It’s true I recently got the Apple iPad to use as another communication and connection device when away from the office or home.  While I’m still learning the different apps I’ll want to complete the different tasks I do, obviously one of the main things I want to easily access is my contacts and calendar.  I went through and added my account on the ipad using the GMail button as we use GApps.  It loaded email just fine but my calendar and contacts did not work.  After some further googleing and searching I found and did the following which allowed me to properly do a Google Apps sync on my iPad (instructions i found said Apple device so I assume this will work as well for iphones and touches though I only did on ipad). This is all found on Google’s site on a couple different pages but I want to make sure it was easily found the next time I needed it.

All instructions found on Google’s Support site:

Mail, Calendar, & Contacts:

Set Up Your Apple Device for Google Sync

If your business, school, or organization uses Google Apps, your administrator will first need to enable Google Sync before you can take advantage of this feature.

1. Open the Settings application on your device’s home screen.
2. Open Mail, Contacts, Calendars.
3. Tap Add Account….
4. Select Microsoft Exchange. Yes, choose this even if you are not using Exchange

Enter Account Info

5. In the Email field, enter your full Google Account email address. If you use an @googlemail.com address, you may see an “Unable to verify certificate” warning when you proceed to the next step.
6. Leave the Domain field blank.
7. Enter your full Google Account email address as the Username.
8. Enter your Google Account password as the Password.
9. Tap Next at the top of your screen.
9a. Choose Cancel if the Unable to Verify Certificate dialog appears.
10. When the new Server field appears, enter m.google.com.
11. Press Next at the top of your screen again.

12. Select the Google services (Mail, Calendar, and Contacts) you want to sync.

13. Unless you want to delete all the existing Contacts and Calendars on your phone, select the Keep on my iPhone option when prompted. This will also allow you to keep syncing with your computer via iTunes.

If you want to sync only the My Contacts group, you must choose to Delete Existing Contacts during the Google Sync install when prompted. If you choose to keep existing contacts, it will sync the contents of the “All Contacts” group instead. If there are no contacts on your phone, the latter will happen — the contents of your All Contacts group will be synced.

You’ve set up Google Sync! Synchronization will begin automatically if you have Push enabled on your device. You can also open the Mail, Calendar or Contacts app and wait a few seconds to start a sync.

Choosing Which Calendars to Sync

This is a simple and easy blog post, I have 8 Wave invites and 2 Voice invites.  Leave a comment with what you want and i’ll give them out.  Enjoy!

I was one of those people who was at the store at 7am on Friday, i couldn’t wait to get the Droid plus I was hoping to get back to give my wife her phone before her work day started (that didn’t happen). So far I’ve been very impressed with the Droid, it’s quick, it got a great screen, i’ve had no coverage isssues, and i’ve found an app for everything i’ve looked for so far.  The difficulty with apps so far is no one knows which ones to get, it’s a new device for most and there are still a lot of apps to choose from. So far my must have apps for the Droid in no particular order are:

• Facebook – well for Facebook
• Twidroid – yup, you guessed it for Twitter, latest version already has lists
• Bible –  from YouVersion, can’t wait till Live is integrated (hint, hint)
• Calorie Counter – great app to track what you’re eating and it’s nutrional information, use your camera to scan the barcode and the info will be added automatically
• CardioTrainer – another great health app that uses your phone’s GPS and as a pedometer to track your routes, call off pace, set goals, etc
• fIRC chat – As a Church IT guy you always have to be connected to our IRC chat to get your questions answered quickly
• Key Ring - So you don’t have to carry around all your rewards cards, gym tags, etc
• OurGroceries – syncs automatically between my phone and the wifes phone, also stores recipes so you can make sure you are picking up everything you need.
• Slacker – gotta have your radio
• wpToGo – Mobile access to my blog, hopefully i’ll use this to actually write posts more often

So what apps are you using? What have you tried that just don’t work the way it should? What apps do you wish you could find?

I didn’t plan on making this a top 10 list, but when i got done and had 10 well I had to name it that way.

This is what I’ve been waiting for and my guess many others have been as well.  Google Apps is releasing a plugin that will allow Apps to act/replace your exchange server with Calendar, Contact, and email syncing with Outlook. Looks.  Hopefully this is included in the Education edition which is free for non-profits.

See it in action in the video below:

Find out the latest and download the plugin here.

As always the easiest way to get these and all other of my blog posts is to follow my RSS feed here, and of course to keep up with all that’s going on in my life follow me on twitter, I’m @djberg.

As is pretty obvious by this blog I love God and technology and love finding new ways that technology can help share God with people.  Following the Google blog and some of the cool things they have coming out always seems to be cutting edge.  Today I noticed the Google Audio Indexing which from their own description is:

a tool that transcribes and indexes the spoken content on YouTube’s Politicians channels

Now I know currently it’s only for the political videos but I hope that at some time this will be available for any videos that you choose to have it index.  Think about having your weekly sermons uploaded to Google video, transcribed and indexed.  This can become an amazing teaching tool.

Combine this with the fact that Google Video is becoming part of Google Apps Premier Edition as well as Google Apps Education Edition which is free for non-profits with a 501c3 and this will be another huge score for churches and other non-profits to get more of their content searchable and useable on the web.

Fresh from the Google Mail Blog yesterday is a post on a new security feature, Remote Sign-out.  You can see the other locations are you signed in on and activity history with IP addresses.  This worked on both my personal gmail account as well as my Google Apps email address.  It’s not much but I love to know that security is always being looked at and improved.

The last couple days I seem to be jumping on the bandwagon, well technically I tried Live Writer months ago it just never seemed to stand out to me.  Not sure if there were updates(i’m sure there have been) but I really like it.  Now to see how it compares to the new WordPress 2.5 that is supposedly coming out on Monday. But the biggest difference I’ve seen between Live Writer and posting directly through Admin is the speed of it getting to the feed reader.  I use Google Reader and it was there in less than 5 minutes and at times with WordPress it seemed like it was the next day before it showed up.

Saw this on the news and on then did some googling to find out finally from Reuters that Blair will be teaching for 3 years at Yale.  From Reuters:

Former Prime Minister Tony Blair will teach at Yale University in the next academic year starting in September, leading a course on "faith and globalization," the Ivy League school said on Friday.

He also plans to set up the Blair Faith Foundation, based in London, before taking up his teaching post, the university said.

The foundation aims to examine the role of religion in the modern world and to promote understanding among Christianity, Judaism and Islam.

While I’m sure I won’t agree with all that is being taught and shared, I think it will open a lot of minds to the idea of religion and hopefully finally a relationship with Christ.  I’m sure there a lot of students that will take the class just because of who the teacher is, I know I would have. 

After blogging about the Mashup I did yesterday and getting some great feedback I decided to try my hand at my own mashup that I could control a little more and not have the advertisements on. The new mashup also gives a lot more info pulled from the Church IT survey. The markers are showing the city the church is located, please send me the complete address or latitude and longitude of the church and I’ll update to give an accurate location, especially those cities that have more than one church. I hope you find this to be a valuable tool and that it will help grow our Church IT network. If you or your church is not shown go fill out the survey and I’ll update within a few days.

Church IT Survey Map Mashup

Was playing with Google Maps and mash-ups last night and came up with Church IT mashup based off of the Church IT Survey, if you don’t find your church on there make sure to go fill out the survey.

Note: After some confusion on the numbers, I’ll clarify that the numbering on this map is only the marker number and has nothing to do with number of churches in the area. Check out the updated mashup for a better picture with more information.