Mar 26 2009
Pocket Informant is a wonderful tool on Windows Mobile, and an iPhone version was just released. It doesn’t have all the same bells and whistles (yet), and suffers from the heavy restrictions and lack of functionality in the iPhone OS version 2.
Two particularily annoying restrictions are the fact that it can’t sync with the iPhone’s calendar, which would’ve made it easy to sync with your desktop, and it can’t ring alarms if the app isn’t on. And to think that a decade ago, Pilot 1000s could ring even while the device was off…
To be able to sync my iPhone Pocket Informant to my work Calendar (Outlook) and home Calendar (iCal), and to retain alarms, I use this scheme:
Here is what you will need to do, and in what order.
1. Open a Google Calendar account. It should be noted that this is stored on Google’s servers, so this solution may not be the best if you treat your calendar info as super private or if it contains confidential information. It might also be a very bad idea if you schedule crimes using your iPhone. Read the privacy policy.
2. Backup your iCal and Outlook calendars, or really any other application you will sync with Google Calendar. The calendar will get wiped from your iPhone so make sure that the info is already somewhere else.
3. Download and install the Google Calendar Sync tool. The options are very straightforward:
Enter your Google credentials, and set the sync to 2 way. Test the synchronisation, verify that your Google Calendar now reflects what is in your Outlook calendar.
4. Download and install the Google Calaboration Utility to Configure Google Calendar as CalDAV Calendars in iCal . Again, the options are pretty straightforward, though the first sync will get the data from Google to your iCal in a new calendar. You will to create new appointments in the proper calendar. I’m no big iCal user, I barely use it in fact, so you may know a way of merging your calendars. Test creating an appointment, see if it got created on the Google Calendar, and then force a sync in Outlook and see if it made it there.
5. Buy, download and install Pocket Informant on your iPhone. Under Settings / Sync / Google Calendar, set the Sync to Active, enter your credentials, and force a sync. See if everything is now in Pocket Informant.
6. Disable calendar sync in iTunes.
7. On your iPhone, follow these instructions that explain how to setup your Google Calendar to sync over the ActiveSync (Exchange) protocol. This will wipe any calendar info from your iphone. Force a Sync, check if your iPhone calendar got updated. This will give you alarms !
8. Bonus option for jailbroken phones: Install Lock Calendar , available in Cydia, to display calendar info on the lock screen.
You now have a decent calendaring solution for your iPhone, hopefully, some of these steps will be redundant with version 3 of the OS and future Pocket Informant release.
Known issues:
There is obviously a pretty long delay until all parts are up to date. I set the sync on my iPhone to 30minutes (I don’t use push), and to my outlook to 30 minutes, so if I’m not lucky it can take quite a while to be everywhere.
Items added from Pocket Informant with “Alerts” don’t seem to sync properly to Google, and therefore doesn’t get synched back into the iPhone calendar properly. So for now, until a workaround is found (there are quite a few different alert types in PI, maybe one of them works), you’re better off creating items that need alerts somewhere else.
Pocket Informant’s sync is not super reliable right now, should be improved soon.
ToDo:
You can use the same process with a ToodleDo account. I myself simply use Toodledo with the Firefox sidebar, and sync my Toodledo account to Pocket Informant and the Toodledo app for iPhone (Great value, by the way).
