Google into Apple's Apps
There is a way to link the iPhone's Calendar app to all your shared Gcals, but it certainly takes a little elbow grease. Here's how it's done.
- Head to Settings → Mail, Contacts, Calendars → Add Account.
- Select Microsoft Exchange, and then input your full Gmail address into the Email and Username fields.
- Leave Domain blank and insert your Gmail password in the Password field.
- Tap the Next button in the top-right, and when the Server field emerges, punch in m.google.com.
- On the following screen, ensure that all options are toggled off except Calendar.
- Now, open Safari and head to m.google.com/sync; find your iPhone in the list after logging in and select it.
- From there, tap to add any or all of your shared calendars, and once saved, your Calendar will update in a matter of minutes if you're on a solid Wi-Fi connection.
Tweaks for Productivity
Although the iPhone's Mail app is fully capable of handling as many e-mail accounts as you can throw at it (within reason, naturally), there can only be one default. This is actually more important in relation to third-party apps that allow shortcuts to "mail" things from within. For example, if you select to e-mail an article from a news magazine, it'll send from your default account. If your work is fairly strict about what passes through its mail servers, make sure your personal account is the default at Settings → Mail, Contacts, Calendars → Default Account.
Note
With the introduction of iOS 6, Apple is finally letting people add documents, videos, and photos right from the Compose screen of a new message within the Mail app. It's a major improvement from iOS 5, where you couldn't attach a wide variety of media once you started composing a new e-mail.
Also, leaving "Sent from my iPhone" as your signature may seem a bit pretentious and played out-and let's be honest, it sort of is-but it definitely gives recipients a heads-up to expect curt replies, stranger than usual formatting, and a glut of typos.
If you're planning on traveling with your iPhone (you should!), pay close attention to how your calendars are displayed. Over in the familiar Settings → Mail, Contacts, Calendars → Calendars section, make sure you deliberately choose to turn Time Zone Support on or off. Off will please those who want to see what times their events are with respect to whatever time zone they're currently in. On will please those who may change position in the world, but never mentally leave the time zone where their work takes place. In my world, Engadget revolves around Eastern Time, so my iPhone is flipped to On. Even if it's 3AM on a Thursday in Sydney, want to be reminded that it's noon on Wednesday so far as my work is concerned. There's hardly a productivity (and reputation) killer more ruthless than a confused time zone.
Avid archivists should also know about another swipe trick: sweeping left or right across a message in the list of messages will bring up a red Archive button, which does exactly what you think it does upon pressing.
Mark As Unread is another beast entirely. It feels like Apple changes the location of this feature on every iOS release, and it's located in a somewhat hidden spot in iOS 5/6. Use this function all the time for e-mails, but to which don't have time to fully reply at the moment.
Within an opened message, you'll need to take the following steps:
- Click Details in the upper-right corner.
- Click Mark.
- Click Mark as Unread.
As mentioned earlier that multi-tasking is more like backgrounding on the iPhone. That doesn't mean that you should avoid keeping mental tabs on what's lurking behind your Mail pane. When composing an e-mail that requires you to reference something stored on Dropbox, in Numbers, on a web page, an address in Maps, or practically any other application, a simple double-tap of the Home button will pull up apps that are currently running in the background. It'll only show the four most recently used at first, but a swipe from right to left will reveal more (and more...and more).
Just tap whatever app you need to reference in order to hop into it, and then do the same bottom-bar emergence trick as before in order to find Mail sitting there in the lower-left corner. Your message will remain just as you left it, ready to accept a new thought or even a paste of text that you copied from a different app.
