There are no great task managers for the iPhone - but there's hope for 2011

I'm surprised by the conclusion of my recent survey [3] of iPhone/OS X/Web task management solutions. There are still no great task managers for the iPhone.

Neither Things, nor Appigo's ToDo.app (which I have used incessantly since 2008), nor OmniFocus, nor Remember the Milk.app nor Toodledo.app are a great solution. They all fall short. None of them are the equal of the venerable, simple minded, task manager that came with the PalmOS in 1994 and was improved with integration into DateBk in the late 1990s.

You may wonder why I condemn all of our current options. I'll start by listing the base requirements.

1. Simple enough for a non-geek to use with at least basic task attributes (due date, priority, task name, description, category [1]) and views (filters, sorts).
2. Data freedom: import/export capabilities for all tasks.
3. Synchronization to a desktop or web version that matches the "data model" of the iPhone version and has the same usability standards. [2]
4. Affordable (total solution costs < $50)
5. Calendar integration, even if that's only an "agenda" type view of tasks and dates.
6. Search across all "fields" (attributes).
7. Utter, absolute reliability.
8. Instant on, no delays in task entry.
9. Archiving of completed tasks.
10. Local iPhone app with synchronizatio -- not dependent on a data connection to work.

Sounds easy, doesn't it?  Palm did most of this fifteen years ago, and Pimlico's DateBk delivered the complete package (and more) over ten years ago. Must be easy [4]...

Evidently not. Nobody does it for the iPhone today. Let me name the failures ...

1. OmniFocus is too expensive ($100 for iPhone/desktop pair) and is too complex. At a lower price point though I'd seriously consider them despite the complex. I'm an Omni Group fan.
2. Things has reliability issues, is too expensive and doesn't support data freedom. Their iTunes ratings continue to decline.
3. Appigo's ToDo.app doesn't have a robust and reliable web or desktop solution and lacks data freedom. The best option is to sync with Toodledo's web app, but that app has a different data model than ToDo.app. This is what I use every day however.
4. Toodledo's own iPhone/web solution is limited by their complex (and, sadly, ugly) web app. The web app search is field specific and so almost useless.
5. Remember the Milk has a bad reputation as a business partner, their iTunes ratings are poor (?reliability), they are relatively costly at $25/year, and there's no data freedom. (Corrected from original - see comments.)

It's a sad situation. The best option is still the combination of Appigo's ToDo.app and Toodledo's web service; I pay for both. I do, however, grit my teeth every time I use Toodledo's web client, especially if I need to search for something.

I'm hopeful we'll see a fix in 2011. There are at least three ways the logjam could break.

Apple's OS X app store could reenergize the flagging OS X desktop, and new desktop products might appear at better price points. If Apple were to provide OS X App Store developers with a standard way to synchronize to iOS devices I'd expect a great solution. Alternatively,  Apple could forget it hates its customers, and finally put a bullet through iCal (sadly, will require 10.7). Lastly, and least likely, Jobs might decide he doesn't totally hate task managers after all.

Google might finally provide an API for Google Tasks, allowing iOS client development. Or they might provide HTML 5 (Gears-like) offline Google Tasks web app with synchronization support for Safari. [6]

Lastly, the Omni Group could create a "lite" version of OmniFocus for the App Store and sell both an iPhone and desktop OmniFocus Lite for under $50.  Or some other current vendor will fill out an existing solution.

If we assume an average probability of each of these outcomes of 50%, there's an almost 90% probability [5] we'll get finally get a great iPhone task management solution next year.

I'll raise a beer when it happens.

See also (mostly not about tasks, but all about PIM functions and the amazingly hard Palm to iPhone migration)

• Why the iPhone doesn't do tasks: a theory (2007 - how sad. I thought we'd see a fix in 2008! Later I decided that Jobs hates task managers.)
• Gordon's Notes: Cloud data: Should I trust (Simplenote) Simperium? (2010 - No. But do trust in data freedom.)
• Migrating Notes from ToodleDo to ResophNotes and the Simplenote ecosystem (2010, notes were hard too.)
• Nerdvana now: Our family calendar is working – and how Gmail parses Outlook invites (2008. Things got better. Calendars are still not perfect (CalDAV vs. ActiveSync vs. iPhone data models esp with invitations) but this is one PIM functionality that's substatially improved over the past twenty years.)
• Gordon's Notes: The descent of the PDA: Newton, Palm, Blackberry and iPhone (2008)
• My Palm to iPhone migration challenge -- summarized (I've updated the spreadsheet describing the nasty Palm to iOS migration.)
• iPhone ToDo app and why my reviews are better than the rest (2008)
• Palm to iPhone migration - address book and notes (2008 - mostly historic, Simplenotes.app was the real fix)
• Palm to iPhone - only the notes remain (2008 - Evernote then, but I gave it up. Then Notebook.app, finally Simplenote)
• Gordon's Notes: What the iPhone needs is Gorilla Haven’s DateBk6 (2009 - it did show up on Android as Pimlical this year)
• Palm to iPhone - the summary and Palm to iPhone - the update (2008 - I like the pictures)
• Palm/Palm Pilot: Personal Experiences and Tips (My 1990s era PalmPilot page - just for the nostalgia. Things got ugly there too.)
• Synchronizing iPhone to Google - a review

- fn -

[1] The big "breakthrough" change to the Palm ToDo (task) list was the radical addition of up to 16 categories. For quite some time Palm tasks lacked "categories" (single tag). The original Palm design team were even more radical minimalists than Apple's modern iPhone OS team.
[2] This is huge. If data models don't match perfectly non-geeks, and even geeks, will eventually be frustrated -- even if they don't understand why they are frustrated.
[3] Looking for a good solution for Emily, and deciding none existed.
[4] I'm being sarcastic of course. One of the hardest things in software development is deciding what to omit. It's the old line about sculpture - great art consists of removing the inessential.
[5] 1 - (1/2*1/2*/2) = 7/8
[6] More likely now that the Google/Apple war is over.

