gCal - Selective Mobile Phone Reminders
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The Google Calendar can send reminders to your mobile phone, but it’s an all-or-nothing deal. There’s no checkbox in an appointment to specify if you want an sms notification. The checkbox is in the Calendar Settings, and it’s universal.
Here’s Murphy’s workaround: The calendar can send an email reminder to your Gmail account for every appointment. You can set up a filter in Gmail to send the reminders to your cell phone, if they meet a preset criteria. Then you can create appointments like “Lunch with Leo mbl” - the mbl will tell gmail to email the message to your phone. This is great for users of the Quick Add feature in Google Calendar.
In the screencast Murphy tells Gmail to forward messages that contain “mbl” to the email address his mobile carrier provides. In the United States many mobile phones can be emailed using 123456@teleflip.com - where 123456 is your ten-digit mobile number. Try it if you don’t know the email address of your mobile phone. 
What does this have to do with Macs you ask? Read on.
A London reader asked Murphy about sending sms reminder messages from iCal. The reader indicated that their carrier doesn’t provide an email address for texting. Murphy’s not a big sms user - or an iCal user for that matter - can anyone help the loyal Murphy Mac reader?
Here’s one idea. iCal can run an AppleScript as an alarm. The AppleScript could send the sms via another application, like Skype. If you have information about sms clients that work with iCal or AppleScript please post it in the comments!
Check out Google for more information on getting Calendar information on your phone. You can even query your Calendar with a text sent from your phone. Click for a follow-up to this post.
14. April 2007 at 2:46 pm :
I don’t think that is correct about not being able to be specific on which appointments get sent via SMS. If you open up the event in GCal and expand the Options section on the appointment, you can set the Reminder option to “No Reminder,” then you will not get an SMS text. I use the SMS feature and find it indispensable.
14. April 2007 at 3:09 pm :
You’re right. But….
With the filter you can easily specifiy the reminder at appointment creation time in one fluid Quick Add motion. (I use Quick Add for most of my appointments) And turning off the reminder in options involves going all the way into the appointment, into options, and clicking that list. I don’t like that process!
Plus turning off the reminder turns off ALL reminder avenues.
It depends on how you use it. I have a few appointments I want sent to the phone, not all of them. So this way works better for some people.
Thanks for pointing that out though.
14. April 2007 at 3:55 pm :
Good point about the Quick Add feature. That is something I don’t use very often. To many of my appointments have extra information and I also found that how I name some of my appointments doesn’t work well in Quick Add.
For example, anything having to do with class I usually do “@Class: Assignment,” but the @ symbol gets dropped and I have to edit the appointment the long way.
14. April 2007 at 5:11 pm :
Naming conventions are important, aren’t they?
It’s a downside of my method, your appointment name gets a little bit contaminated.
I was thinking about what you said. I think your way of undoing the reminder in Options works well if most of your appointments should have mobile reminders. And this way works well if you want to be more selective, like if you pay for sms messages.
BTW - There’s a Firefox add-on for Quick Add that lets you Quick Add from other web pages. You can just use the q key if you’re on the page. But the add-on isn’t working for me. I think it has a problem with 2.x - I haven’t really researched it yet.
10. May 2007 at 11:43 am :
Well here’s a handy applescript on Oreillynet.com that trolls through your address book for a set parameter and then sends a set SMS to each contact that matches that parameter. I modified this script so I can tell it to search for clients or suppliers. Very handy. You could easily mod this concept to work with iCal and send a specific iCal day/week/month calendar info to your own phone.
http://www.oreillynet.com/mac/blog/2006/11/automate_sms_sending_with_skyp.html