While I was on vacation last week I helped the pastor of a nearby church get her iPod Touch set up to be her new pocket computer.  Previously she had an old Palm to act as her PDA and had that syncing to a home laptop, a work desktop, and a new netbook computer.  To move the data from her contacts, calendars, and emails she needed to connect her palm to each computer, sync it, and hope that stuff didn’t end up being duplicated or overwritten.  Now, this worked for several years for my friend, but she recognized that her Palm was getting a little past it’s shelf-life and so got a new iPod Touch for Christmas.  She loves it.

Still, she had the problem of figuring out how to get her information from her Outlook calendar and on to her iTouch - and then keeping all of her devices and her iTouch “in sync.”  In her paradigm, she’d need to set her iTouch to sync with each computer as a separate client - a process that could be a confusing as it would be time-consuming. Thankfully, we came up with a better option - called “Google Calendar.”

In case you don’t know, Google Calendar is part of Google suite of web-applications.  It’s sister applications are Gmail, and Google Docs (among others).  Google Calendar can be accessed from any web-browser, and it works just like an application that’s running on your desktop (except perhaps being easier to use).  Even better, you can set up Google Calendar to be usable when you’re off-line, so you can make the web-app seem even more like a desktop application for users.

At first, my friend didn’t pick up on why I wanted to go this route.  She asked, “So I’ll have to set my iPod Touch to sync with each computer this way still, right?”  When I shook my head at the question she asked, “But how are my appointments getting to my computer if I don’t sync?”  That’s when I explained to her the shift we were really doing.

Of her four computers (notebook, desktop, netbook, and iTouch) only ONE was going to be doing any syncing - and even that was only because it was the only way to get her iTouch to see her calendar when she was off-line.  Her other computers (or any computer where she logged in, for that matter) was getting the information “from the cloud.”  The is, she was going to a web-site, and that web-site was displaying her calendar data from a server farm somewhere out on the internet.  When she updated a meeting on her netbook it would automatically show up when she went into her office and turned on her desktop and went to her Google Calendar page.  The beauty of it was that we set up her iTouch to sync with her Google Calendar over wifi.  If she was online and opened up the calendar application on her iTouch, the calendars would automatically sync.  When I demonstrated how easy Google Calendar was to use, and how quickly the syncing took place between the iTouch and Google - she was ecstatic.  She was free from syncing purgatory!  In fact, my friend is now ahead of me on the curve in some ways because I still use a local calendar to keep track of the books I loan out to others - which requires that I sync my iPhone to iTunes.  I’m jealous.

Now, there are a number people who are a bit leery of letting Google keep track of so much of our information - and not without good reason.  If Google were to decide sell your calendar data to generate personalized advertising, then your appointments (even “private” ones) could be out on the ‘net for the world to see.  Google, for it’s part, insists that it keeps any data it collects anonymous (must like any web-email service), and if you want to keep your data secure while you’re connecting you can replace “http” with “https” in your address bar and the person sitting next to you at Starbucks won’t be able to sniff your upcoming appointments out of the air.  To me, the ability to store data “in the cloud” means I can get to it wherever I’m at, and with whatever device I’m on, without having to spend hundreds of dollars on clunky software for the privilege of waiting while my computers sync (or even thousands of dollars in the case of offices that want to share calendars). I’ll always keep a local backup, but the freedom to move from machine to machine to machine without ever having to make sure all my appointments are uploaded and at hand, is wonderfully freeing.  If you haven’t tried it yet, you may want to soon!