davextreme

David Pogue’s review of Google’s new Nexus One telephone elicited a lot of hate mail. He notes, “It’s been awhile since I’ve seen that. Where have I seen… oh, yeah, that’s right! It’s like the Apple/Microsoft wars!”

I’ve seen this, too (in my more casual world). What interests me is that Google and Apple don’t compete directly in many spheres. Cellphones, now, but not in search nor advertising, Google’s main business. While Apple does offer MobileMe, which competes with Gmail and Picasa, and with iWeb Blogger, I guess, but no one really sees them as being on the same bar. With Android, though, Google’s entering the telephone market and with ChromeOS, the computer world. Yet in many ways most of their services interoperate perfectly. I use Gmail via Safari and Mail, and Apple makes tons of money from search bonuses when people search Google in Safari.

Pogue continues:

The irony is, of course, that once upon a time, Apple was perceived as the counterculture underdog. But 200 million iPods later, some people obviously see the former “think different” company as the “you’re all a bunch of consumer sheep” company.

MarsEdit is a handy Macintosh application that I use to compose entries for my website. Unfortunately, for reasons I don’t understand, when I publish a post with MarsEdit, none of Movable Type’s plug-ins seem to fire off. At present I use Multiblog to rebuilt my Debigulated URLs blog, which allows short URLs to work for all of my main blog’s entries, and I use MT-PubSubHubbub to ping Google’s PubSubHubbub hub when I post a new entry. If Multiblog doesn’t get triggered, the short URL I’m declaring in my page’s head won’t work because the .htaccess file at my link shortener hasn’t been rebuilt. If MT-PubSubHubbub doesn’t fire, the hub won’t get notified of a new post. I can work around the first problem using Bob the Rebuilder, and I’ve written up a sloppy AppleScript to deal with pinging the hub from MarsEdit.

I am absolutely certain that there’s a better way to do this, but here’s what I’ve got going for now. It works in testing using FriendFeed, which updates within seconds of a post that pings Google’s hub¹. Here’s the script:

tell application “Safari” activate do JavaScript “window.open(‘http://david. ely.fm/davextreme/’)” in document 1 end tell

delay 2

tell application “System Events” tell process “Safari” tell menu bar 1 tell menu bar item “Bookmarks” tell menu “Bookmarks” tell menu item “Bookmarklets” tell menu “Bookmarklets” click menu item “Publish to Hub” end tell end tell end tell end tell end tell end tell end tell

delay 2

tell application “Safari” to close the front window

I placed the script in my MarsEdit scripts folder (found easily by going to MarsEdit’s Scripts menu and selecting “Open Scripts Folder”).

The script requires that you have:

1. A “Bookmarklets” folder in your main Bookmarks menu in Safari; and
2. Google’s “Publish to Hub” bookmarklet in that folder, which bookmarklet can be found on Google’s site near the bottom of the page².

From there, I post an entry using MarsEdit, then select my “Ping Hub” script from the Scripts menu. It opens my webpage, waits two seconds for it to load, invokes the “Publish to Hub” bookmarklet, then closes the window.

My hope is that someone develops a plugin for MarsEdit that does this more elegantly, but maybe this will be helpful to people in the meantime. (Or someone can tell me why those plugins don’t activate when my xmlrpc updates go through.)

1. The only use I have for FriendFeed being testing this push stuff. ↩
2. Yes, I’ve been reading David Foster Wallace, so I use “which” in new ways and employ footnotes too often³. Hopefully it’ll wear off soon. ↩
3. Also I go out of my way to point out that I’ve been reading DFW (and call him DFW). ↩

Hmm. Google’s launching a campaign called “Going Google” designed to get companies to switch to Google Apps from (though unstated) Microsoft stuff. I do think that Gmail provides about the best email experience there is, be it desktop- or web-based, I don’t think Google Docs are at all ready for real use as a primary authoring tool, bloated and annoying as Word is.

I’ve played around with Google’s new sync services for a few days now, and mostly it works well. Since I use Google Apps instead of regular Gmail I had to go into my administrator panel and turn it on first, then reload the mobile page a few times to get it to work. I’ve found three problems so far, two of which I’ve solved.

1. Junk contacts from Gmail. When I synced I had a lot of people in my list I didn’t want. I did some pruning and this is fine now, but even when you tell it not so Gmail likes to add contacts on its own, so we’ll see how that plays out long term.
2. When you enable over-the-air syncing on your phone, iTunes no longer syncs back to your computer’s iCal and Address Book. For iCal, you can use their CalDav support to get iCal to sync up on its own. My calendar needs are pretty simple so this works fine for me, but BusySync is I’m told a good utility for improving this.
3. What I can’t figure out how to do is keep Address Book on my Mac updated. iTunes doesn’t pull that data down from the phone anymore, so I’ll be left having to remember when I type a new address or phone number in my phone to also do it on my computer.

So basically I’m left with less than what I had before. I can use iCal and Google Calendar, but I could do that before with CalDAV. Now my Google Contacts stay up-to-date, but Gmail already knows people’s email addresses, and for anything else my phone is where I need them.