Appigo and Toodledo – nasty emergent design flaw makes a mess of my iPhone Notes and Tasks

This is about the worst design flaw / bug /emergent interaction I’ve encountered in the past few years.

Here's the story from my rejected post to the Appigo Todo Google Group [1]

When I added Notebook to Todo, and after I'd imported hundreds of notes Toodledo, I ended up with a set of categories (aka folders) for my iPhone Appigo Notes and Tasks that were the sum of the Palm categories I had used for Notes and the Palm categories I had used for Tasks.

Since my Palm Notes and Tasks had different categories, there were empty folders that showed in Notes (but not empty in Tasks) and vice-versa. They cluttered up my folder list.

So I deleted the empty folders on both sides.

Can you guess what happens next?

It took a surprisingly long time after the deletion, perhaps due to Toodledo synchronization issues, but I now have hundreds of Tasks and Notes that no longer belong to any category…

… At least when synchronizing with Toodledo, Tasks and Notes share a common set of categories/folders. If you remove a folder from Notes that is empty, you remove the matching folder from Tasks. All contained Tasks go into the inbox (at least they aren't deleted).

This is the single worst bug or design flaw or bizarre emergent synchronization behavior I've run into in several years. I don't know how I'll sort this out.There’s no way to undo this behavior, and there’s no good UI on either the iPhone or Toodledo for manipulating sets of Tasks or Notes.

Man, do I hate synchronization.

What a bloody mess.

Update 11/9/08: To clarify why the problem is so bad. If the data lived in Outlook, this would be a nuisance problem. It would take some time, but I could select swathes of items and assign them to new categories. Neither Appigo nor Toodledo support multi-select operations.

I did some further testing. I created a folder in Toodledo tasks, and verified it did not, at first, appear in Toodledo Notes. I did the same with Toodledo notes. However after Appigo Notes synchronization, the Toodledo TASKS folder appeared in Appigo Notes. After a cycle of Appigo Tasks and Notes synchronization the new Toodledo Notes and Tasks folders appeared in both Appigo Tasks and Notes and then synchronized back to Toodledo Notes and Tasks.

Which brings me back to two critical points I keep relearning:

1. Synchronization is Hell.
2. Reliable service requires a single vendor to control the client and the server. Differences in folder models between Toodledo and Appigo are at the root of this exquisitely nasty bug.
3. There is a vast and perhaps unbridgeable gap between the capabilities of a robust desktop client like Outlook and what the Cloud can offer.
   

Update 11/12/08: Although Appigo did not publish my email they did respond to another complaint. They say it's not their design, it's a result of how Toodledo manages categories.

I suspect Toodledo stores notes in the same tables they use for tasks, hence the shared categories.

So this is an example of an emergent bug arising from synchronization between different application models.

Everything I need to know about Health Care messaging and synchronization I learned from my PDAs.

Update 11/13/2008: I looked into alternatives to Appigo such as Things.app and OmniFocus. The first is pre-release and has no import/export capabilities and the second, though released, has no useful import/export capabilities.

Neither meets my minimal data freedom requirements.

Since the category-loss bug arises from the combined use of Appigo's Todo.app and Notebook.app synchronizing against Toodledo's single Task/Note store, one workaround is to keep Todo.app and Toodledo Tasks but look for another solution for Notes, such as Evernote.

Alternatively, since Evernote now has a published API, Appigo could use Evernote as their note store instead of Toodledo. Their Notebook app is far more stable and useful than the Evernote iPhone client.

I'd suggest this to Appigo, but the last post I submitted to the Appigo support Group was not published. [1]

I don't have better options for the moment, so I'll stick with Appigo iPhone Todo.app and Notebook.app for the next few months. Things.app may be ready for my use by February 2009, assuming they have a robust set of import/export capabilities on the client.

Of course Google could create a Task companion for Google Calendar at any time. If they do that then the deck will be reshuffled and we'll have more options. I don't expect any solutions from Apple; I think they're in much worse organizational shape than we realize.

[1] Appigo declined to publish my post to their Google Group based support forum. If my most recent note on this thread doesn't appear, I'll have to conclude that Appigo is aggressively censoring their customer posts -- at least on this very sensitive topic.

Update 11/13/08: My posts are not appearing in Appigo's Google Group.

Update 2/24/2010: Appigo did eventually introduce warnings into their apps, so that you're less likely to fall into this trap.

Chapura KeyTasks: Sync Outlook Tasks with iPhone

I'm trying to move my Outlook tasks into Toodledo, and finding a meaningless "proxy error" (my XP firewall is off) when I try to use the Toodledo Sync Application to get my tasks to Toodledo, and thence to the iPhone ToDo.app.

This is way too cutting edge for my sleep needs.

IN the midst of the fray I find a link to an old friend/nemesis - Chapura. They're threatening to release a web service iPhone app combo "any time now" ...

Synchronize Outlook Tasks with iPhone.

Using 11 years of Microsoft Outlook synchronization experience, KeyTasks provides the most reliable wireless Outlook Tasks synchronization available for the iPhone and iPod touch.

The KeyTasks synchronization is provided through your MyChapura Account. A MyChapura account is included with your yearly subscription of KeyTasks. MyChapura is an online service that provides "cloud" synchronization of Microsoft Outlook Tasks and KeyTasks on the iPhone or iPod touch.

MyChapura stores your information on our Web servers. This is commonly referred to as the "cloud." When you make a change in Outlook or on your device and synchronize, that change is sent up to the cloud. Your iPhone or iPod touch will receive this change when you synchronize and your PC can be configured to manually or automatically synchronize. This allows you to keep your information current in multiple places no matter where you are.

We keep your information protected with a secure transfer process and encryption in your MyChapura Account. Your information is encrypted using your MyChapura Account password. Because of this, only your password can decrypt your information...

I'm getting a dawning sense of horror.

I've spent about 10 years fighting with Palm/Outlook synchronization.. It's been a greater battle than hacking WordPerfect hex files to make my printer work, or futzing with obscure Hayes commands to get my 2400 bps error-correction enabled.

I've learned a lot about synchronization from Chapura, and it's all been painful.

