nihaar's notepad » mycal

iPhone OS 3.0 is here

nihaar — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 13:59:04 +0000

Apple released the long anticipated iPhone OS 3.0 this week. Having just downloaded it today, I love the improvements they’ve made; again displaying an uncanny ability to know what their users want. Some of my favorite upgrades are the copy & paste feature, universal search (apps, contacts, and even emails!), and landscape mode for keyboards (this makes a small improvement on the typing experience, but its still far from perfect).

I also love the new CalDAV support which now lets you add multiple calendars (from Google, Yahoo etc) on your iPhone. To enable this,

Go to your settings and under “Mail, Contacts and Calendar”, tap on “Add Account”.
Select Other and under calendars tap on “Add CalDAV Account”.
Enter google.com as your server and your login information and voila!

Your google calendar now shows up on your iPhone. Another great reason to try out MyCal, as it makes adding events to your iPhone a piece of cake.

MyCal – improved location detection

nihaar — Fri, 08 May 2009 20:32:26 +0000

Tweaking around with the location detection mechanism of MyCal (combining Yahoo’s Local search results with that of Yelp’s), I was able to improve its ability to locate the correct store/restaurant/bar you type in.

Now you should see for areas that have multiple locations (such as starbucks, petland discounts, etc) MyCal will automatically select the location closest to your zipcode. Go ahead, give it a whirl.

MyCal now accepts emails…

nihaar — Mon, 04 May 2009 22:15:12 +0000

You can now send your events to mycal via email. Simply type in your event info into the subject line and send it to ‘mycal@nihaargupta.com’ and that’s it.
For example:

To: mycal@nihaargupta.com
Subject: cooking session with raekwon tonight at 9 at the clan kitchen @ 123 Pine Street, Staten Island, NY

and MyCal will create the following event in Google Calendar:

event: “cooking session with raekwon” May 4th, 9:00pm
location: the clan kitchen
123 Pine Street, Staten Island, NY

MyCal – an easy way text events to your google calendar

nihaar — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 13:40:28 +0000

I’ve recently been working on a way to text events to my google calendar that would automatically add location information (cross streets and subway info) to them. Tired of having to constantly find and type it in each time (yes, I’m lazy), I wrote an app that would do it for me each time I entered an event to Google. Being a huge fan of SMS, I used this as my interface. The project also helped me get my hands dirty with Django and Python (something I’ve been meaning to do for a while).

How I use MyCal with my iPhone?
I’ve downloaded the Google Calendar Sync desktop app that does a 1-way sync between my Google Calendar and my MS Exchange account (which syncs to my iPhone). This way any event added to my Google Calendar will show up on my iPhone as well.

Check out MyCal (apologize about the lame name) and leave some feedback if you like it (or hate it).