Category: Apple

Missing Sync troubles

I seemed to have Missing Sync working OK with my Storm for a little while, then the calendar sync starting tossing out errors. I opened up a support ticket on Friday night. I’ll see if someone gets back to me on Monday or not. Meanwhile, I tried a few random things to fix the situation, and I have gotten it working again, though I’m not confident it’ll *keep* working.

I did a backup and restore of my iCal data, then ran Onyx to clear out all my logs, then rebooted and did a fresh sync. No errors. It’s getting late, so I’m not going to mess with it any more tonight, but we’ll see if the device keeps syncing OK over the next few days.

I was listening to a DNR episode last week which dealt with some of Microsoft’s work on sync technology. It was pretty interesting. Apparently, sync still isn’t an easy problem to solve.

Missing Sync

I just installed Missing Sync on my Mac. I’ve got it all set up to sync my contacts and calendars between the Mac and the BlackBerry over Bluetooth. Sweet. I encountered a few bumps while setting it up, but I think I’ve ironed out all the weird little conflicts, and it’s working OK now.

I’ve still got the BlackBerry Desktop Manager software installed on my Vista machine, but I don’t think I’m going to use it for anything except maybe software installs.

Overall, the Storm is working out pretty well so far. I haven’t had any random reboots, software glitches, or anything like that. I’m getting used to the touchscreen and virtual keyboards.

In terms of my overall “holy grail” quest for maximum syncing between all my devices, I think I’m actually doing a lot better than I would have ever expected. I’ve got my contacts & calendar on my Mac, on the web, on my iPod Touch, and now on my BlackBerry. On my Vista PC, I’ve only got my contacts, but I can always get to the calendar on the web.

On the random notes side, I have Backpack on the web, accessible through FrontPocket on the iPod Touch, and through the mobile version of the BackPack site on the Storm. It would be cool if I could directly sync Backpack to the notes app on the iPod Touch and/or the Storm, but that doesn’t seem likely at this point.

On the e-mail front, I have access to all of my e-mail accounts on both the iPod Touch and the Storm now. I think the iPod Touch is a little nicer to use for e-mail than the Storm, mainly because it has full IMAP support. The BIS solution on the Storm really just forwards mail to the device. Sometimes, it seems to be able to mirror read/unread marks and deletions back to the server, but I’m not sure if it’s doing that for all my accounts. I think I’ve figured out that, for my Lotus Notes e-mail, if I delete a message on the Storm and tell it to delete that message on the server, it *will* remove the message from my Notes inbox, but it doesn’t actually delete it. I’m not 100% sure on that. I think I need to mess around with it some more.

Kindle iPhone App

I downloaded the Kindle reader for my iPod Touch earlier this week. I don’t anticipate that I’ll use it much, since I do have an actual Kindle, but I wanted to play around with it. Given the limitations of the iPhone form factor, the app works reasonably well. I suppose I could manage to read a book on it, but I’m not sure I’d want to.

I think that releasing this app right now was a good move on Amazon’s part. There do seem to be a lot of people who are comfortable reading on the iPhone. A good number of e-books have been released as iPhone apps, so apparently there’s a market. Amazon might as well pick up some sales this way, and maybe the app will eventually drive some Kindle 2 hardware sales, as people get used to buying and reading e-books, and decide to step up to a dedicated device.

I’m a little surprised that they don’t support reading newspapers and magazines via the iPhone app. Maybe it’s a rights issue. If I was going to read anything on the iPhone, it’d more likely be newspaper and magazine articles, rather than full-length books though.

iPhone app store

There’s an article up on LifeHacker about the first year of the iPhone app store. Here’s a statement I heartily agree with:

The little things: We’ll keep saying it until it’s fixed. It’s ridiculous that a phone that can remotely control your computer and work as a WebDAV server can’t be made to monitor a folder full of text notes and sync its own Notes application to it.