I must admit though, that while their Palm KeySuite is dumb and ugly, the current version does work. I regularly sync my decrepit Palm to Outlook 2003 and it hardly ever blows up.

So I can believe that Chapura might get the Outlook to iPhone connection working better than Apple, Google or anyone else. Unfortunately I'm also confident that their corresponding iPhone task app will be very ugly.

Which brings me to the sense of horror. If Chapura follows past practices, they'll create a suite of apps for the iPhone that will mirror those on Outlook. They'll be ugly but reliable. I might end up replicating what I do now on my Palm. Sync from home to native iPhone apps, and from work to Chapura's future suite.

Kafkaesque.

Palm to iPhone migration - address book and notes

My painful Palm to iPhone/cloud migration continues. I've updated my summary table.

I migrated my Calendar by basically stopping use of my Palm/Outlook Calendar and entering data in the iPhone/iCal calendar [1]. I use Spanning Sync to publish to gCal and, less often, update from changes I make to gCal. I'll archive my Palm data in PDFs and data tables.

I migrated tasks by moving them from the Palm to Palm Desktop to archival To Do file to Toodledo. I corrected minor conversion bug on Toodledo and sync with ToDo.app on the iPhone.

I migrated my encrypted password database to 1Password.

Note the above costs money. I've spent about $80 on additional software and services and I'm not done yet. Some of the costs are recurring, but on the other hand so far I've seen no reason to buy MobileMess.

I don't yet know what I'll do with my Memos/Notes. Too bad Google Notebook isn't a more useful product, and too bad Evernote doesn't yet do data freedom. I will probably wait to see if Apple delivers sync of iPhone Notes in September. Other options:

• Put my notes into the Toodledo task framework.
• Use the fake address trick.
• Buy Missing Sync for iPhone.
  

On another front sync with my work calendar, contacts, tasks, memos, notes, appears hopeless for now. (I fear those will be intractable unless Chapura produces an iPhone version of KeySuite.)

So the Address Book/Contacts are up next, then I take a break.

I'm expecting to migrate from either Outlook (via Access?) or Palm Desktop to OS X Address Book (10.4 if possible). Options so far:

• Mac OS X 10.1, 10.2: How to import addresses into Address Book
• OS X 10.2 had some import scripts (I suspect these are gone)
• Thunderbird to ldif
• abtransfer
• Sync Address Book with my Palm
• Use Missing Sync for Palm OS - we have an ancient license!
  
• Buy Missing Sync for iPhone and use the migration assistant to move from the Palm ($25 with a crossgrade from our Missing Sync for Palm and Missing Sync for Blackberry licenses)
• Use MobileMe (added later, I forgot about my prior post!)
  

I think I'll reinstall my old copy of Missing Sync for Palm to migrate my contacts from the Palm (backup first of course). Then, if Apple or a Cloud competitor doesn't give me a good Notes solution by the end of September, I'll invest $25 in Missing Sync for iPhone and take care of my Notes problem.

[1] As I wrote this note I realized that I could have used my old copy of Missing Sync for Palm and moved the calendar data from my Palm to iCal. Note this exposes one of the many peculiar limitations of iCal. Categories in the Palm become calendars in iCal. Of course Spanning Sync only syncs one calendar to Google. So much for categories ...

Update 8/17/08: Address book moved easily. This is what I did.

1. Install my old version of Missing Sync for Palm OS.
2. Backup OS X address book and iCal
3. Delete all existing Address Book entries and sync iPhone (so all gone from both)
4. Disconnect iPhone
   
5. Set Missing Sync to overwrite Notes (might as well get those on the Mac somehow!)
6. Disable sync on Everything else including calendar.
7. Missing Sync default is to "sync contacts". This is a misnomer on first sync; it should say that handheld will overwrite desktop (same for calendar).
8. Consider zipping up your iPhone backup file at this point.
9. Sync Palm then disconnect
10. Connect iPhone and Sync
    

Oddly enough, my favorites were preserved. I wonder if they match on strings.

Based on what I've learned so far, this is what I'd recommend for any Palm user migrating to iPhone/Mac:

1. Consider Missing Sync for iPhone, it includes the "migration assistant" that will move your data. It's $50 new, but you get a $25 sidegrade on other MS products and future upgrades. (See update below however)
2. Use Migration Facility to move data from Palm.
3. Use iCal data to move tasks to Toodledo or RTM. Pay for these. After migration to Toodledo/RTM, you'll want to delete tasks from iCal and disable task synchronization.
   
4. Buy ToDo.app for iPhone.
5. Buy Spanning Sync to sync iCal with gCal (optional).
   

I'm now almost done with the personal migration. Only a solution for Notes remains -- a solution for my work data is still in the future.

Update 1/5/09: A commenter left a very negative review of Missing Sync for iPhone, so please read and review before ordering. My experience personal experience was with using other Missing Sync products.

Update 5/7/09: A reader points us to to a detailed migration path from Palm/OS X to iPhone/OS X.

Apple's Task Fiasco: iCal, Mail.app and the iPhone. It's got to be Jobs fault.

Back when I was patiently waiting for 10.5 to go from moderate disaster to worthwhile, I noted some curious behavior of Tasks in 10.5: What is a task and a note - OS X iCal/Mail/Gmail vs. Outlook vs. Claris Organizer.

From what I read then it semed 10.5 Mail.app was following an unusual Tasks/Notes behaviors last seen in Claris Organizer (later Palm Desktop), and that Mail.app was becoming a PIM without a Calendar.

Which is kind of weird, but I figured it would all make sense when I got 10.5.

Wrong.

First, a digression.

Millions of people use OS X. Lots of well regarded bloggers write about OS X. So how come I'm the only one to get worked up over Apple's astoundingly screwed up approach to Tasks? I mean, I Google to see if anyone else has noticed the problem and I come up with my own comments from before I had 10.5?!

Shades of the Truman Show.

Ok, back to the post.

I think there are still a few deluded people who think Apple is uniformly excellent.

I can cure them of that. Try this experiment with the very latest version of OS X 10.5.5.

