'TATA buses' : tata volvo

Recently I had the pleasure of riding in the TATA city bus in Kanpur.

To my surprise these are a very superior quality buses if not exact but a close replica of the Volvo buses. I really used to relish those comfortable drives on Volvo buses in Sweden with beautiful people around.

Equally pleasant ride was the one on TATA AC bus called Marcopolo in Bangalore. With these buses spreading in every city, Indian traffic will soon see the days of calmness and safety. Without compromising the quality, the fares are nominal to compete with the existing auto-rikshaws.

One of the great features I liked in the Volvo buses was the STOP buttons located behind seats and various rods in the bus. If anyone wants to get down he simply presses one of them and the driver would stop the bus at the next bus stop. Interestingly, TATA has designed exactly similar buttons in their bus giving it a fancy look. The door opening mechanism and place for cradles/wheelchair is also similarly built.

Seats appear quite comfortable; if only they can withstand the huge population pressure and remain well maintained.

An indigenous solution to indigenous problem. Good Luck TATA !! Good luck India.

App of the week

iCal viewer

Came across some nice apps last week. The best one was iCal viewer which displays your ical events on your desktop background in a very fancy manner. Sorry I couldn't find a better wallpaper to demonstrate it. It shows the time left for an event as the list of events move left towards a vertical line on your desktop. Its a shareware so you have to bear a red strip on the screen if you use it for free.

http://www.icalviewer.com/

Dates to ical

This is a sweet little app which transfers all birthdays/anniversaries in your address book to your ical which now get displayed on your desktop and obviously will ring an alarm for the event. So you would never miss a birthday again.

http://www.nhoj.co.uk/datestoical/

Island Racer

How about NFS on Mac? Well not exactly but this game is worth downloading for its beautiful graphic effects. The controls are not very developed though. The demo version can be tried for free.

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/games/simulation_and_sports/islandracer.html

Waveboard

You have a google wave account but you don't wanna keep your browser open all the time. Try Waveboard-its a simple Google wave client still in development phase but doing great job.

http://www.getwaveboard.com/

Google address and calendar sync

Yeah.. I recently came to know that you can sync your address book contacts and calendars from Mac with google and then with iphone. So next time you make any contact or add an event on your mac, your iphone will automatically get synchronized through google.

There are multiple ways to do it.

1. Google sync

To sync your calendars and contacts between Mac and google, go to iCal and addressbook preferences and configure google sync with your google account. Interested people can try Calaboration which does the same job.

2. CalDAV account :

CalDAV is basically exchange support extension by Apple. It can be configured on Mac or iphone to sync information amongst google, Mac and your phone. The details can be found at :

http://www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/answer.py?answer=99355

3. Spanning Sync

Spanning Sync is a paid but amazing app that seamlessly syncs your calendars and contacts between Google and Mac bothways.

If you happen to own an iphone you can use Exchange server setup to sync your google accounts with iphone. Details:

http://www.google.com/support/mobile/bin/answer.py?answer=138740

Google quick search box

Beware Spotlight lovers, Google is coming with the king of all searches for Mac. This app integrates Google's searching and database capabilities with Mac's Spotlight searching capabilities.... wowwww. Its still in development phase and obviously free. What

More about it :
http://code.google.com/p/qsb-mac/