Feast your eyes on the Google Calendar Sync tool’s way of saying “You’ve uninstalled Outlook and I don’t know what to do now…”

Not only does it contain an insanely silly looking error number, but it’s so severe it also has a code too. Does that mean error -2147221164 has 1007 other codes with it?

I’m guessing (since I uninstalled Outlook yesterday) that Could not connect to Microsoft Outlook: error -2147221164, code 1008 means “I cannot find your Outlook data file, or whatever inter-process method for synching calendars it is that I use”.

My my this is fun. Yesterday I read a fun web comic about a cool new browser idea from Google, and then went on my way wondering why half that stuff hasn’t been done yet anyway. Really, sorting URLs as you type them so that

www.google.com

appears before

www.google.com?s=chicken%20vindaloo&sessionid=0234848384434535,493545,43,,,534…

isn’t a world-breaking idea, surely? Supposedly Opera does it, along with several other ideas Chrome has implemented, but it’s still a bit weird that neither Firefox nor Internet Explorer have “borrowed” the ideas too.

Anyway, it turns out you can now actually download a beta version of the browser. And it seems a fairly stable beta too, this is no Mozilla 0.001a that they’ve shovelled out quickly to get their foot in the door. Google appear to have been sitting quietly with this making it work well enough to release. Google do that, more people should too - release stuff when it works.

Chrome renders pages quickly too

Image from Wikipedia

See that old fashioned paper device? Remember those things from the 80s, they were as revolutionary as the PalmPilot when it first came out. All it is is some paper within a ringbinder. Big, bulky, hard to edit and most definitely not able to sync with your PC.

And you know what? It’s just saved me a lot of hassle and trouble. Do you see that rectangular plastic device sat on top of the FiloFax? That’s called a mobile phone, and is the current fancy way to store all that delicate info in your pocket. FiloFax out, smart PDA-like phone in.

Yeah, in theory… until it goes wrong… Like it did with me today.

I use Google Calendar for my planning and organising, without it I’m screwed. My phone has all my phone numbers in, without them I’m equally screwed. Losing my phone would be bad, so I need a way to back them up, preferably so they’re readable on my PC too. Having tried using a Windows Smartphone with anything but Windows before, I decided that to make life easy I’d try and use the phone in the way it was designed…

Phone <–> ActiveSync <–> OutLook

ActiveSync was already on my PC, and I just needed to install OutLook, plug in my phone and it’d back all my contacts up, and then that’d be it. Except it wasn’t since ActiveSync was most insistent that I didn’t have Outlook installed, and then after a bit of prodding, gave me a random error number and refused to sync. Some Googling turned up a hint that I need to re-pair my phone with my PC and then it’d work properly.

So I deleted my phone from ActiveSync, dismissing a confusing dialog that said I’d lose the contents of my phone when synced with this PC (It was one of those fantastically bad dialogs that said “Bad things will happen if you continue” and then just an ‘OK’ button to press). Well I wasn’t syncing, I was deleting the phone from ActiveSync… surely that’s not a bad thing to do?

Well… yeah… it is actually. ActiveSync started up and merrily synced my Outlook with my phone. By ’sync’ I mean ‘make empty OutLook and full phone match by emptying the phone’.

Fortunately for me I had meticulously copied out my contacts at the weekend into my 80s PDA equivalent, and merely had to sync that with OutLook using the good old fashioned method of typing everything into my PC. The only cool part of this was that as soon as I’d saved a contact in OutLook it sent it to my phone.

I don’t like the way my data is now trapped within OutLook and the magic ActiveSync system, but it’s better than having it just on my phone. I’ll investigate LDAP addressbooks next I think.

Oh, by using the Google Calendar Sync tool I managed to get my Google Calendar into Outlook and then into my phone, which was quite a nice feat. It even works the other way - I can write appointments on my phone and send them to Google Calendar.

The stereo in my car has no external input, making it difficult to listen to music on my Nokia N810. I have to resort to a slightly fuzzy FM transmitter that dangles around in the passenger footwell and occasionally needs retuning if I go for long drives through the country. I have a spare car stereo from a previous car, but because my car’s OEM stereo is an odd shape I’ll need a replacement fascia.

Thinking I could get a replacement I hit eBay…

That seems a sensible search term, I own a 2005 Panda and need a stereo fascia. Let’s see what comes up…

Well that’s fantastic! It found 39 items. Right, must be a bargain in here…

Wait, something is wrong…

Look at the search string, it’s been modified. And if you squint at the tiny bit of writing you see some curious search logic being applied. It turns out that if eBay can’t find results for your search query, they modify it and search for that instead, and then modify what you typed into the search box. How they modify the search is unknown. All we know is that they are now giving us results for something we didn’t ask for. I don’t want a new stereo for my car, I want a fascia for my car, but that vital, important, required keyword has been stripped off!

This is a fine example of a system second-guessing its users and getting it totally wrong. There is no way a search engine can guess what I mean, the best it can do is give me alternates that are likely, or let me set the context and narrow the searches down, which is what eBay is trying to do. Unfortunately it also then decides to totally erase my previous search leading to confusion. I bet like me you look in the search box to double-check your search criteria if the search doesn’t work.

If you do a similar search on Google and it spell checks or thinks you mean something else, a much better display is presented to the user:

As you can see, Google thinks it knows better, but rather than totally obliterating your mental map of what to expect, it notifies you of its suggestion but then gives you what you asked for. It’s up to the user to use the alternate.

And that’s the way eBay should work. Rather than second guessing me and giving me pages of cars, it should tell me the search failed and then offer a suggestion for me to click on. The clicking on part is important - it links an action to a consequence and is vital to preventing your users from becoming confused. Since don’t forget, confused users often get irritated and angry and then feel the need to tell the world about this using their blogs

For a while it’s been possible to browse the Google search using a mobile device by pointing a browser at the Google Mobile page. From then it’s the usual Google Search affair to do a web search.

I’ve just noticed, at the bottom of my iGoogle page a link to view it on my mobile phone. Hoping this would be some fantastic RSS/GMail/Calendar iGoogle style page for my phone I followed the necessary steps to add the link to my phone’s browser.

The page loaded quite quickly but wasn’t what I was assuming. Think of it more as a list of Google services, rather than iGoogle. It’s really handy though. You can access all your Google services through it - including Google Docs.

My mobile is an Orange SPV E650 running Windows Mobile 6, and includes the pocket versions of Excel and Word. Using mobile Google I was able to download and edit one of the spreadsheet documents I have stored in my Google docs. There was also an option to view it as HTML. I don’t know if editing can be done though.

I’m fairly sure this is a feature I won’t use that often, I usually have access to a proper PC for most of the time. However there have been the odd situations where being able to call up Google Maps or quickly check my mail (booking a hotel somewhere and forgetting its address, then needing a map to find it, being an example) have been really useful and saved loads of effort.