1. Create a task A in Mail.app. Notice that you cannot add a Note to it. Your "task" is a one liner.
   
2. Create a note B in Mail.app. Notice that you can "promote" it to a Task ("C"). You will now have a Task C with a Note B [1]
3. Switch to iCal.app. Look at Task C from Step 2. It doesn't have a Note in iCal. Add a note "D" in iCal to Task C.
4. Switch back to Mail.app. You will see Task C with Note B, but you will not see Note D. If you hold your mouse over the task long enough you'll see a read-only view of the iCal Note.
5. Paste plain text into a Mail.app Note. Observe the formatting -- particularly the multiple lines between paragraphs.

So both iCal and Mail.app have their own Task model, with some sort of synchronization of the titles but not the notes. iCal and Mail.app each have their own peculiar implementation of a Note associated with a Task.

I can't recall a comparable design screw-up in 20 years of lots of OSs and platforms.

So how did Apple botch this so badly, and how is this connected to the curious absence of tasks on the iPhone?

Here's my best guess. I don't usually pin Apple's glories or sins on Steve Jobs, but I'll make an exception this time. This has to be his fault.

This smells like a nasty collision between two powerful design teams, neither willing to compromise. When Jobs cares about something, he does seem to resolve these collisions. Obviously he didn't.

Jobs loves the iPhone. It has no tasks. That's another clue.

My guess is that Steve Jobs hates Task lists. He probably has some sort of trick memory and doesn't need them. Maybe it's his rebellion against the left brained world.

We aren't going to see Apple Tasks on the iPhone, or Tasks working on the desktop, until Jobs moves on from Apple.

In the meantime, I suggest

1. Pretend Mail.app does not have tasks.
2. Do not use the Mail.app feature that allows one to create a task linked to an email
3. Do not create a task from a note in Mail.app
4. Do feel free to use Notes in Mail.app if you can imagine any use to them.

If you've read this far, please submit feedback to Apple.

• ical feedback
• mail feedback

Maybe something like this:

Currently Mail and iCal both have a form of "Task" or "To Do" item, but they have different behaviors and Task notes are not shared. So a Task Note created in Mail cannot be read in iCal and vice-versa.

This is not what we expect from Apple. It is embarrassing.

Please integrate Tasks between iCal and Mail. Tasks should have identical attributes, features and Notes in both applications, and should sync with MobileMe and the iPhone.

PS. You can't delete Mail.app tasks, you can only complete them. Sigh.

Update: I found someone else who thinks Apple's implementation is cracked, but I don't think he got as far as sorting out the whacky Notes behavior.

Why the iPhone doesn't do tasks: a theory

Why doesn't the iPhone have the capabilities built into the @1990 PalmPilot? Why can't it do tasks or notes properly? These core functions are the among the demands I list on my non-tech blog:

Gordon's Notes: iPhone: my demands:

... Tasks at least comparable to the 1994 PalmPilot tasks.

Synchronization with Outlook at least comparable to the modern Palm OS (in other words, flawed, but useable). A 256 character limit on contact comments is not acceptable...

My working hypothesis has been that Apple hates me, but maybe I'm taking this a bit personally. Another theory is that the Apple has decided this stuff all has to migrate to the net and they've decided to speed up the process by eliminating all alternatives.

A third explanation occurred to me, and a bit of research supports it. Scott Mace, who has an appropriately despairing blog about calendar sharing and synchronization, mentions that the iPhone's calendar synchronization with Outlook is very weak. That's a clue.

Outlook is a the 8,000 pound Mastodon in the world of calendars, tasks, and contacts. It's the immovable object, and it's not simple to synchronize with. Outlook has a very complex and kludgy way of implementing these core concepts, and Microsoft leveraged that complexity to destroy Palm. Apple may have a few Palm veterans in Cupertino, people who are warning them about what it means to try to manage tasks, appointments, and contacts on Microsoft's turf.

Most iPhones will sync with XP and Vista machines, and eventually with Outlook 2007. If Apple wants this to work half-decently (meaning better than Palm), then the iPhone has to approach contacts, tasks, and appointments in a way that's a reasonable match to a subset of Outlook functionality (the most used fields, for example). If the iPhone does this, then OS X must to.

Problem is, Apple has iCal and the (very peculiar) Address Book on OS X, and they're nothing like Outlook. So Apple needs new versions of iCal and the Address book, but that's not going to happen on 10.4. That kind of change can only come with 10.5, perhaps with a new approach to synchronization.

So my latest tortured theory predicts that Apple won't add new PDA/PIM functionality to the iPhone before OS X 10.5 ships (supposedly in October, though I doubt it will be stable before April). If I'm write we'll see something @ Jan 2008.

Escape from Outlook Notes - ResophNotes, SimpleNote for iPhone and Notational Velocity

I had despaired of rescuing my notes from Outlook 2007.

I'd written hundreds over time. In the old days I used Palm products that would sync with Outlook, so I could carry them with me. Now my iPhone, after years of struggle, gives me good Outlook sync with Contacts and Calendars. Notes and Tasks, however, have been orphaned. There's no real hope of an Outlook Notes to iPhone sync solution; although a few people use Outlook Tasks almost nobody uses Outlook Notes.

I've learned to live without corporate Outlook Tasks (I schedule my time on a 3 week plan basis), but I wanted those notes. I decided they needed to live within either ToodleDo Notes/Appigo Notebook, iPhone Notes (unlikely), or the Simplenote / NotationalVelocity universe (for various reasons I've given up on Evernote).

Today I discovered ResophNotes, a Windows app that syncs with the Simplenote cloud data store. The Simplenote cloud data store, of course, also syncs with Notational velocity (open source, OS X Spotlight indexed), OS X Tinderbox, OS X Yojimbe (3rd party sync), and there's a Chrome extension for editing notes.

I exported my Outlook 2007 notes to Outlook's odd CSV format (includes line feeds!), then I imported into ResophNotes and synchronized with Simplenote's cloud store. Then on my iPhone I viewed them in the Simplenote iPhone client.

It worked better than I'd expected.

