I've just found the solution! You can help me save a lot of time, which in turn will allow me to concentrate more on the production side of my shows instead of the planning side. And it's simple: all I need is the help of 94 of you clicking a vote button.

update: just one day later and 34 of you awesome individuals have already clicked. thanks!!

Okay, hear me out, my logic on this is impeccable, I'll just need a few sentences to explain.

If you've read this post about my new iPhone calendar app you know I've become a big fan of Pocket Informant on the iPhone. And you also know that I am still searching for an app to help me with year planning. Each year around this time I'm knee deep into planning next year's workshops. And each year I spend hours trying to find out if anyone has written an app that will help me doing that.

I have very simple needs:
- a view that shows me the entire year with my workshops as time blocks
- a fast and simple way to move around these workshops
- calendar data linked/synced with my existing calendar (currently Google cal)

There is no such application for the Mac. Or the iPhone.

So every year I fall back to a stone-age year spreadsheet and changing cell background colors to indicate events. This takes time. Lots of it. And this is valuable time that I can't use to bring you exciting episodes of TFTTF, HS, Daily Photo Tips and so forth.

Here is where you come in.

If you're a fan of any of these shows, or the workshops, you want to help me finally get such a year planner, right? (See? I told you my logic was impeccable!)

But this is not just for me, it's useful for everyone. Plan out vacations, keep track of your kids school projects. Name it.

So you can imagine how happy I was to find the Pocket Informant feature request list. If anyone can pull off that year planner feature, it's these guys with their mad coding skillz! The feature request list is powered by Uservoice and you can vote for features. Three votes per person and feature. 280 votes to get to the top of the request list and a chance to be looked into. 280 / 3 = 94 people.

Please help vote this feature request up to the top of the list!

Instructions

1. Go to the log in page of the voting site


2. Click the login provider of your choice (Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, OpenID,...)


3. Once logged in, enter "year planner" in the search box


4. Click the vote button next to the "Year Planner" title and leave three votes.

Let's move it up to the top of the list!!

Warning, this is another iPhone post. No photography here. Move along, nothing to see here...

Every year I reach the point where I need to start planning the workshop schedule for the next year. This usually takes place after summer. And every year I find myself trying to find an application that helps me do that. A simple year planner. One that allows me to see the entire year on one screen, and where I can define time blocks and move those around on a calendar. Preferably it integrates with the calendar on my Mac. Shouldn't be too hard to find, right?

Wrong!

This is the third year where I've spent hours to try and track down this software. I would happily pay for such a software. But no luck. I've looked into project management software. Too bulky or too expensive, not elegant enough, or simply too big and complex for my purposes. I've looked into calendaring software. None that offers me a decent or usable year overview. Or if they do show the entire year, they really only show you the year but they don't populate it with any of the calendar information.

The situation is even worse on the iPhone. The built-in Calendar app is nice, but if you want to get more serious, it's pretty much useless. Look at the month screen for example. Just a dot on the days that have entries, and the day overview hidden away in a tiny portion of the window on the bottom. This would be a perfect opportunity for app developers to come up with great calendars, but Apple has put the kibosh on that by not providing a calendar API. That's right, no iPhone app can directly interface with the iPhone's calendar data, so all of them have to be isolated applications.

Google Calendar to the rescue!

And that's where my recent research weekend where I found the solution to unfreeze my iPhone 3G 3.1 helped in a way.

Apparently Apple doesn't mind iPhone apps to sync with Google apps, and that's true for Google Calendar too. So there are quite a few iPhone calendaring apps out there that work just fine using Google Calendar.

And as I have already moved my calendar subscriptions over onto Google Calendar and as it's working flawlessly so far, why not go he whole hog and move my main calendar over there too?

So my next steps were to a) find a great iPhone app that syncs with Google Calendar and b) move my main calendar over to Google.

Twitter to the rescue!

What a great community! Just a few tweets later, and @stke was there with a great app tip: Pocket Informant. Thanks for helping trigger one of the biggest calendar reconfigurations I've done in a long while.

Admittedly, it doesn't really solve my year-view issue, and it isn't necessarily a planner, but it solves a host of other problems that I've been having with the built-in Calendar app and it throws in some new and awesome todo features on top.

