You cannot, absolutely cannot, use Apple’s iCloud and sync your contacts and calendars with Google Apps also. This is new as of the OS/X Lion (10.7) release and seems like a stupid, stupid idea to me.

Spanning Sync and Soocial (both of which used to support very nice services in this regard) are out in the cold. I have both of them — and neither has been able to solve the problem. Basically you have to choose between using Apple cloud (iCloud) or someone else’s cloud (such as Google). Unfortunately, that means you can either have seamless syncing between all you Apple gizmos… or, you have to take a more manual approach.

So, for those frustrated Lion customers out there, if you want the more manual approach, here are a few tips:

1. Turn off iCloud for calendars and contacts on your computer.

2. Disable any kind of iCloud syncing for calendars and contacts on your devices, too.
3. I deleted all the contacts/calendar databases from my mobile devices (well, it happens automatically when you disable the iCloud syncing).
4. Now, on your Mac, turn on iCal and AddressBook syncing to Google or, if you prefer a more powerful option with more configurability, get a copy of Spanning Sync or go with Soocial, or some other service. These do good jobs of preventing dupes, etc.
5. Set your iPhone or iPad to use an Exchange server for contact and calendar syncing. (I still prefer to use a Google server for mail, it works better).

There you go. You should be mostly in the same place as with iCloud, although there are a few limitations. For instance, Google doesn’t support all the custom contact fields that iCloud supports. That hasn’t had much of an impact on me, although it can bother some people. Other than that, I’d just have to say things aren’t exactly, quite as seamless as with iCloud… for instance, iCal integration with Google Calendar works great, but you can tell from the user interface that they weren’t really made to work together from day one.

I hope that helps, but I know it’s a frustrating situation.

It would be great if Apple fixed their shit (so to speak) but I don’t expect it. They’ve been making some bad decisions this year… releasing Lion too early, the horrible new AddressBook design, the mess that was iTunes Match (I think it’s fixed now but I’m not going to risk it). Seems to me Apple is becoming more political, and less focused on the old mantra of “it just works.” Bah. It doesn’t work anymore.

Overall I’m happy with the upgrade. There are some really nice usability improvements, in general I’d say performance is great, and some of the new features are really very handy.

Take, for instance, the new Font Book that ships with Lion. For years I’ve used, loved, and cursed Suitcase Fusion for managing my fonts. I’ve got about 800 or so that I’ve accumulated over the years — enough to pose a small organizational nightmare if not done well. Past version of OS/X have had no problem handling the number of fonts, but organization was a pain.

The new Font Book has some much needed improvement. It now clearly indicates duplicate fonts and makes resolving duplicates easy. And, more important, it does a fantastic job of diagnosing font issues — far better than Suitcase, it turns out. I had nearly 80 fonts in my Suitcase library that were in some way defective (ranging from missing kerning information to more dramatic problems). So hands down, kudos for the new Font Book.

I’ve removed Suitcase Fusion and am loving it — Suitcase has had its quirks and problems and frankly I think they’ve been getting worse. Lately I’ve seen huge CPU usage, lockups, and less reliability than in the past… and reviews of the latest release make it sound even worse. Now that Lion has some really solid font management and organization improvements, it’s one less thing I have install (and pay for).

We first heard rumors of this policy change a couple of months ago, but now it’s made the papers: the Financial Times is reporting that Google is phasing out the use of Windows internally, as employees are migrated to either Linux or Mac OS X on machine turnovers or new hires. The policy change was precipitated in large part by the security breach attributed to Chinese hackers; Google’s IT leaders apparently feel that Microsoft’s OS represents too great a risk across the enterprise to leave it in place.

Personally, I stay as technology-agnostic as I can, at least in the professional arena. If a Windows-based solution is the right choice for a company, that’s what I recommend — and, there are many situations (more than most) where it is the right choice. But, on a purely personal level, my inner child does a little jig of joy when it hears that someone else is getting fed up with poor software. Seeing Google add their voice to the many companies pushing-back against Vista is a good thing.