I’m still looking for a really good note-taking app that allows you to use it offline, then sync it back to your computer and/or the web. FrontPocket is working well for me, but it still doesn’t allow me to do much offline. Actually, FrontPocket may be the “killer app” that finally convinces me to switch from the iPod Touch to an iPhone, just so I’ll have constant access to my Backpack data.

FrontPocket review

I just installed FrontPocket on my iPod Touch. I stumbled across this program yesterday while I was working on my MobileMe issue. FrontPocket is an application that gives you (almost) full access to your Backpack account on your Touch (or iPhone). This is something I’ve really been looking for since I got the iPod Touch. I was hoping somebody would get around to coding something like this, and now someone has!

The program uses the Backpack API to access the info in your Backpack account, and pull it down to the iPod over the air. It caches the info locally, so you can still have access to it when you’re not connected to WiFi. I just did some testing, and it doesn’t look like the program automatically sucks down your whole Backpack account; it seems like you only have offline access to stuff that you’ve previously viewed online, and only the version you’ve most recently viewed, not necessarily the current version on the web. And it seems like you can’t add new notes or edit existing ones offline.

While online, you can add notes, edit notes, add journal entries, and add reminders, so you can do pretty much anything you’d want to do. The program does not, though, render Textile or HTML, so you’re just viewing the text of your notes. And URL links are not active links, so you can’t click on them and have them open in Safari or anything like that. (And, of course, the iPod Touch still has no copy & paste functionality, so you can’t just copy & paste an URL out of FrontPocket and into Safari.) Oh, and it doesn’t render photos that you’ve stored in Backpack either.

So, overall, there are a number of limitations to this app that I really wish they could find a way to fix. Some of them are likely related to limitations in the Backpack API. Others could be fixed, though they might be non-trivial. The app’s only on version 1.1, so maybe we’ll see some new stuff added in the next iteration. (I wonder if there’s an open source Textile rendering engine out there somewhere that they could convert for use on the iPod/iPhone and just drop into the app?)

The thing I’d most like to see is a full sync option, where my entire Backpack site would get pulled down to the device. I’d even be OK with having to press a button in the app to initiate the sync, though it would be cool if it could be done automatically in the background.

The app does have calendar functionality, by the way, but I don’t use Backpack calendar, so I can’t say much about that works. I haven’t seen any indication that it integrates with the standard device calendar app, though I wouldn’t expect it to; Apple probably hasn’t made it easy for third-party apps to update the built-in ones.

more fun with MobileMe calendars

Okay, I thought I had everything straightened out, but it just seems that the combination of Outlook and the way I’m generating my “birthdays” calendar on the Mac is not happy. It seems like things go wrong on the MobileMe site after going from iCal, to MobileMe, to Outlook, and back to MobileMe. It’s that last part, after Outlook does whatever it does to the calendars and pushes it back to the web, where everything goes wonky. If there was a way to just push the calendar to Outlook, and not let Outlook push it back to MobileMe, then I’d be OK. I wouldn’t mind treating the calendar as read-only in Outlook. Oh well, I guess I’m going to have to de-sync the calendar on my PC for now. I’ll leave the contact sync going, since that seems to work fine.

more MobileMe syncing fun

So, following up on the problems I had yesterday, I did a bit more research and tried a few things. To make a long story short, I deleted my “birthdays” calendar in iCal and re-synced, and everything was OK. I added the birthday calendar back in, synced again, and things are still OK. The next test, which I’ll probably do tonight, will be to sync Outlook on my PC again, then sync *that* back to MobileMe, and see if the problem returns. Hopefully not.

There’s a heck of a lot of talk on this problem in the MobileMe calendar support forum at Apple. One other thing I did, which didn’t seem to help, was to mess with the time zone settings in MobileMe. I’m back to the Eastern time zone, at least in the account page, but my calendar is showing everything in Mountain time, for some reason. I’m hoping that one will clear itself up.

syncing

I’ve been using MobileMe to sync contact & calendar data between my MacBook and my iPod Touch for a while now. It works pretty well. Today, I decided to go one more step, and set up MobileMe on my Vista desktop machine to sync with Outlook. The contacts were no problem; they synced up fine the first time through, and I then went through them and weeded out a few duplicates.

