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October 01, 2002
The kitchen sync?
Longtime readers may remember me complaining about not being able to keep address records synchronized between my PDA, computers and mobile phone. For the past few days I've been playing around with Apple's answer to that problem -- iSync. It looks like a good start on a solution, although the beta needs some work and I need a new phone.
The iSync utility is a generalized sync application designed to manage addresses and calendar events between the Mac OS X iCal calendar and Address Book and any devices you might have (plus other Macs). The utility currently supports a few cell phones, the Apple iPod and Palm devices. It functions over network connections, bluetooth, USB and (with Palms I'm assuming) IR.
As I understand the program will be extensible, allowing device manufacturers and third party developers to make plug-ins to support other devices.
The Address Book is, for the most part, a decent takes on address book functionality. I just don't like how editing is handled, there is an "Edit" button that you have to push, when really you should just have to double click on something to edit it. Apple also needs to include more fields, probably the whole MS Outlook set of fields. I understand that the Palm and other devices might not support all the fields, but they could be stored as notes (on the Palm) or just left off. The export/import file format is standard vCard.
The iCal calendar is actually quite neat, you can publish and subscribe to calendars using either the .Mac service or any WebDav webserver. I'd like better visual feedback as to what day is currently selected and the ability to drag an event to stretch multiple days. You can created multiple day events, but you have to go to the event's properties palette. You can see an example calendar published through .Mac here. The export import file format is standard vCal. There is already a website where people are trading calendars and other folks have started working on connecting iCal with blogs.
iSync itself is currently beta software, so understandably there problems, but it does seem to work. However, I don't yet have a way of checking the computer to computer syncing yet, and I don't have an iPod or bluetooth cell phone either. Bummer.
The biggest complaint that I (and a bunch of other people) have is that to sync between computers you have to have a .Mac subscription. That shouldn't be required, especially if the two computers are on the same network. It also doesn't use Palm's categories when syncing the Address Book, which I imagine will be fixed RSN.
All in all, an interesting package and a welcome addition to the other Mac OS X utilities.