The Madness of the Apple

I've been an Apple fan for nearly 20 years now, although I used Linux at home for many years before switching to MacOS X in 2004.

So, of course, an iPhone was the natural next step: a real computer in my pocket wherever I went, with connectivity everywhere. What more could a boy ask for?

This weekend, I decided to establish a reasonable task management system. Below, sadly, is the best process I could find for keeping my calendar and my task list in sync. The first 4 steps are eliminated if I don't use Jott.

1. Call Jott and leave a message.
2. Jott translates my message to text and sends an update to Toodledo.
3. At this point, Google Calendar has access to the new task "event", although the update may not take place for quite some time.
   
4. Synchronize Appigo's Todo software on my iPhone with Toodledo.
   
5. Update the new task via Todo to refine the details.
6. Synchronize the Todo software on my iPhone with Toodledo.
7. At some point, Google Calendar has synchronized with Toodledo.
   
8. BusySync running on my home computer checks every 5 minutes to see whether it needs to retrieve changes to my Google calendar and push them to to iCal on my Mac.
9. Every 15 minutes, my Mac pushes iCal changes to MobileMe.
10. Immediately after this, MobileMe pushes the calendar update to my iPhone.

Total time? The big unknown is the frequency of Google's retrieval of new entries from Toodledo. Everything else is inside my control.

The cost?

Jott (pay as you go plan)

$10 for 10 minutes of recording time.

Toodledo

Free

Google Calendar

Free

Appigo's Todo

$10

BusySync

$25

MobileMe

$100/year