Palm Pre Basics - #8 - Synergy in the Palm Pre Calendar

Butterscotch Tutorial Special Palm Pre Basics Part eight of twelve: Synergy in Calendar Jay Goldman: Hi I'm Jay Goldman the host of Mr. Mobile. Today we're going to take a look at the calendar application on the Palm Pre. Calendars are one of the applications on the Pre that take advantage of Synergy, the built-in function in webOS that allows the Pre to synchronize over the air with different web based services. You can configure the accounts that the calendar is going to synchronize with in the calendar menu under preference and accounts. I've configured this Pre to synchronize with my Palm profile, which you setup, when you originally setup the phone, two Google calendars and a movies calendar that was created by the Flixster's application when I installed it to show the movies that I want to go to. The default calendar is the calendar that events will be created in, in the all calendars view mode. And I can tap on the sync now, to synchronize these manually, although they will sync atomically over the air. The add an account button allows me to add a new account for Google, Facebook or Microsoft Exchange. Google accounts are a great solution if you'd like to synchronize your Pre with a desktop computer that is also synchronizing with Google. If you're on a Mac take a look at Spanning Sync and if you're on Windows you'll find a number of different solutions that allow you to do this. Facebook accounts are very handy for downloading things like the events that you've agreed to go to on Facebook or your friends birthdays. Microsoft Exchange obviously synchronizes within Microsoft Exchange Server and so if you're in a corporate environment you can use that to have full access to your calendar. As always the back swipe will allow you to exit from these screens and return to your calendar mode. Note that the Palm can be a little finicky about picking up that gesture so you may need to do it more than once. The calendar supports three fairly standard views for looking at date based events. This is the today view, we can switch to the week view, which shows me colored blocks depending on which calendar events are scheduled in or the month view which use these grayed out areas to give me an idea of when I have different things scheduled and shows me the current date which is circled in blue. Double tapping on a date takes me directly to that date and I can use the menu here to change which calendars are viewed and I can see which colors relate to which calendar. New events can be created by tapping on an empty area on the calendar or by going to the calendar menu and choosing new, which gives me access to event or all day event. I can set which calendar I'm creating this event in, in this case on my Palm profile which is the default calendar. And then I can access the keyboard in order to type the different fields that I need to enter when I'm creating the event. So if I'm for example having coffee with a friend like my producer Sean. I can enter a date using the date picker controls. So if a meeting on the 16th of September at 5 or 6 p.m. The event is lasting an hour, use the back gesture to return to the previous page. I can set an event location. So if we're meeting for example at the Butterscotch studio. And once I've entered an event location and set whether or not I want to repeat, I can actually map that location directly inside of the calendar application. There is no save function, so to save the event I return using the back gesture to my pervious view and I can now see my event has been scheduled here. One thing to note with the calendar application it has been a little bit finicky from time to time and so if you find that your events aren't showing up even when you think that they should be, you can often resolve that by tapping on the all and simply reselecting all calendars which will result in them redisplaying. Thanks for watching our episode about the calendar. Stay tuned for the rest of the series for more information about your Palm Pre and we'll see you then. Butterscotch - Tasty Tech; Delicious Downloads. Butterscotch.com, a division of Tucows Corp. Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/