Staying in Sync
Sunday, March 16th, 2008I am still in search of the optimal way to keep the tools I use for contacts and calendars and mail and feeds in sync with each other. It’s a daunting challenge. I have yet to find a very good solution, but I’m going to describe some of the tools I use to try to do this.
I’m actually using the Google Apps for Your Domain, but it’s close enough to being GMail for me. GMail’s support of the IMAP protocol makes using a desktop client to read my email easy.
My email client of choice. For a long while, I was simply using Gmail’s web interface, until I decided that I wanted to get myself a PGP key and start signing my outgoing messages. Enigmail makes that easy.
A plugin for Thunderbird. This gives me my calendar in the same program I read my email.
I wanted to give outlook a try. I wanted to like it. I used to use it for work. It supports IMAP. Unfortunately, I found it to be way too slow for my tastes. I could jump from message to message in Thunderbird way faster than I ever could in Outlook. Still, I need it if I want to synch my contacts and my calendar to my Creative Zen Vision:M.
I needed an online place where I could send my calendar. I am constantly running the latest nightly build of Lightning, thanks to the nightly updater, so the Provider for Google Calendar wasn’t working for me. Also, GCal doesn’t support To-Do’s. Chandler Hub was the best service I have thus found that would allow me to do a 2-way sync of my calendar.
A great service. They have plugins for both Outlook and Thunderbird. This keeps my address book in sync between the two, as well as several of my other online address books. Unfortunately, Plaxo for Thunderbird doesn’t sync my calendar. If they did, I could probably get rid of a lot of the other tools I use.
This is a new service I have been trying. Thunderbird syncs it’s calendar with Chandler. Outlook syncs with Plaxo. Outlook won’t read Chandler properly, so I had no way to get the stuff in my calendar over to Outlook. This is where Schedule World steps in. I have been having a little trouble getting it to synch my calendar with Outlook, but it is doing the To-Do’s fine.
It has now taken me 3 days to get this post written, so I’m going to stop right now. There are other links of my chain of getting things synched, but they are not as important as these pieces.
Do you have a suggestion for a tool that helps you stay in sync? Feel free to contact me.