Territorial Bloggings

Now it’s time for the second in my three part series of posts on my entry into the iPhone world. Part one dealt with general musings on iPhone usability, and part three will deal with my favorite iPhone apps. In this second part, however, I’m going to write about what I’ve cobbled together in order to integrate the iPhone into my overall online productivity environment.

As a preface, and jumping off on something that I wrote in the first post, something that’s important to me is that I have clear separation between work and personal, particularly in terms of email & calendar. I made the decision long ago not to commingle those any more than necessary, even though I’ve never worked for an employer where that’s been an issue — better safe than sorry. So, I want to be able to control how/where the separate data streams (calendar in particular) get synchronized/combined.

That all being said, after a bit of experimentation, I have pretty much settled on a workable solution, whereby I have things nicely integrated & synchronizing without too much effort. [HT to Sem. Gillespie for the general format & inspiration for this section...]

Hosting: Eleven2 – a good, solid, semi-budget type host, but with great service, and not such a huge user base that they’re so big that they engage in overselling. Plus, they support WordPress fully, in that all the new functionality like push-button upgrades work. And, the owners are iPhone users, so there’s a possibility that they’ll start supporting iPhone push email.

Email: Right now it’s Gmail, in the form of Google Apps for Your Domain, for personal mail, and Groupwise for work mail, both set up on the iPhone as IMAP. Both work without any problem, and I have no complaints at all, wrt email.

Calendaring: Groupwise for work, and Google Calendar for personal & to synchronize. This is where it gets a little trickier, because GW doesn’t play nice with other systems, in terms of interoperability. Back when I had the Blackberry, I found a 3rd party app that kept GW in sync with Gcal (before I found a way to have the Blackberry serve as the hub for that purpose), so now that app (CompanionLink for Google) serves as the conduit by which my central Gcal & GW keep in sync. Then, I can easily keep the iPhone in sync with Gcal using the newly available hooks that Google has put in place. It’s clunky, but it all works surprisingly well.

Contacts: Traditionally, I used GW as the hub for my contact management. No more. Now, I’m using Google Contacts, and taking advantage of the hooks that are now available to integrate directly into the iPhone’s Contacts/Address Book. So, I have access to my contacts in Gmail/on the web and on my iPhone (and on my Mac since I’m using Spanning Sync to facilitate syncing my calendars & contacts down into iCal & the Address Book), although they’re not kept in sync in GW. Which, frankly, isn’t that big a deal to me…

Photos: I generally don’t do a whole lot with putting my photos online; however, when I do need to work with photos online, I’ve found Flickr to be the best option. Good organization, good sharing, good integration with other apps (WordPress, Facebook, iPhoto, etc…).

Task Management: I’m on an ever-present quest to organize my life through task managment. I’ve tried GTD (Getting Things Done) without much success, either in paper, or in various online forms. I tried using the Blackberry as a way to implement a bit of order into the chaos. I never had much success. Thus far with the iPhone, however, I’ve had a bit of success with the following combo – Tasks as the task manager app on the iPhone, Jott as the way to easily get tasks input into the system via voice/dictation, and Toodledo as the web hub by which the tasks are integrated & managed overall. I’ve actually been using this system, it’s been helpful, and it’s been working.

Social: Facebook has emerged, surprisingly enough, as my social space of choice. I also have a presence on Twitter, but I really don’t keep it up. Blogging, of course, is a given. The iPhone apps for all three of these social spaces are quite strong, with the apps for Facebook and WordPress being particularly strong.

Backups: While this isn’t specifically related to the iPhone, it is something that’s important nonetheless – there’s nothing worse than the feeling you get when you mis-click, or when a drive dies, and you lose data. That’s when you’ll want to have all the backups you can get your hands on! I have two external hard drives (320GB, Firewire400) that I use to back up my MacBookPro. One is dedicated to TimeMachine (the backup software built into OSX) backups, so that if I need to go back and get a version of a file from any time pretty much within the past year, I can go and pull it out. The second drive is dedicated to use by SuperDuper!, a great backup app that allows me to have a daily updated, bootable copy of my MBP’s hard drive, just in case something were to happen to it. With the combo of those two backup methods, I’m totally protected, and it’s all automatic!

Online Storage: This is one that I go back and forth on, as to whether or not I really need it. Because I really don’t use all that much online storage, although I do need some, other than what I use as part of my web hosting, in order to transfer files back & forth (to work & home & the web host). I’ve tried JungleDisk, which is a good front end for Amazon’s S3 storage service. It works pretty well, and Amazon’s pricing is pretty reasonable. At the moment, I’m focused more on using the storage that I have available as part of my hosting at Eleven2. The trick with that approach is (for me, at least) to then integrate it into the OS (Mac at home, Windows at work) as a drive, so as to make it simpler & easier to use. WebDrive for Windows is a pretty good app for that, and ForkLift and/or ExpanDrive for the Mac are good solutions.

Conspicuous in its absence thus far has been Apple’s own MobileMe offering. I’ve tried it. I’ve found it wanting. What it does, it does well enough. Unfortunately, it doesn’t do enough to justify the cost, even in light of the wonderfully tight integration with the iPhone. Even for the core functionality of email, calendaring, & contacts management, MobileMe is not flexible enough to trump the solution that I’ve been able to cobble together.

And that’s actually kinda cool…

Coming in Part 3: Musings on iPhone Apps

-ghp