Now I can move my old (originally Palm III Notes, now ToodleDo/Appigo Notebook) personal notes to the same cloud store. I'll sign up for the $10/year premium Simplenote service. (Currently I have free version.) If Simplenote belly up the rich ecosystem and open source Notational Velocity desktop solution provides the insurance I need.

A good day.

See also:

• Gordon's Notes: The rise of software rental (aka software as service)
• Moving Palm notes to Toodledo via CSV file - what worked. (Hard!)
• Appigo Notebook is coming to the iPhone
• Kiss your Google Notebook good-bye
• Palm to iPhone migration - address book and notes (Aug 2008 - dated)
• Toodledo gets it
• Appigo and Toodledo – nasty emergent design flaw makes a mess of my iPhone Notes and Tasks
• Evernote's import/export test (updated)

Update 7/31/10: The author of ResophNotes tells me he's preparing a new version that will import CSV files -- like the ones ToodleDo Notes export creates. Incidentally, I discovered that FileMaker Pro 8 does a great job opening Outlook's CSV files with embedded line feeds. I never imagined ...

Palm to iPhone - the update

A few weeks ago I wrote a summary of my Palm to iPhone conversion.

Time for an update.

This is really a Geek Odyssey, though, as I mentioned before, Missing Sync for iPhone would probably help.

I won't repeat all the extensive links in my earlier post, please go there to get the details. I've even updated that older post with a link to today's Appigo Notebook/ToodleDo migration.

You can see the current state my "iPhone as PDA' above. Those bottom four links should look familiar. They're a close match to the classic four iPhone buttons: Calendar/Date Book, Contacts/Address Book, Tasks/Todo and Memo/Note.

On my Palm I'd substituted a 'digital ink' app for the Note, I used that to scrawl quick notes. On my iPhone the equivalent is Jott. It captures audio snippets which are then transcribed. In some ways better than being able to scrawl an "ink" note, in other ways not as good.

The Calendar and Contacts are Apple apps. They sync with OS X iCal and Address Book. I wish instead they would sync directly with Google Calendar and Contacts. For now I sync my desktop data to Google using Spanning Sync.

Appigo makes both Todo.app and Notebook.app (to the right above the main four). Both sync with Toodledo. I wish Google would buy Toodledo and take that over too. The Appigo products are great. Toodledo tasks are spartan but good enough, Toodledo Notes need a lot of work.

The rest of my primary screen consists only of apps I use ALL the time (oops! Looks like Maps got bumped off. It should be there). Other screens are split info games (a real strength of the iPhone), lesser used apps, etc.

The Appigo apps make the iPhone a better competitor to the 1994 Palm III, but in terms of usability and PDA value the Palm III is still a clear winner. The iPhone is only competitive when you start to do geeky and barely possible things with Google Calendar and the like. Of course the iPhone can do far more things than the Palm III could, not the least of which are Safari, Mail.app and Map.

One more thing. The Palm III had global search. So you could search tasks, notes, address book, etc with one tap. Slow, but global. There's nothing like that for the iPhone. Appigo Task and Note search is very fast but limited to those apps. Calendar has NO search, and Contacts has a feeble search against name alone.

Google saves my iPhone

Ok, so I don't know if it works, and I do feel sorry for the Nuevasync team.

Still, I'm grateful for Google's Exchange ActiveSync service service. With MobileMe hopeless and near worthless, and my iPhone love broken-hearted, things were looking pretty damned bleak -- until today.

Perhaps in honor of this launch, Google has an iPhone device page with lots of Google related topics in one place. The Sync set is towards the bottom of the page ...

iPhone Devices - Mobile Help

... Sync

• Overview
• Set Up Your iPhone or iPod Touch
• Choose Which Calendars to Sync
• Can I Still Sync with iTunes?
• Contacts Upload via iTunes (PC)
• Contacts Upload via iTunes (Mac)
• Synchronizing Contacts or Calendar
• Contact Search Feature
• Data Disappears During Re-Sync
• Known Limitations

No doubt about it. Google loves me. I ain't crawling back to Apple no more.

Update: Google licensed ActiveSync from Microsoft for this. I assumed they'd cloned it. I wonder what a ten million user license of ActiveSync costs? I don't imagine Microsoft gave Google much of a discount. It's an amazing testimony to the power of Microsoft's Exchange monopoly, and a marker for how serious Google is about making this work.

Update: It worked on our iPhone touch -- Calendar and contacts alike. I then wiped everything from the iTouch and proved I could sync just the calendar, and leave the contacts alone. That worked. Then I chose my sync calendars (config site is http://m.google.com/sync, you must visit it from an iPhone). I actually ran up against the 5 calendar limit (my work, emily calendar, my personal, MN Special Hockey and US Holidays), but that's good for now. The 5 calendar limit appers to be related to an iPhone bug.

So next I will sync and backup my iPhone and create special backups of my OS X Address Book and Calendar. Then, for now, I will turn off Spanning Sync while I do my testing -- so OS X iCal will no longer be connected to my true calendar (no loss).

Update: After backing up as above I'm on to my iPhone. It was already setup to do IMAP sync with my Gmail account; I added the Exchange server connection. I got the "invalid certificate" warning during Exchange setup -- that's a known bug. I turned Exchange Mail OFF, Contacts OFF (for now) and Calendars ON. I received the warning that existing calendars would be removed from my iphone.

After setup my Mail, Contacts, Calendar settings showed two accounts: one for Mail and one for Calendars. Although NuevaSync recommends turning Time Zone support OFF for Calendars Google didn't make any recommendations, so I left it ON.

I checked Calendar, and saw one calendar was synchronized. That was curious, since I'd configured the iTouch I'd specified 5 calendars.

Here's where things get interesting. When I visited the setup page I found configurations for two devices.

So you can sync multiple devices to a single set of Calendars, and you can configure separately which calendars each one syncs to. [or maybe not - see update]

Interesting ...

Anyway, so far it works.

