How To: View Your Google Tasks in ICal

Posted on September 1, 2011 by Aaron Foltz

I’ve had plently of experience with different task management services including Remember The Milk, Google Tasks, Toodledo, Checkvist, and Todoist. They all seem to have one thing in common: they don’t work exactly the way that I want them to. Most of my experience has been with either RTM or Google Tasks, with Google Tasks winning out the past year or so. I stepped back from RTM because of its lack of project manipulation and Google Calendar integration issues, something that Google Tasks solidly supports (Plus I’m a BIG google fanboy, so why not use another Google service).

One thing that has always irked me about Google Tasks, and really ALL task management services, is its ability to be integrated with ICal or other desktop clients. Ideally, I want to see my Google Tasks in my ICal/Mail todo list and calendar, allowing me to freely edit and synchronize back with the Google servers.

iGTasks allows you to synchronize the two for a price, but why would I pay for something that should be able to be easily done for free? A free alternative (almost) to this can be found by using the Producteev task management service. You can sync its service with Google Task and Google Calendar for free, and it seems to have the nice side effect of creating a few new calendars under your Google Calendar. These calendars will have ALL of your current Producteev tasks which in turn will have all of your Google Tasks if your choose to sync the services. This newly created calendar can then be added as a delegate in ICal, allowing you to at least view each of your tasks in calendar form.

Although this is a big leap, it’s definitely missing a few main things. For one, this new calendar shows up ONLY in the calendar view, not in the todo list sidebar. Secondly, you can delete the calendar entry for that task, but as far as I can see, it doesn’t have any effect on the actual task in Producteev or Google Tasks (so basically you still can’t edit a task).

In order to do this, you’ll first have to create an account on Producteev.

Make sure you don’t connect with one of the services at the bottom, instead, create your own account. If you make your own account, you will easily be able to link with the Producteev desktop app (this will allow you to edit/add tasks to Google Tasks). If you connect using one of the other services, there is no way to log in to the desktop app using those credentials.

Once you are at your landing page, click on “Workspace Administration” at the bottom left of the page. It should look something like this:

Next click on “Email / IM” found in the left navigation menu. At the bottom of that page, you should see two headings titled “Calendars” and “Google Tasks.”

Select “Connect” to connect those two services to Producteev. At this point, everything should be set up. You should be able to edit your account in ICal to add the newly created calendars. At least for me, the calendars were named “Aaron’s workspace – PDTV” and “My Workspace – PDTV”, and it seems like both of them are exactly the same as long as you don’t add another person to your workspace.

Eclipse Default Workspace Configuration

Posted on August 18, 2011 by Aaron Foltz

So I decided to tweak my Eclipse perspectives yesterday, and low and behold, my default workspace configuration seemed to be nullified. No matter what, Eclipse kept opening in /Users/aaron/Documents/workspace, so I figured it had to be set as the default somewhere. Even the “Prompt for workspace at startup” checkbox did nothing, it just seemed to ignore it.

2011-08-18_0958

In order to fix this problem, you’ll need to open up your local Eclipse installation. Look for the folder named “configuration”:

Once inside, open up the “config.ini” file:

You’ll need to edit the line starting with osgi.instance.area.default to supply your desired default workspace. In this case, @user.home is the location of my unix home, or /Users/aaron.

References:

HTML Web Development on Mac OS X

Posted on July 24, 2011 by Aaron Foltz

I wanted to jot down a few thoughts after finally finishing the bare interface/page portion of this design. Although the WYSIWYG editors are helpful in theory, I found that 90% of the time they don’t work correctly or fail to render any CSS with the HTML. I started out doing a general search for Dreamweaver alternatives for Mac OS X and ended up at this helpful website.

Kompozer

This is the first recommendation that I tried, and in the end it failed to fulfill my needs. The HTML rendering seemed to be flawless, but my problem came with the CSS editor included with the software. For the majority of the time, it seemed to be getting my main_style.css out of thin air. I don’t think it was every in sync with what was actually on the server, even after multiple attempts of trying to fix the problem.

Amaya

Coming from the W3C, I figured this editor would be destined to fit the bill, but in the end, it also fell short. My main problem with this editor was the lack of FTP support and pitiful HTML rendering. The rendering was extremely inconsistent with ALL other browsers. Here is the current rendering of the homepage:

As you can see, the rendering isn’t that far off, but it isn’t great either.

Aptana Studio 3

Both the standalone install and Eclipse plugin are wonderful, but I found that the software just didn’t “feel” right to me. My only complaint is that Aptana features a preview browser that opens in a new tab. Although this isn’t horrible, it doesn’t really work well when you want to split the window with the browser to see realtime changes.

Eclipse with WPT (Web Tools Platform)

This almost seems like a better candidate than Aptana because it allows you to see a realtime preview on a horizontal split screen with the source. Although it fixes the above problem, it also created a new rendering problem.

Conclusion

After downloading/trying all of these tools, none of them really worked the way I wanted them to. At the end of the day, I found the perfect combination to be Cyberduck + Textmate. Just double-click on the file in Cyberduck, edit in Textmate, and all your saves will automatically be updated on the server. Doing ⌘R with the HTML bundle installed will refresh your running browsers, then you can quickly ⌘-Tab and see the changes immediately.