Introducing Pocket Informant

Where its previous versions seems to have had some issues, version 1.1.0 of Pocket Informant is one of the best mobile calendars I have seen in a while. It's not for everyone, it will require some level of configuration, but when it comes to my personal preferences, I believe I have found a keeper here. It will happily run in its own little sandbox, but if you are ready to switch to Google Calendar and set Informant up to sync that to your iPhone, you will unleash its full potential by enabling iCal sync functionality, albeit indirectly through Google. This way you can see and edit the same data on both the iPhone, iCal, and even online in the Google Calendar web interface while you're away from your beloved gadgets.

Pocket Informant gives you an agenda, a day view, and a month overview. Nothing special so far, until you see everything in action. Where the iPhone's Calendar app does its job .. well, in a doing-its-job kind of way, this one is on steroids. What I haven not mentioned yet is the week view, and for that view alone I would have made the switch. Why? Simple: Apple's Calendar app doesn't offer that. And for the way I work with calendars, a good week view is essential. In the month view, Informant will even give you tiny little time bars on every day that show you which portions of your days are booked. You can even opt for small text entries. And these are just a few of the cool things it does.

Generally Pocket Informant is highly configurable. Actually it might be even too configurable for some. Luckily there's a free light version of the app to find out.

But what really blew me away is its todo integration. It allows you to keep a todo list GTD style. With projects, contexts and the whole thing. Or do you prefer the Franklin Covey style, giving you the active, in progress, overdue and due items? It can do that too. If a todo item has a due date, you can see it on the calendar. And if that isn't enough, get this: this is not an isolated solution. It syncs with the cloud, or more specific with the Toodledo service. All you'll need is to get a free account there and you're set. Even better, Toodledo itself lets you integrate your todo lists with other things, such as Twitter. When I'm in Twitter and I all of a sudden I think of something I'll need to do, I can just send off a direct message to @toodledo and it'll end up as a new todo in my list. In Pocket Informant. On my iPhone. I have also added Toodledo to my iCal, so now I can even see (but not edit) the todo directly in iCal on the Mac.

There is a free version of Pocket Informant [App Store link]. The full version [App Store link] isn't cheap (€ 10.49 as of writing this), but after working with it for a day, I can say it's worth every cent.

Just for disclosure: I'm not affiliated with these guys.

Memory management

What's even more interesting: After I have moved my high-volume calendars to Google and now syncing my calendar(s) from Google back to the iPhone using Pocket Informant, I can all of a sudden use all of them again without running into the low memory issue that killed my iPhone experience since the upgrade to 3.1 - something that I believe has to do with how efficient this app manages its memory. And it has to do with the fact that the Apple Calendar app stays open in the background - something that only a few Apple apps are privileged to do - and thus permanently uses a lot of memory if you have a lot of calendar entries, while Pocket Informant doesn't run in the background and frees up the used memory once you leave the app.

Alerts

Calendar alerts are provided by making use of the push notification feature. Or you can opt to use Google Calendar notifications via text message, web alert, and so forth. Or in my case, I have added my main Google Mail/Calendar to the iPhone as an Exchange account, which syncs the calendar entries of my main calendar (and only those) with the iPhone's Calendar app and therefore gives me the alerts this way. I know I know, things could be a bit easier, but this way works just fine for me.

Shake to sync

The app is pretty smart about how and when it syncs with Google Calendar and Toodledo, but if you want to force a sync, you can enable the shake to sync feature, something that I initially thought was just a gimmick, but that I have come to like quite a bit during testing of the app. I'll probably disable it though after the honeymoon is over and I go on to use the app as a simple every-day work-horse.

Conclusion

No, this isn't the year planner that I was hoping for. If you know an app for the iPhone or for the Mac that provides that in an elegant way, please please please let me know about it.

What it is though is a really powerful calendaring and productivity application that - used correctly - will put a lot of oomph at your fingertips.

Integrating it with Google Calendar and Toodledo allows me a lot of flexibility about how and where I use calendars and todos, and keeping that data in the cloud makes it much easier for me to access everything.

And using the pretty well integrated GTD part of Informant, I will probably stop using Things, which I sill love, which I think looks much nicer, but which simply isn't as fast and integrated as Pocket Informant is.

Wishlist

Here's my very short one-item wishlist for Pocket Informant:

Please think about year planning, if anyone can pull it off, it's you guys. I'd love to be your guinea pig! But whatever you change in the future, please don't sacrifice speed and integration.

Do you use an alternative calendar on the iPhone? Let me know in the comments!

A warning upfront: if you came here for a photography article, this one's not for you. This is about the iPhone and a little odyssey that eventually lead me to solving all my iPhone 3.1 issues. Wall, almost all of them...