Update: This is so cool. I play around with an item time on my iPhone, and moments later it's switched on my wife's BB Pearl (yech) and her Google Apps Calendar (yay). I'm holding off on Contacts for now; the Google contact model is pretty sparse. I want to give that migration a bit of thought. With Google for Calendaring and soon for Contacts I can live with Todo.App, Notebook.app and Evernote for a while longer.

Google has Gmail Tasks now. How long before they, or someone else, provides an iPhone Task app that will sync with Google Tasks? If they build out the data model I'd love to see Appigo selected for the iPhone app.

Update 2/10/09: Ok, maybe it wasn't a good idea to sync two iPhones to one account. When I go to http://m.google.com/sync I can't change which five calendars I sync to.

Update 2/14/09: It may be coincidental, but a day or two after I discontinued sync with the 2nd iPhone I was again able to edit my subscription limit (still only 5 calendars pending bug fixes). Incidentally, now that I'm getting Push Calendar updates I see why people complain about the iPhone's battery life. OS X wasn't built to be a power miser.

Update 5/22/09: Every few months the calendar seems to stop updating. I turn off "calendars" in the iPhone Exchange ActiveSync screen; that removes all calendars from the phone. Then I turn it on again. They then update normally.

Palm to iPhone - the summary

I'm wrapping up my series on migrating my personal data from the Palm/Outlook/XP to the iPhone/OS X/Cloud. I've yet to figure out how to manage my work data as well, that will be the subject of future posts.

On the left, a picture of my battered Tungsten E|2. It's my sixth or seventh Palm, and my second E|2. Like most Palm devices the on/off switch died within six months of purchase.

Palm can't make power switches. Or rather, they don't like them to last.

Note there are eight action buttons, four silkscreen and four physical (omitting the center button -- I hardly ever use it). Note the nice search button -- the iPhone doesn't have global search (maybe for a good reason).

Below is the current iPhone. Not coincidentally, the top row corresponds to the four physical buttons on my Palm. The special bottom row, however, is taken over the the phone, google, map, iPod.

The Calendar and Contacts are a close match to the Palm. They sync with iCal and Address Book by USB cable. One improvemnet is that iCal also subscribes to my wife's BlackBerry/Google Calendar, so get to see her appointments on my iPhone (read-only). (iCal further syncs my primary calendar with gCal using Spanning Sync; I've put MobileMe on hold until Apple does some major fixes).

The ToDo.app doesn't sync with iCal, it syncs with Toodledo. My family Google Calendar also gets a feed from Toodledo, it shows tasks as all day events.

On the far right is Evernote, the anxiety provoking home for my Palm Notes and more. They sync to the Evernote service.

The following posts may be of interest to anyone who's trying to migrate a Palm device from Outlook/XP to an iPhone using OS X/Cloud ...

• Different calendaring models...
• Migrating Palm Notes (Memos) to Toodledo and Appigo Notebook.app (9/29/08)
  
• All done except Notes/Memos (and buy Missing Sync for iPhone)
• Moving Contacts/Address Book
• Moving Tasks, more moving tasks, and ToDo.app and Toodledo
  
• Archiving your iPhone backups
• JFile passwords to 1Password
• Spanning Sync
• Summary table on Google Docs (since updated)
• ePocrates Palm to iPhone (this one was easy)
• Cumulative iPhone notes and surprises
• Why MobileMe's problems are deep and a Palm veteran's perspectives

iPhone ToDo app and why my reviews are better than the rest

I bought Appigo's ToDo.app ($10) for my iPhone (currently I think of my phone as iTease). (BTW, Appigo has a Google Group for this app.)

I've been using it with Toodledo. I'd considered a switch switch to Remember the Milk but Toodledo tech support helped me with my major concern -- the ability to apply operations to sets of items. The combined cost of ToDo.app ($10) and Toodledo ($17) together is $27 - a good fraction of MobileMe. Too bad Apple hates us.

Here's what conventional, good, reviewers will tell you about ToDo.app

Macworld | iPhone Central | Review: Todo 1.1.1 for iPhone and iPod touch

... it’s in creating and organizing tasks that Todo really shines, offering many more features than Zenbe Lists or any of the basic to-do apps I covered a few weeks ago.

As with other apps, you can create multiple lists of tasks; you add new lists and tasks using the plus (+) button at the top of the main lists screen or any individual list screen, respectively. When viewing a list, tapping on a task’s circle marks the task as complete; depending on your settings, completed tasks disappear completely or are moved to a Completed section at the bottom of the current list..

... Creating a new task demonstrates Todo’s best attribute: offering many options and features while keeping the interface simple and easy to use. In addition to naming a new task, you can specify a due date, a repeating schedule, and a priority (1, 2, 3, or none); you can also include a text note...

This is what you only get from me:

1. If you try to switch services, say from ToodleDo to RTM, every item on your list is deleted. So you can't decide to use one service, then switch. [Update: Appigo consciously decided to do this for the initial release, they will probably make this configurable in a future release.]
   
2. Tasks can belong to only one list/category/tag. (Very much like Palm -- in fact ToDo.app is pretty much a functional clone of the original Palm To Do app).
3. There are no alerts or alarms on tasks.
4. There's no search. I really need search. Of course this is a problem across the entire iPhone. [Update: Appigo expects to deliver search in a near term release]
   
5. It's crashed once in light use.

Update 9/22/08: I'm a regular Appigo ToDo.app customer. It's a great product, but there's a scary specter looming.

Toodledo gets it

I feel like I've been wandering in a strange country, speaking a language nobody else understands.

Suddenly, unexpectedly, I find a friend in Toodledo (awful name)

Toodledo :: A to-do list to organize your tasks

...If you already use a task manager, you won't want to type in your tasks all over again. Toodledo can import tasks from many sources, including your Palm OS PDA, Microsoft Outlook, Apple's iCal, and other online todo lists...

Heck, even if it doesn't work I give them points for caring!

Toodledo offers an iPhone optimized web view, they have great export options, an iPhone web app view, and they integrate with ToDo (iPhone $10).

This looks promising!

Update: Note that Toodledo deletes old tasks and limits review of past task to 3 days. For $15 you get more functionality, but you have to pay $30 for unlimited storage. If it works I'll try the $15 option until I see what Apple will deliver. I can do that because of their very good import/export functionality -- otherwise I wouldn't try them at all.