I know all the arguments for tolerance: AT&T’s network was slammed with unexpected adoption levels; they are trying to roll out more coverage; they are upgrading their networks. But that doesn’t change the fact that when I bought my iPhone 3Gs, I cancelled my data card and plan and have been waiting for over a year listening to promises of “real soon now.” In the meantime, I’m inconvenienced on every business trip. Dishonesty is at the heart of the matter: AT&T needs to deliver on their promise, or tell us what’s really going on.

So, for the record: If a class action suit gets off the ground, I’m in.

Just my own two cents regarding the Ars Technica article appealing to our commercial senses: While Ars may feel the pinch as more people start to block ads, the fact of the matter is — it’s a sign of tolerance levels in the audience. As more ads are blocked, the industry starts to realize that people don’t like current advertising practices. Find a new way to do it, or suffer the consequences.

According to TUAW you can buy the CoPilot application for a $2.99 per month subscription, or opt for a $19.99 per year payment. That’s a heck of a lot more attractive than AT&T’s plan (which would run about $120 per year). You can give the application a try for free, too, as it comes with a 30 day trial period when you first download it. TUAW does point out, thought, that after using CoPilot for a couple of years, you could have bought the higher rated TomTom or Navigon apps, both of which seem to have more features and fewer problems than CoPilot. Check out some of the reviews on the Apple store before buying: CoPilot has it’s pros and cons.

1. It’s cross platform, working seamlessly on my iPhone. Any information I capture appears both on my laptop and my iPhone and is fully searchable in either place.
2. Evernote’s search and retrieval capabilities are phenomenal. In part, this is because it uploads everything to a central server where character recognition is run on everything non-text, turning images, scans, faxes and PDF files into fully, content-searchable documents.

As my library of Evernote content has grown it has become more and more indispensable. This took a while. At first I had my typical quandary when facing a new tool. “Where do I put this? How will I find it again?” Eventually I discovered the answer to both questions is actually quite simple: Put everything in Evernote, and don’t worry about finding it again — it’s just going to work. And it does.

This doesn’t mean it’s entirely effortless, but it’s close. I still love Apple Mail and it’s powerful search capabilities, and I still have gigabytes of documents tucked away in my file system. I don’t dump all of my mail into Evernote. Evernote gets most of my documents, faxes, PDFs, images I snap on my iPhone. But it also gets email that I think falls into the “ooh, I’m going to want to reference that again later” category, and it works nicely — especially when there’s a document or image attachment.

Give it a try, but do be religious about it for a while. Until you have enough information in Evernote, you’ll feel like you’re doing double-duty. Eventually, a transition happens and you find it has become central to your workflow. Now, I use it every day — categorizing materials I want to research, as an “idea board” for rough drafts and notes that I’m working on, and as a way to tuck away anything I’ll want to find again.

The good news is, with iPhone OS 3.1 we’ve got better options.

The bad news — well, it’s still a bit of a hassle to figure out how to make it work.

iPhone OS 3.1: Subscriptions, finally!

With the latest release of Apple’s new iPhone OS subscription calendars configured in iCal on your Mac will sync via MobileMe to your iPhone. This means that if all you want to do is get calendar subscriptions to show up, and you are syncing your iCal calendar with your MobileMe account, you’re all set.

This does require a MobileMe account though. I haven’t found a way to get an iPhone to subscribe to calendar subscriptions all on it’s own — so this is where other solutions come in very handy.

Spanning Sync: Google calendars (and subscriptions)

SpanningSync is another possible solution — for those of us either without a MobileMe subscription, or just interested in solid synchronization between Google calendars and the iCal. SpanningSync is a preference panel that reliably and accurately synchronizes your iCal with Google Calendar and Address Book with Google Contacts. In my first week of experimenting with it, I’ve found it flawless. Furthermore, updates both from and to Google calendar happen within minutes, if not faster.

