Small & Simple Thoughts

Entourage on the iPhone

I have an iCal calendar on my laptop that I use to manage my personal life – home, volunteer service, etc. It works great to have the calendar on my phone and laptop, be able to edit, add and delete items in either place and have them update each other.

I also access my gmail account from Mail on my laptop and iPhone via IMAP. This works seamlessly. I send and receive emails from either location and they are always in sync with each other. It’s flawless.

With this functionality in place my iPhone fulfills the function of mobile office – allowing me to take calls, schedule meetings and access information wherever I am.

Since the iPhone OS 2.0 upgrade I’ve known that I could use my phone with my Exchange account at work. I set up the Exchange account to work with email earlier this week. I only set it up to work with email as a starting point. Once I was comfortable with that I would move on to calendars and/or contacts – that was my plan.

Email was working fine. It was a little tricky for me to figure out the right server/username settings (my Exchange account has always been a little quirky), but once that was done it just worked.

Yesterday, for the first time, I wished that I had my work calendar on my phone also. I brought up my settings and slid the calendar option from no to yes – immediately a dialogue warned me that all of my other calendar items would be deleted and asked if I wanted to proceed. “No. I want my personal calendar and my work calendar side by side.”, I thought. “Isn’t that possible?”

It turns out it is possible but not this way. If you turn on Exchange for your phone, forget having any other calendar sync to your phone. For some reason, iCal calendars and Exchange calendars cannot co-exist on the iPhone.

Actually they can but you have to pipe the calendar through iCal – and that require having Entourage installed. Fortunately, I do have Entourage installed. I turned on syncing in the Entourage preferences and the Entourage calendar appeared in iCal. Then I when I sync my phone the Entourage calendar is included. Even better, I can edit the Entourage items on my phone and then sync them back to iCal which automatically syncs back to Entourage which automatically syncs back to Exchange. It is not a seamless ‘push’ solution but I don’t really need that. This suits my occasional need to view my Exchange calendar on my phone. Hooray!

Nettuts.com on WordPress & sIFR

Nettuts has a nice write-up on implementing sIFR 3.0 inside of WordPress. I just implemented version 2.0.6 this past week. It went pretty smoothly but the new version has some tweaks that will make it easier for designer to implement in the future.

For example, the new sIFR uses CSS selectors to target the element to be replaced. This is the beauty of jQuery and, to me, the secret to its success among designers. jQuery, and now sIFR, make themselves easy to be incorporated into the designer workflow by reducing the learning curve. In business, it’s called smoothing out the wrinkles to the sale and it works when building resources you want others to use too. Also, sIFR now uses css-type syntax to set up the hover colors, etc. of linked text. Again, a boost to productivity for designers.

I’ve used sIFR a couple of times and it is a fantastic tool for upgrading the design quality of a site. For example, the headlines in my site are now set in Fontin from Jos Buivenga. Thank you sIFR!