When the Mac App Store launched in January, we debated whether it sucked or not based on the store’s conveniences and annoyances. We avoided judging it on available apps, since the store had just been launched. Now that the App Store has had time to mature, we’re taking another look at what the Mac App Store offers that you can’t get anywhere else. Here are our favorite apps exclusive to the Mac App Store. More »
Your Windows system tray and Mac OS X menubar have become prime real estate for highly functional micro-applications that provide easy access to information, settings, and tasks. Here are our top ten favorites for both Windows and Mac. More »
We’ve showed you how to search specific sites straight from the address bar using keywords, but it turns out that same feature can be used to actually add events to Google Calendar. Here’s how to do it. More »
Most of us hook up our Google accounts with our iOS devices using Exchange, which pushes new mail to your iPhone. But if you sync Google Calendar using Exchange, your calendar colors don’t sync. Luckily they can, and there’s a simple solution. More »
If Outlook’s attention-grabbing desktop pings are the main reason you stick with it, Google Calendar might surprise you. After enabling a Labs feature and a Chrome setting, you can get similar notifications so you don’t miss that meeting (or lunch outing). More »
Whether you finally decided to shed sassyhacker957@gmail.com for a more professional handle or you want to swap Google accounts for less embarrassing reasons, Google doesn’t have a built-in system for migrating your data to a new account. So we figured it out. More »
With the right commands, you can turn your favorite command-line text editor into a distraction-free Google Docs app, add new events to Google Calendar, upload images to Picasa or video to YouTube, backup your Google data, and more. Here’s how it works. More »
Google – GoogleCL – Picasa – Command-line interface – Google Docs
Having a ball playing around with the just-released GoogleCL tool, which offers command line access to Google Calendar, contacts, Docs, Picasa, Blogger, and YouTube. With Python-based GoogleCL installed, you can do things such as list today’s events on your GCal right in the terminal, like so:
$ google calendar today title Coffee with Michael and Samir Dozing off Lunch at Flingers
Instant use case: Add echo "Next 24 hours:";google calendar today title to your ~/.bash_profile file to see what you’ve got scheduled for the day when you launch a new Terminal window. Some more GoogleCL fun inside.
If you just type google at the command line, you launch an interactive terminal that lets you try all the various commands. In the interactive terminal, type command-name help to see its options, like help calendar.
Each command has several parameters that aren’t immediately apparent. For example, in calendar, you can omit the long and hairy event URL by using the title parameter. You can list events for a particular day using the data parameter (--date 2010-06-16), and you can get events from a particular calendar and by keyword search term.
For example, to see all my trips to NYC on my TripIt calendar, I’d use the command:
$ google calendar list --cal TripIt --query NYC
Remember the beauty of the command line: you can easily chain commands together with the pipe, so you can sed, awk, and grep output to your heart’s content, and then write it to a file if needed, using >. Before I discovered the title parameter on the calendar command, I was planning to use sed to filter out the calendar URLs from the output. (Thanks to lightening-fast sed and awk experts on Twitter, I was prepared to do just that.)
What I’d love to do is create a Todo.txt CLI add-on that inserts an event on your Google Calendar when you add a task with a due date. Here’s the discussion about that going on now on the Todo.txt CLI mailing list. It’s pretty much a no-brainer.
While I’ve mostly only played with calendar, the Docs access is pretty useful, too. With it, you could easily schedule cron’ed backups of your Google Docs, or push data into a new doc on a regular basis. Same deal with Picasa and YouTube. I like the idea of cron’ing a job that backs up my Google contacts to a CSV file on my local computer weekly, too. I don’t see myself ever blogging from the command line, but it’s neat that you can.
How are you using GoogleCL? Post your favorite command combos in the comments.
By itself, task manager GQueues is pretty handy—a list-oriented task manager with sub-tasks, due dates, assignments, tagging, and other neat features. But its integration with Google sign-in, Calendar, and Google Apps make it more than just another to-do app. More »
Google – Search – Search Engines – Google Apps – Companies
