I signed up tikirobot.net for “Google Apps for Your Domain” to see what all the fuss is about. It’s pretty cool! You get mail from Gmail, calendaring from Google Calendar, and Google Talk, and Google Page Creator, if you want that. The signup process is pretty painless, given what they’re providing.

This is my third try at Google Calendar and it’s finally growing on me. A few months back, support for Safari was shaky and I couldn’t get the “Quick Add” feature to work. Now Safari works pretty well, but the only way I could a create a new calendar was to use Firefox. Also, the Quick Add defaults are not very geek friendly at this point. The only dates I ever need to remember are my sister’s birthday, my mom’s birthday, the raj+jess aniversary and … well, I guess that’s the only three I could think of at the moment. Anyway, in Quick Add speak that would be something like “raj+jess anniversary August 7 yearly”. And it does create an event with that title on that day. But the default reminder is just 30 minutes!!! That’s not much time for an anniversary! :-) So you have to go to the event and change the reminder, and confirm that yes, you want to be reminded a week ahead of time for all future instances, etc, etc. I think it ends up being more work than just adding the event normally. So being able to specify reminder stuff in Quick Add would be nice. I expect I’m not the only one that would like Google Calendar to make it look like I’m remember birthdays, so they might as well be special cased in Quick Add. It’s all about the CLI.

Anyway, you get all the Google productivity stuff but it looks like it’s coming from your domain. That’s pretty sweet for a small business or even a whole school. Let me know if you want test drive a TikiRobot Google Apps account …

Link to Google Apps.

Filed under: all talk, lifehacking · 6 Comments