So, how does this help iPhone users? In conjunction with a MobileMe account you can get a full synchronization between Google, your desktop and your iPhone. SpanningSync takes care of the Google to desktop synchronization, while MobileMe takes care of the desktop to iPhone connection.

Using SpanningSync, it’s also possible to synchronize subscription calendars to the iPhone, provided that your Google calendar account subscribes to the calendar. SpanningSync is smart enough to pick up every calendar (subscriptions included) on your Google calendar and put it on your desktop.

Another product in this space is BusyCal, from BusyMac.com. BusyCal offers an iCal replacement with a number of groupware features:

BusyCal is a desktop calendar that provides seamless calendar sharing and enhanced productivity tools for workgroups and individuals. BusyCal combines the calendar sharing and synchronization technology from the award winning BusySync with a beautiful desktop calendar interface that is instantly recognizable to iCal users — all in one easy to use integrated application.

BusyCal bills itself as “a better iCal,” but this approach does require dropping Apple’s calendar application in favor of BusyMac’s.

My solution

In my case, I’m using iCal, MobileMe, Google calendar and SpanningSync quite successfully. My iPhone is always up-to-date with my desktop and with Google.

I tend to use iCal and MobileMe as my primary scheduling tool. Consequently, most of my calendars are, actually, iCal/MobileMe calendars. I’ve got a few subscriptions as well, but most are in iCal/MobileMe. Finally, SpanningSync takes care of making sure my two public Google calendars (for shared meetings and office scheduling) are correctly synchronized to iCal.

All of the iPhone synchronizing takes place through MobileMe. As soon as SpanningSync picks up a change — either on Google (sending it down to my iCal account) or on my desktop (sending it up to Google), my MobileMe subscription reliable picks up the change and pops it into my iPhone and vice-versa. So far I haven’t had any problems making changes to calendars on the iPhone. MobileMe picks up any change, sends it to iCal and within moments SpanningSync relays the change to Google.

It is a bit complicated but, fortunately, it’s all behind the scenes. Granted, life would be easier if iCal and MobileMe knew how to talk effectively to Google — but then, where would companies like BusyMac and SpanningSync be?

Unfortunately, the point of this post is not how splendid 10.6 is. Now that it’s up and running, I’ve no complaints. But getting it up and running — that was another story. My advice: if you are faint-of-heart when it comes to your computer upgrade failing mid-stride, wait a little while. We’ll be seeing a 10.6.1 release soon, and hopefully it fixes the problems I ran into while upgrading my Mac Book Pro.

The most disturbing problem was the installer crash, something very uncharacteristic for Apple software. After getting the preliminaries out of the way, the 10.6 installer was merrily chugging along at about 15 minutes into the upgrade when it just disappeared. I had glanced away from the screen so I assumed the computer was still doing something — but ten minutes later I was still staring at a blank screen. Completely blank. No indication of life beyond my mouse pointer. I had to do a hardware reboot, holding down the power key until the system restarted.

Fortunately, the installer restarted automatically and detected it’s failure. I was given the option to “recover” my failed install attempt, which I did. This time the installer finished the job, the only incident being a point where it got hung up around “40 minutes remaining” and ultimately took close to one and a half hours to finish. All appeared good and my machine rebooted just fine. Then I tried to login.

I ended up staring at a blank screen again. The same one, with no sign of life but my mouse pointer.

Here are the steps I followed to diagnose and ultimately repair the problem. Fortunately, it didn’t require going back to Leopard:

1. First, verify that it’s your specific account and not the system. Try logging in as your systems’ Administrator, or another user. If this works, it’s a good sign you have a problem with your login items.
2. Start up in “safe mode” by restarting your computer and holding down the “shift” key.
3. With “safe mode” enabled (you’ll see an indication on the login panel), log in under your troubled user account.
4. Disable all of your login items using Preferences.
5. Try rebooting and logging in again. If you still have problems (as I did — once again, getting the blank screen and having to hard-reboot), you may have a font management problem. In my case, I restarted in safe mode, removed all of my fonts except those in the default system and, just to be safe, uninstalled Linotype FontExplorer.