs macht Spanning Sync zwar nicht mehr zu mehr zum Super-Schnäppchen, aber das Geld ist meiner Meinung nach dennoch gut investiert! Mein Geiz-ist-Geil-Link ist im Text und unten als Bild “versteckt”.

I’ve been trying out Spanning Sync for a while lately. The thing I haven’t been too fond of is the thought of “what am I going to do after this trial runs out? Am I REALLY going to pay for this software?” The answer is (fortunately) no.

Enter: Calgoo and Calgoo Connect. Calgoo Connect is an app for both Windows and Mac OS X that does the same thing that Spanning Sync does, but (and here’s the kicker) for FREE!

I dashed over to Calgoo’s signup “hub“, signed myself up, and then downloaded Calgoo Connect.

The setup was quite easy, although I didn’t like that I had to make a new connection for each calendar of mine, but I like how it allows me to sync calendars from multiple GCal accounts.

It was easy to do and now everything works just as it did with Spanning Sync. So, my iCal, GCal, and I are all happy.

So I bit the bullet and sprung for a .Mac account for my photography site. I had been using the .Mac trial for the past 60 days to back up settings and host a small gallery, so I knew what I was buying into. And I have to say, I’m very happy with it. iWeb is a great, simple, and fast program for building a website, and with 1-button publishing, updating my site couldn’t be easier. With iPhoto, I can create any number of slick looking galleries (anyone seen the cool Carousel gallery feature?) and keep them free-standing, integrate them into my site (via iWeb), or even create users/passwords for individuals to access private galleries. I can do the same thing through Aperture for my professional photography (I manage my personal pictures through iPhoto and professional ones through Aperture). This feature will be great when I launch my photography company. I’ll be able to go to an event with cards that have a generic username and password and pass that out so people can access the event’s pictures. Or, I can take e-mail addresses and send out specific usernames/passwords to each person so they can see only their own pictures. It’s all so simple to do, super-fast with 1-click uploading, and the results look great! Add to that, you can use your own domain name for your .Mac site, and it’s suddenly very professional too. I’m sure I’m just scratching the surface of what I can do with iLife and .Mac; I can’t wait to see what else is in store as I dig deeper!

Google Apps is something I’ve been playing around with for a while now (in fact, I purchased my domain with GoDaddy through them), and it’s been indispensable. I have Gmail with my own domain name (which forwards a copy of every email to my cell phone instantly), a nice looking start page, and an online calendar (synced with iCal via Spanning Sync). Not to mention, Google Docs, if I ever need ‘em. I have all this (plus this blog) under one roof because .Mac doesn’t take full control of the domain, just the ‘www’ CNAME. It’s been a long time since I’ve worked on DNS side of building a website, so this is all (re)new to me, and I love it. The last site I had built was hosted by the registrar, and I couldn’t change anything to use stuff outside of my own site. Being able to have the best of several different worlds under one domain is wonderful!

One problem that continued to pester me is one that is near and dear to the heart of all attorneys, the calendar. My office uses a PC Network with a specialized legal application called “Timematters”. Timematters is a PC only application and one of the things it does well is sync with my Treo 650. This way my secretary and staff is entering contacts, appointments, and task items which sync into my Treo. This is very helpful to me. The problem is when I want to look at my calendar at home on something other than the tiny Treo screen. So therein lies the challenge — sync my Treo with my Mac without screwing up the data when I return to my office. (It would not be fun explaining to my colleagues how I managed to wipe out the contact database) As an aside I was never able to successfully do this on my old PC laptop either.

This is not as easy at it should seem. The Palm desktop may be the worst program ever written in both its PC and Mac variants. But I think the Mac version is particularly loathsome. I try to sync with it and it takes FOREVER. Furthermore, it doesn’t always grab all the data and worse yet it seems to corrupt data when I send it back at work. I also tried “The Missing Sync” to no avail (although a lot people swear by it).

The good news is I’ve found a solution using Google Calendar and GooSync. GooSync can be found at www.goosync.com and is made by a UK based company, Toffa International. GooSync allows you to sync your Google Calendar with just about any cell phone that has a calendar app. If you go to their site they have a list of supported phones. With my Treo it actually installed a small palm application that, with a press of a button, allows me to sync my treo to my google calendar. GooSync talks to my google calendar and sync’s all changes on both the phone and those on google. When I go back to the office it then integrates those changes straight into my windows based calendar software without a hiccup.

One nice feature of this is there are no cables. You can sync your phone from anywhere. I usually hit the GooSync button on my Treo as I drive home from the office and again in the morning as I head back in. The free version of GooSync will synchronize for 30 days. If you purchase a 1 year subscription at 20 pounds (which ended up costing me about $40, it will sync an entire year.

If you really want to go crazy, you can also buy Spanning Sync. This program installs a system preference tool that works very similar to the .mac synchronization. When you first set it up you can attach each of your google calendars to a separately created calendar in Apple iCal. I’ve had it running on my MacBook Pro now for 2 weeks with no problem whatsoever. Because it allows you to sync multiple calendars I can pull down my office calendar (uploaded with GooSync), my wife’s calendar, the Google US holiday calendar, and any other public google calendar. I can make adjustments to both calendars and the sync process puts it all together on both systems.

I’ve been very pleased with this program. My wife still works on a PC and it allows her and I to keep up with each other. This also lets me see my calendar, via google calendar, even when I’m away from my mac. It also works fine on multiple macs. I bought my daughter an iMac and the program works fine on my user account on her computer. If you don’t believe me then go to the website. They have a very nice video demonstration.

They offer a trial demonstration of 15 days. They have an interesting license schedule, its $25 a year or a one-time fee of $65. I bought the one year license. I highly recommend this program if you have need of viewing and editing your calendar from other computers, or share calendar data with other users (especially cross platform). It is a great little application that quietly does exactly what you expect it to every time.

The net result for me with these two programs is that my secretary, my wife, and I can all be looking at and changing my calendar from multiple locations and multiple platforms and at the end of the day everything syncs up flawlessly. Since my calendar is constantly changing, this is a very good thing.

Spanning Sync, which connects Google Calendars to iCal, has released V1.0 and it’s pricing structure today.

I’ve been a part of the Spanning Sync beta team for the last four months and have really watched this product grow. The team is really responsive and I’m sure that support (as with any V1.0 product) will be focused and quick.

How this has impacted what I do each day: My schedule is basically full with appointments 2 (or even 3) weeks out. My team is unable to schedule project reviews, client meetings, etc., without checking with me and my availability first. This way I’m able to give them access to my Google calendars which update with Spanning Sync every 10 minutes. This has really allowed my team to schedule meetings, etc quickly, be responsive to our clients, all without needing immediate access to me and my computer.

Spanning Sync also has a discussion group and a development blog. Both have been helpful.