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Right on the heals of the announcement that Gmail Goes Offline with Google Gears comes the announcement that Google Calendar is getting the Offline mode treatment as well. Google’s help page mentions that users can decide which calendars are available offline. “Calendar keeps you on time, even when you’re not online. Offline Calendar allows you to access your events through your browser without requiring Internet access. It’s perfect for flaky connections or for when you’re in between meetings and have no idea where you’re supposed to be next. Note that while offline, Calendar will be read-only – it will not be possible to create, edit, or delete events.”

In a very non-Google fashion, Offline Calendar is being rolled out to Google Apps users FIRST. Typically, Google Labs swag gets rolled out to regular old Gmail users first, and then it will eventually make it’s way into the Google Apps users hands. This time around, Google Apps users get first dibs.

Offline Google Calendar will work with multiple calendars, but not on first sync. Your first sync will only grab your default calendar. No worries though, once you’re synced up, you get really basic options on your Settings page to manage which calendars you want synced to your account.

The only downside… it’s read only… at least for the time being.

You can read more About Offline Calendar from Google.

LifeHacker is reporting that Google is finally enabling Google Gears support in GMail. The first question you might ask is “what the heck is Google Gears”? Gears is an open source project that enables more powerful web applications, by adding new features to your web browser:
Let web applications interact naturally with your desktop
Store data locally in a fully-searchable database
Run JavaScript in the background to improve performance

So when Gears is enabled you can access your Gmail from your browser any time… even when you’re not online! Essentially, Offline Gmail uses Google Gears to download all (ok not ALL, but MOST) of your email to your desktop. When you use Gmail in offline mode it works exactly the same as using it normally—except that when offline mode is enabled in your browser, Gmail is that much faster. When you compose an email in offline mode they get put in your outbox, and those emails are automatically sent once you’re back online.

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I’ve been using GMail for a while now; it’s really an incredible email platform and when they rolled out Google Calendar it seemed they were going in for the kill. However, I never really found an easy/free way to sync my contacts or calendar with other devices. Of course you can export your contacts and import them to Outlook (which I rarely use nowadays for personal use) and with IMAP support you can sync your calendars into Outlook as well. However, I also have an HTC Touch… the ability to sync to that device was missing.

Recently, I stumbled on NuevaSync–a free service that sync’d both my Gmail contacts and my Google Calendar.  Thankfully, they also support Google Apps accounts.

Supported devices:

• Apple iPhone® 2.0, iPhone® 3G and iPod® touch 2.0
• Windows Mobile® based PDAs and smartphones

Supported Services:

• Google Calendar for calendar events.
• Google Contacts / GMail for contacts.
• Plaxo for contacts.

According to their site: “NuevaSync allows direct, over-the-air, native synchronization of certain smart phones and PDA devices with public PIM, and calendaring services including Google Calendar. NuevaSync does not need any software installed on your device because it uses synchronization protocols that are already built in.”

Pretty slick… and it’s a free service.

After finding the NeuvaSync site I started Googling to find others who had and found an article on TechCrunch that includes a Q&A with the development team. It’s an interesting read and you should check it out.

Check out NeuvaSync here.

On a related note there is another contact management (though no hints as to calendar sync) application called Soocial which may be worth checking out.

The Sysinternals Troubleshooting Utilities have been rolled up into a single Suite of tools. This file contains the individual troubleshooting tools and help files. It does not contain non-troubleshooting tools like the BSOD Screen Saver or NotMyFault. I’ve been using several of the SysInternals (now Microsoft) tools for years, they are AWESOME.

Download Sysinternals Suite
(8 MB)

The Suite is a bundling of the following selected Sysinternals Utilities:

AccessChk

AccessEnum

AdExplorer

AdRestore

Autologon

Autoruns

BgInfo

CacheSet

ClockRes

Contig

Ctrl2Cap

DebugView

DiskExt

DiskMon

DiskView

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