I noticed an interesting behavior in the iPhone's Gmail implementation. When I delete a message from the inbox, I expected this to behave the same as it does with IMAP, where deleting a message from the inbox just Archives the message.
But in the case of the iPhone, deleting a message actually deletes the message, (moves it to Trash on gmail). So if you want to just archive a message you need to move it to the "All Mail" folder.
It looks like this has been documented.
Now that we have our iPhones I wanted to find a solution for both my wife and I to sync our data from our Google Apps domain to our phones. Ideally, I would have liked our phones to sync directly to Google, but that is not available, so I needed something to work on my wifes Macbook Pro and my linux laptop.
For my wife, we are using Spanning Sync to sync Google Calendar to iCal. Then we sync her iCal and Address Book to Mobile Me (or actually .Mac, since we are still running 10.4.x). Then her iPhone syncs with Mobile Me wirelessly. This allows her to modify her calendar on her iPhone, or her Mac. Also she can use either Google Calendar or Mobile Me to modify or view the calendars on the web.
For me, I don't have my ideal solution. I am using Google Calendar for my calendar, but since there isn't a solution on that will run on linux that will sync to Mobile Me, and am just using the web interface to the calendar on the phone. For contacts, I manually imported my contacts to Mobile Me, and then just sync directly to my phone.
Ideally, I will have a solution for my calendar, that would allow me to use the phone's calendar application. Since I doubt that Apple will allow syncing directly to Google, I think that answer is either:
So my wife and I joined the crowd and got iPhone 3Gs. Now that we have them, we are enjoying them, but it was a pretty big hassle to get them.
I got to the Apple Store pretty early in the morning, and there wasn't a line for iPhones. An Apple Store employees got the two iPhones and started activating the first. The Symbian device lost connection to the service, but after the AT&T Wireless account was created, and after the phone number port started, but before the number was added to the account.
When he got another Symbian device, further attempts to continue the setup kept failing. It looks like Apple's system to register iPhones will only work if the device actually does the registration, and will not work if the phone is configured via the phone with AT&T support. We were on hold with AT&T for over 2 hours, talking to 7 different people at AT&T.
Finally we got the phones registered. What we had to do was add the iPhones to the account with new phone numbers. Then with the AT&T support rep on the phone, the numbers were switched to the numbers that were were attempting to port.
I do appreciate the time that the Apple Store rep spent with settiing this up.
One other problem arose. The microphone on my wife's iPhone didn't work so I took it back to the Apple Store and they did replace it, without too much hassle.
A while ago, I wrote about how I would love a Squeezebox that is integrated with speakers. This would make it a perfect solution for our kids rooms.
Squeezebox/Logitech just announced the Squeezbox Boom, which is exactly what I want. With this, we don't have to deal with playing cds that skip because the kids have scratched them. I am definitely ordering one of these.
I am thinking about installing Microsoft Windows Vista Media Center on our Mac mini, espcially since our Xbox 360 is doing everything that the Mac mini used to do. I am planning on keeping the Mac mini in the closet, near our Windows Home Server, and then I would view this content on the Xbox 360 through Windows Media Extender.
There are several things that I would be able to do with this setup:
