When it comes to the Apple iPhone and Windows iTunes, you can synchronize your bookmarks with Internet Explorer or Windows Safari, and contacts from Outlook or Yahoo! but when it comes to synchronizing your calendar you are severely limited, unless all you use is Outlook, because that’s all you can directly sync with at the moment.

I was an Outlook user for years until I gave Microsoft the (thunder) Bird. The biggest problem with making the change from Outlook to Thunderbird was the loss of my synchronization between my iPhone and my calendar, because I don’t use Outlook anymore. I do use Google Calendar (GCal) because it allows me to access my calendar from anywhere (like Gmail) and share calendars between my family.

So how do you sync the iPhone with Google Calendar?

Well, you can’t. But through some sneaky workarounds, it is possible. Since the iPhone only knows how to sync with Outlook, the trick is to get your GCal appointments synced with Outlook.

This is possible with some commercial (pay) services such as ScheduleWorld and SyncMyCal, however the route I went after trying his free trial was David Levinson’s gSyncit. It’s a whole 10 bucks and it works great. After throwin’ down $10 via PayPal and instantly getting the registration code by email, it got rid of the nags, enabled automatic synchronization, and allowed me to add the other 3 GCal calendars that I needed to sync with Outlook. Plus, you don’t need to touch GCal and copy ICAL URLs. Just supply gSyncit with your GCal username and password, then it gives you a list of Google Calendars to sync with.

You can sync both ways, too… from GCal to Outlook, and vice-versa. I am currently only syncing one-way (from GCal to Outlook) so I can’t comment on how well it works the other way.

After configuring gSyncit and clicking the Sync button on my Outlook toolbar, I was able to sync my iPhone through iTunes with ease. Now all my Google appointments are on my iPhone!

…now if I could just figure out a way to get the Chargers to beat the Patriots…

I used to be the biggest evangelist of Microsoft. All other software was inferior. I’m sure that had something to do with my history in Redmond. Slowly over the years I’ve seen the light. A few months ago, after much frustrations with IE7 I made FireFox my default browser. I’m so happy I did, too. And today I gave Microsoft “the bird” by switching to Mozilla Thunderbird.

I have been a huge Outlook user since the early days of Outlook Express. I’ve stuck with it because there really wasn’t anything better out there. Lately I’ve been getting a lot of advice from friends & family to check out Thunderbird. After upgrading to the latest version of Outlook and having major performance issues with it (plus the UI overhaul made me sick), I got fed up after a week or so. Today was the worst, so I installed Thunderbird, imported all my Outlook contacts and email, set up my five mail accounts, then added a ton of extensions to make Thunderbird rock like Outlook always wanted to.

The most immediate thing I’ve noticed is speed. It loads immediately, and responds immediately. And that is with all of my Outlook data in-tact! After I migrated my data I went to town with the extensions. I’ve listed them all below, as I found some really cool ones. My favorites are the Lightning/GCal add-on and the QuickFolders. My only loss was Exchange support for work. Not a huge deal, as it isn’t a requirement to use Exchange, and the POP/SMTP support works just fine.

I did also try out the Outlook theme, which makes Thunderbird look very much like the previous version of Outlook. In the end, I decided to stick with the Thunderbird theme out of respect for the bird.

Read the Rest of ‘Giving Microsoft The Bird’