I love my iPhone 3G. I'm doing more and more with it, from emailing, stats checking, podcast recording (Daily Photo Tips is entirely produced on my iPhone), calendaring, checking my bank accounts, .. you name it. It has become so important to me that I have even started to use an iPhone case to protect it. And if you know me, you know that I've NEVER used a case on any of my phones before.

I'm still on the 3G, because my German T-Mobile plan ("1st generation plan") wouldn't allow me to early upgrade the phone without having to also upgrade to the next higher plan ("2nd gen") which for reasons that most Germans on the 1st-gen plan who use the MultiSIM option know is a pretty much no-go. But I digress.

Let's start at the beginning:

The update to 3.1 and what it broke

When I updated the iPhone to 3.1, all hell broke loose. Or rather the opposite. My iPhone came to a screeching halt. All of a sudden it wouldn't react for a minute right after a reboot. Or scrolling in a podcast list would be super jerky. Or flipping the home screen sideways would stop for 5 seconds before it would resume. Or the calendar app would try very hard to open but fail and return to the home screen. I could go on and on and on. I tried a lot of things, lots of detective work, but couldn't really piece it together. When I twittered about it, I received a note from someone who seems to work at Apple letting me know that it's not 3.1 being the problem but that iTunes 9 was buggy. Well, the iTunes 9.0.1 update came along and nothing really changed on my iPhone. Still the same lack of response to so many things.

What I found out early was that it was likely to be a memory issue. Using the iStat app I could see that the amount of free memory was pretty low. Usually in the 1MB range.

The other thing I noticed was that when I hooked up the iPhone to iTunes, the bars that show you how much of its capacity is filled with music, videos and apps, had changed. The usually very small orange-colored "other" portion was much bigger all of a sudden. At this point I still didn't have enough information to piece it together.

The phone call with Apple Care

So with my out-of-warranty phone I finally gave in and called Apple Care. Got a nice lady on the phone who couldn't really help me. I managed to talk her into letting me talk with a 2nd-tier engineer and from him I finally found out one crucial piece of information: the orange bar contains calendars and contacts. I probably could've found this information online, had I know what to search for.

The calendar and its "new and improved" broken behavior

Around the same time I started noticing that all my subscribed calendars were now being synced to the iPhone. This is new behavior in 3.1 and it only happens if you sync them via mobileme. If you sync via iTunes, you can make a choice which calendars to sync.

This is especially interesting as I am subscribed to some high-volume calendars, such as Leo Laporte's TWiT Live production calendar (I'm a guest on his Tech Guy radio show and this calendar is my main way to know if I'm on his recording schedule or not), and Twistory, which is my twitter history as calendar entries. This last one is really high volume depending on how much I tweet, but I've found it really valuable at times and don't want to miss it.

The epiphany (or: what needs to come together to break things)

Here is my root cause analysis, mixed in with a good portion of guesswork:

1. Calendar entries and contacts obviously take up working memory on the iPhone. To be able to sync and fire off alarms at the right time, I assume the iPhone calendar reads all calendar entires into memory on startup.


2. mobileme syncs all calendars to the iPhone, even the subscribed ones. With mobileme there is no way to select which calendars to sync and which to not sync.


3. I have 596 conctacts in my address book. Some with pictures. Most likely another memory eater.


4. I have a bunch of high-volume calendars subscribed in iCal.


5. Disabling mobileme or even just disabling the calendar on the iPhone brings it back to life.

This would explain why only 3G users see the issues (the 3G has less memory than the 3GS) and then only some of them (who is crazy enough to have 596 contacts and god knows how many calendar entries in about 7 different calendars?)

The solution

I spent good portions of the last weekend on finding a solution. And thanks to Monika's just recently re-ignited love to sock knitting (a lovely cherry-cream-colored pattern emerges as I type this post), this has even still been a weekend in sweet harmony ;)

1. Find a way to not sync the high-volume calendars to the iPhone

The best solution was to use Google Calendar™ to help with this:

a) Dump the subscribed calendars from iCal
b) Instead subscribe to them in Google Calendar
c) Now add your Google account to iCal and enable the subscribed calendars in the delegation tab of the account settings

Voila! The subscribed calendars don't sync to the iPhone anymore, but you still have them in iCal.

2. Move everything to Google Calendar

I could have stopped here, the above solution already does the trick for me to speed up the iPhone, but - alas - I'm on another calendar-related quest, so I continued to do my research: The search for a better calendar that helps me with my workshop planning.

But that's a story for the next blog entry.

Got similar iPhone 3.1 experiences? Share them in the comments!