Check out the connections list. These guys are definitely data geeks. Alas, their aesthetics are lousy. They really need to invest in a sexy web site expert. I bought ToDo for $10, so I'm paying bucks to get tasks working post-Palm.

Update 8/16/08: After a painful uploading of tasks to Toodledo, I realize just what a problem their backwards interface is. They're really strong on data integration, but week on UI.

For example, it wasn't clear at all how I could operate on multiple tasks.

Mercifully, they have incredibly responsive tech support. The multi-task support is related to search. Perform a search, then click multi-edit.

It's not nearly as clear as Remember the Milk's set operations but it does the trick.

iPhone ToDo.app will sync with RTM as well as Toodledo, but it cannot be used to move data between the services. It always erases data on a service change. (Do the services require that? Toodledo is big on data freedom, so I want to give them the benefit of the doubt there.)

Update 9/12/08: I'm a happy Toodledo customer. The UI is ugly, but it's powerful if you study it. So I'm fine with that, I just worry that without a prettier face they won't get enough business. I just bought Appigo's Notebook app to sync with Toodledo Notebook -- only to discover that there's no Notes import yet. Ah well ...

Update 10/14/08: I'm happy to see Toodledo has added search to Notes, but I'm surprised to realize that Task search only scans titles, not notes. If you want to search notes you go to the notes field in advanced search. There's no "notes" and "task title" option. It's like working with a very simple database table. I'll see if I get a response to a support email.

Palm to iPhone - only the notes remain

As summarized in my last note, I've got everything but my Memo Pad items (Notes) moved from Palm to iPhone. I've also realized that if were to do this all over again, I'd have paid my $25 sidegrade fee for Missing Sync for iPhone (includes migration utility).

Hey, I didn't have the benefit of reading my own blog postings.

The Memo Pad/Notes items are tough. I could get Missing Sync for iPhone [1], but then the data sits on my home machine. That wouldn't be so bad if the iPhone included any search functionality, but it doesn't.

I could wait for iPhone OS 2.1, but there's no guarantee Apple will actually include notes synchronization then. They've get a huge number of bugs to fix.

I don't like the usual hack of storing notes as fake contacts (messes up address book, weak search).

I could store them as tasks without dates or priorities on Toodledo/Todo. That's not a bad option.

I looked at Evernote again. It seems a natural fit. I installed the Windows version and used the "Add to Evernote" option to move all Notes to the net. The first time I did this the Windows app crashed, so I first created a local-only database, imported into that, then created a "sync" (net) repository and dragged them from the local to the net version.

This worked. The notes are on the net, and I can search them from the Evernote client on my iPhone (as long as I'm connected). I can even do some limited work with them using the Evernote client on OS X.

There's only one fly in the ointment, but it's a big, ugly sucker.

I tested the "export" features of the Windows client. Pathetic. The data is locked in. Worse, some web searches find Evernote users commenting about the need for export ... in 2005.

I really don't trust a company that locks in user data like that. They're well beyond the point where words are any use -- they need to show results.

So I have the data there for now, but I'm assuming I won't be able to get any of it out. So Evernote is a transitional strategy.

As I think harder about this I came across a review of evernote contrasting it to some other options:

Evernote for Mac Reviewed (beta version) Daniel mostly on Software:

• 3.1: Evernote (2.7 plus 0.4 for what my benchmark doesn’t count)
• 2.8: Journler, Together
• 2.5: Scrivener, Soho Notes
• 2.4: EagleFiler
• 2.3: DevonThink Personal
• 2.0: Yojimbo
• 1.8: Circus Ponies NoteBook

There are a large suite of unstructured textbase apps for OS X, including Tinderbox. This Particular Outliner and Tidbits often review these apps.

These note taking apps go far beyond what I've done with the memos, which are really memory fragments, but I'll take a walk through this space and see what the Cloud or iPhone integration options are. (Yojimbo's web site still talks about .Mac sync, which is not a good sign.)

It has also occurred to me that there might be a way to structure my Notes as blog postings, and then store them as a private blog, choosing the blog based on available iPhone apps.

So it's Evernote for the moment, but I'm actively considering alternatives.

The current collection of solutions makes an interesting contrast to the simplicity of my original Palm III - even if I ignore the migration challenges!

• Calendar: iPhone <-> iCal <-> Google Calendar via Spanning Sync ($25)
  
• Contacts: iPhone <-> Address Book
  
• Tasks: iPhone ToDo <-> Toodledo ( -> iCal + Google Calendar as read-only) ($35)
  
• Notes: iPhone Evernote <-> Evernote service (temporary)

Obviously my data is fairly scattered now. I positively reek of cloudness.

[1] The mystery of why this is the only product able to access the iPhone data store over the USB conduit grows. What's Mark/Space got that no-one else has?

Update 9/29/08: Migrating Palm Notes (Memos) to Toodledo and Appigo Notebook.app

Update 3/14/09: See comments for an advanced approach using, in part, a Perl script.

What is a task and a note - OS X iCal/Mail/Gmail vs. Outlook vs. Claris Organizer

In another universe I'm using Ecto Professional for task and project management, but in this world I'm an Outlook uber-geek. I know every weird kink in that twisted software, from the brilliant drag-and-drop item transformations to the fantastically clumsy object ID scheme.

In Outlook Notes are obscure colored rectangles with fancy fonts. (Bear with me, this is going somewhere.) Full text search (Windows Desktop Search in my case) makes them surprisingly useful, but most people (foolishly) ignore them. They have Categories (tags: many-to-many relationship) and data attributes that support some useful queries.

Outlook Tasks, on the other hand, are fancy with RTF bodies that can act as containers for all kinds of things.

Notes and Tasks in OS X are very different. They're especially different in 10.5, where they reflect from Mail.app into Gmail to they live as email messages!

Web 2.0: Howto : use google's imap and mail application as GTD tool

Apple's mail.app features it in the latest version that is shipped with Leopard (OSX 10.5). If you set it up to talk to gmail using imap, notes and todo's are created on the imapserver....