The calendar was a little trickier. I have three calendars in MobileMe: Home, Work, and Birthdays. The birthday calendar is populated automatically via MenuCalendarClock, a shareware program that just pulls birthdays from the Mac address book and puts them into iCal. These calendars all now show as separate calendars in Outlook. I had to basically push them down to Outlook, rather than doing a straight merge, though, to get them to show up.

There’s a default calendar in Outlook called “Calendar” that has now synced up the MobileMe (and hence my Mac and iPod). I never used the calendar in Outlook before, so this is just an empty calendar. There doesn’t seem to be any obvious way to delete it in Outlook, or to tell the MobileMe control panel not to sync it up. Not a huge deal, but a little annoyance.

And repeating events seem to be treated a little differently in Outlook vs. iCal. After I pulled stuff into Outlook, then synced back to MobileMe, then synced my Mac, every repeating event on my calendars showed as changed. I’m hoping this is a one-time thing, and I’m not going to have to push & pull every repeating event at every sync.

I’m also a little worried that, when I go to http://www.me.com/calendar/ to check my calendar online, I just see “Loading Events”, and nothing ever comes up. I think when something this has happened in the past, it would generally clear itself up overnight. Here’s hoping. Looking around online, though, this may have something to do with the way Outlook messed with the repeating events. I may have to do some work to straighten this out.

My reason for setting up Outlook with MobileMe, by the way, is because I’m thinking about replacing my old Motorola cell phone with a BlackBerry in the not-too-distant future. If I do that, I’m going to want to do full contact & calendar sync with the BlackBerry, and it seems like the easiest way to do that might be through Outlook. It seems like it’s possible to sync a BlackBerry directly with a Mac, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to set up my PC with all my data either way.

more iTunes Plus

Only a few days after upgrading 200+ songs to iTunes Plus, I went back again today, and found another almost 200 songs to upgrade. The biggest chunk there is the complete Led Zeppelin, which I bought for $99 a while ago, and will now cost me about $30 more to upgrade. I’ve noticed that the songs are downloading pretty quickly, but the bit where it says “processing file” right after the download is taking quite a long time on each song. I have no clue why that is, but whatever it is, it’s going to take a long time to get all that Led Zep converted to iTunes Plus.

iTunes Plus

I spent a little over $50 yesterday upgrading my iTunes library to the DRM-free iTunes Plus. I had 219 songs upgraded. I feel a bit like a chump for paying Apple so much money just to get DRM-free, slightly higher bitrate, versions of stuff I’ve already paid for. But it’s a one-time thing, and I like the idea of having the DRM-free tracks. In practice, I don’t think it’s going to make much difference though. I listen to my music primarily on my iPod, or through my CD player, so the DRM never got in my way.

It took a surprisingly long time to download all the new tracks. I had to quit the download last night, so I could turn off the computer and go to bed. I picked it up again this morning, and I think it ran for a few hours at least. It was still running when I left for work, so I’m not sure. The download process does an OK job of replacing the old tracks with the new ones, but it didn’t move all the old tracks out of the way like it should have. I had to go in and clean out about 50 tracks manually.

I wish Apple would have come up with a good way of automating the replacement of the old tracks on a second computer, though. To get the new tracks from my desktop to my laptop, I had to attach to the desktop, put together a “smart folder” to pull the new tracks together, copy them to the laptop, move them into the library, then delete the old versions manually for *all* the tracks. That was a bit of a pain. And there’s no way to fix existing playlists, to replace the old tracks with the new ones, so now I have a bunch of empty, or nearly empty, playlists. Well, it was probably time I cleaned up some of my old playlists anyway.