Unless you desire to have your blog looking like a fail whale, you have to find ways to schedule blogging into your life.
Google Calendar has been an asset for me (as far as scheduling goes), but unless I received a strong signal for my iPhone, the Google Calendar web app was entirely useless (at least on AT&T).
Fortunately I discovered an iPhone app called SaiSuke (from Say Software) which allowes me to sync to Google Calendar (both ways) over the air without touching Outlook or iTunes.
Since this iPhone app is rather pricy (at around $10), you may want to check out the review below to decide if this app is worth skipping lunch at a restuarant (and just brown bagging it for a day).
The Good
One of the features I really enjoyed about SaiSuke was the ability to easily create calendar events, and setup alerts. Just like in Google Calendar, you can choose to be notified either by email, SMS or a pop up (or even all three).
I find this to be very useful for blogging as sometimes life can drown out your blogging hobbies, and having a little reminder is a great way to keep the momentum going (especially during this political/financial drama we are all living in).
Another great feature is the ability to share your schedule through SaiSuke, which is great for group blogs with multiple authors (or even for those of you brave enough to share your posting schedule with your readers).
Last (but not least) I enjoyed the ability to adjust my calendar week. Users have the option to shorten your week from 7 days to 5 (just in case you want to avoid posting on the weekends) or even choose which day your blogging week should start on (say like a Wednesday or Thursday instead of Sunday or Monday).
The Bad
While SaiSuke did boast a few powerful features, it did have a few annoyances as well.
The first was the inability to create repeating events, which means if you want to set up a dedicated schedule for blogging, you have to do it from Google Calendar’s end, and not SaiSuke’s.
To add even more salt to the wound, repeating events created on Google Calendar are uneditable on SaiSuke, which means that I have to edit it from my computer later on if my schedule changes, instead of easily from my iPhone.
Last but not least, their is no landscape mode in SaiSuke, which means those of you with basketball hands (like me) will find it annoying to type within the portait layout that is default for most iPhone apps.
No Aspiring Rivals?
Even though there are plenty of powerful calendar apps within Apple’s app store (like SmartTime by Left Coast Logic), most of them do not allow for you to sync your data elsewhere (a deal breaker for me as your iPhone and computer can always become damaged in a lightening storm or worse, stolen).
While there is another iPhone app called GooSync who may challenge SaiSuke in the future by syncing your iPhone calendar with Google Calendar, their app may never realize its potential as Steve Jobs has not given the green light for third party apps to connect to the iPhone calendar (and I suspect he never will).
Conclusion
SaiSuke is a great app, and is one of several time management apps that I use to help me blog.
Hopefully Saysoft will consider not only adding landscape mode (for those lacking piano fingers) but also expand the app to include other online calendars such as Yahoo Calendar and Zoho (as not every blogger loves Google).
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