if connected

It’s Thursday, four days after European clocks changed to what others call daylight saving and I’m still finding clocks stuck on GMT.

I’ll forgive those without an Internet connection like the wall clock in the kitchen, but way too many devices should know better. Windows Mobile still seems awkward, probably because I’m still running 6.0. The brand new Blackberry Bold hooked up to my company’s Blackberry Enterprise Server really should have updated itself. Two years ago I wouldn’t have cared.

But iPhone has changed everything. It just worked.

A former colleague wrote recently that ‘save file’ should have no place in this day. Everything should be saved automatically all of the time. I think manually changing the clocks twice a year should follow it into extinction.

Sidenote – This is the first post I’ve written on the new version of WordPress for iPhone. It’s a big improvement and worth returning to if you’ve tried and rejected it in the past. It means I can post more easily from wherever I happen to be:

Many companies operate calendar sharing, but the process of setting up a meeting never works as it should. The idea is simple: as people can view each others’ calendars it’s easier to set up meeting times that work for everyone invited. Reality lags:

• No calendar system I’ve seen allows for blocking off travel time before and after meetings. So, a time may look free, but is actually not as a meeting adjacent to free time is off-site somewhere. Or, someone needs time kept free for preparation ahead of a booked meeting.
• Times that are marked ‘busy’, may not be, if there’s a more important meeting being arranged. But the only person that understands which existing meetings are important, and which existing meetings can be shifted around, is a calendar’s owner. The only way for a meeting organiser to find out about this is to ask, on email or phone.
• Shared calendar’s are only up to date if people use them the whole time. So, everyone needs to be connected and in sync via their mobile phone, and needs to be up to date about entering new appointments. At no organisation I’ve worked has this been the case.
• People always seem to become confused over meeting updates in Outlook/Exchange, especially for repeating appointments. Result is that people accidentally delete meeting invites, and recurring meetings therefore disappear from their calendar.
• Network calendars are poor at offering employee privacy. People tend to keep a separate personal calendar on a different system, or, even on pen and paper. So, corporate calendars can’t be relied upon to be the whole truth about someone’s availability.

Shared network calendars just slow down organising meetings by adding extra useless meeting invite steps ahead of the inevitable person to person email exchange.

Surely the clue is in the name: this is a personal service for sync’ing personal stuff, not social networking.

Or, did I miss something important in the speech while I watched the football, and which is not listed on Apple’s MobileMe site?

(oh yes the photo gallery, surely that’s just a straight evolution from .Mac – Ovi this is not)