Archive for the ‘Google’ category

Google Calendar Event Gadgets?

August 20th, 2009

When I started researching on interacting with Google calendar API, I came across a cool feature offered by this API, and that is the event gadgets.

Although the calendar UI is quite fixed and developers can’t do much to extend it, Google did leave the door open for some extensions using this feature.

Event gadgets are like any other event on the user’s calendar, but how it looks is mostly up to the developer. It will appear as an icon on that event day, and when clicking on it, it will open an iframe which will show any given URL. The size of this iframe is also configurable.

To set it up using the .NET API library, simply create an event object and set the WebContentLink properties:

WebContentLink conetentLink = new WebContentLink();
conetentLink.Title = “Buy tickets”;
conetentLink.Type = “text/html”;
conetentLink.Url = “http://myserver/tickets.aspx?show=hair”;
conetentLink.Icon = “http://myserver/money-icon.jpg”;
conetentLink.Width = 200;
conetentLink.Height = 100;

The contect can be either images, HTML pages, or igoogle gadgets.

In Birthdays Synchronizer, I used this feature to create the birthday reminders on the users’ calendar. When the event is created, the friend name and picture URL are saved as part of the parameters on the gadget link, allowing my hosted page to show this information nicely to the user:

Well.. maybe it does require a little more work on the UI :)

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Posted in API, Birthdays Synchronizer, Calendar, Event Gadget, Google

Birthdays Synchronizer 2.0

August 17th, 2009

Today I finally released the new version of the Birthdays Synchronizer application. As I wrote in previous posts, I wanted to enhance it with a new and exciting UI, and chose WPF for this purpose.

Although my learning curve for this technology was a bit slower than I expected, I’m very pleased with the results :)

I used Expression Blend 2 for designing the UI and animation (or storyboard…) and MVVM pattern for the acutal development. While working with WPF I faced more than one gotcha (it has some issues after all..), but eventually I managed to overcome them all. Microsoft did amazing work on this technology, which offers so many possibilities and really changes the way desktop applications are developed and displayed.
Beside the UI changes, the new version also interacts with Google Calendar, allowing to synchronize the birthdays to this calendar in a very special way:
If in a certain day you should be reminded for a friend’s birthday, a little cake will show up on the top of this day reminding you of it. It also shows the picture and name of the person when clicking on it..
In the coming posts I will elaborate more on this integration and some of the things I had to overcome with WPF.

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Posted in Birthdays Synchronizer, Calendar, Google, MVVM, WPF

Experimenting Google services…

February 10th, 2009

On my previous phone I used Gmail mobile application for managing my email communication and Google reader for mobile (WAP) to browse my RSS subscriptions.

Now that I finally have a proper mobile phone, I want to explore what Google has to offer for my phone.

Google Latitude

Latitude, which comes together with Google maps, synchronize your current position (using GPS or AGPS) with Google servers, allowing you and your friends to know who is near who, get updated with each other’s status and communicate using this application.

You can easily navigate between your friends on the map with the 3 and 6 keys, update the status directly from the application, and even send SMS to the people you find in the map. From playing with it for several days it looks pretty cool and has a great potential.

Check out this video from Google explainging it a bit more.

Another cool feature is that it connects to internet only when the position is changed, and disconnects when the update is finished. This saves both on battery and bandwidth costs.

As I mentioned, Latitude is part of Google maps, so you get all the great features of maps as well. A Few months ago when I was in Amsterdam, I used Google maps with my friend’s Nokia N95 to search for a Crumpler’s store and navigate there. It worked just great! It was just like doing it from my PC, plus it had my position so it directed me very precisely till I found the store.
One more feature is the street view. Google is taking special panoramic pictures on main streets, allowing you to explore it directly from your mobile. Check out this screenshot I took from my Nokia:

Google Sync

Yesterday Google lunched a beta service allowing you to synchronize the phone contacts and calendar with Gmail account. For symbian devices synchronization it is using the SyncML protocol.
After setting up my Nokia with the appropriate settings and crossing my fingers that nothing will be erased, I chose the contacts sync option (my calenadr is in sync with my work outlook calendar). A minute later all my phone’s contact were on my gmail account! Including the pictures! Since it supports bi-directional sync, I modified some details on the gmail account and synced again – and it really seems to be working (although it take some time for the changes be updated on the servers before the phone can be updated).
The one thing left for Google to add to this service, is email synchronization. In one of their blogs they mentioned they will support Mail for Exchange which is really great news and even better option than SyncML, since it will push emails into the mobile devices instead of making the phones periodically check for them.

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Posted in Gmail, Google, Latitude, N85, maps, review, symbian