...A todo created here shows up...

... if you go to gmail, you'll see a label (as google calls it) with the name Apple Mail To Do, and if you click on it your todo is sitting right there for you to be handled. As it is all in iCal format, easy calendar integration is there, but most important is the fact that you have access to your todo list from anywhere....

Notes show up too, as strange emails with an invalid mail header and a "tag" of "Notes".

The Gmail integration is completely unexpected and thus far seems pretty pointless (maybe that will change June 9th?).

More to the point, OS X Notes/Tasks are almost the mirror image of Outlook Notes/Tasks. In OS X 10.5 tasks are very simple things -- a single line, a priority and due date, and a status field. Notes, on the other hand, can have many associated tasks and support attachments and (clumsy) RTF editing.

 

So where did the OS X Notes/Tasks design meme come from? Perhaps from Claris Organizer, an Apple Mac Classic app from the late early 90s that was later sold to Palm and rewritten to run as a Carbon app in OS X 10.1 and 10.2.

In Claris Organizer (later Palm Desktop for OS X), Notes were distinct entities that could be related to other items.

So you might think you were attaching a comment to an Address Book entry, but in reality you were creating a "note" item and a link from the Address book entry to the note item:

TidBITS  Moving Back to the (Palm) Desktop (1999)

Attached to Attachments -- If you've synchronized your Palm device's data and played with Palm Desktop a bit, you've no doubt run into one of the bigger brain-twisting elements of the new Palm Desktop. What happened to attached notes? Under the Palm OS, you can create a note ... that includes miscellaneous information... Looking at the Note List for the first time can produce a moment of organizational panic: in addition to the records you entered in the Palm's Memo Pad, you'll find dozens of records marked "HandHeld Note:" then the name of one of the Palm's built-in applications...

OS X 10.5 Tasks and Notes have something in common with this, though the user interface is pretty different (much simpler basically). If you start out creating an OS X Task I don't think you can create a Note related to it, but if you instead create a Note, then transform a row (line item) into a Task, you're creating a (hidden) link to a new Task item.

The awkward Palm PDA/Claris Organizer PIM integration resembles Apple's peculiar Gmail "integration", and foreshadows how hard it will be for the iPhone to sync with both Outlook and iCal. (Maybe that has something to do with why Apple hasn't put tasks on the iPhone!). I presume one would have to sync an Outlook Task with an OS X Note that happened to contain a single task!

Software dies, but software memes (and synchronization problems!) live a lot longer.

So it seems OS X 10.5 Mail.app is slowly turning into a simpler version of Outlook -- now with email, tasks, calendaring (ok, via iCal) and notes.
Meanwhile Google Apps is turning into a Sharepoint clone.

It's sure going be interesting to see how this all plays out with the iPhone.

Gmail tasks grow up - slightly

I've been rather unimpressed with Google/Gmail Tasks. They remind me of Apple's disastrous Mail.app tasks, except they don't even have categories.

They're not dead yet though ...

Official Gmail Blog: Tasks: Paper vs. iPhone

We set out to fix this by making Tasks available from your phone with a version optimized for the small screen. And starting today, you can manage your task list from your iPhone or Android device...

... Just go to gmail.com/tasks from your phone's browser and log in. If you already use the version of Tasks in Gmail Labs, you'll see the same task list that's always in sync...
... so try it out and let us know.

P.S. There's a new gadget version of Tasks too -- so if you want to add your same task list to iGoogle, now you can.

I put my request list into the let us know bucket:

• an API
• Calendar integration (esp. something like this)
• The "palm to do" minimal attribute set

If they get the API and calendar integration I'd love to see Appigo's iphone ToDo.app sync to Google Gmail tasks instead of to Toodledo.

Let loose the geeks of tech war: Google on Android vs. Google on iPhone

I use my iPhone with Google Apps - not MobileMe.

I'd love to use MobileMe -- I'm not deterred by the cost. The problem is that MobileMe sucks. No public APIs. No calendar sharing. Exactly the same Notes and Tasks functionality as Google Apps (none).

Google Apps are simply vastly better than the MobileMe alternatives.

So my iPhone Mail.app syncs with Gmail. iPhone Calendar.app syncs, via my iCal/Spanning Sync desktop, with Google Calendar. My Notes and Tasks (Appigo Notebook and Tasks.app sync with Toodledo). Of course Maps.app works with Google Maps, Google Reader Mobile works with Google Reader, and Google.app search works with ...

You get the picture, as my son Ben would say.

Apple either doesn't get the picture, or they can't execute on the server.

Problem is, the picture's not complete. I can't, say, sync iPhone Calendar.app directly with Google Calendar. My wife's Blackberry Pearl can do that, thanks to Google software, but my iPhone can't. This is a big problem, and it's a problem owned by ... Apple.

Not good.

On the other hand, that won't be a problem for the Android ... (emphases mine):

Official Google Mobile Blog: Google on Android

At Google, we develop products that we love to use ourselves. For example, we're avid users of Search, Gmail, Maps, and many others. But for those of us in mobile, it's tough. Not all products work the same on all devices, and although we try and optimize for each device, we often run into challenges specific to certain mobile phone platforms. I, for one, used to carry three devices with me all day. I love my iPhone for its powerful browser and music player. I use my BlackBerry for Gmail and Calendar (and occasionally Brick Breaker), and I carry a Nokia N-series phone because of its camera and YouTube application.

The first Android-powered phone, announced today by T-Mobile, comes 'with Google'. The following Google applications are preloaded on the device: Search, Maps, Gmail with Contacts, Calendar, Google Talk, and YouTube. There are a few things I'm particularly excited about:

• Easy to use. It's never been easier to use Google on your phone. With single sign-in, you can log in to your Google account and have instant access to all your favorite Google products. No messing around with settings, your login never expires, and everything just works. If you don't have a Google account yet, you can set one up on your phone and be up and running in seconds.
• Fully synchronized. Your emails, contacts, calendar entries, Google Talk chats are fully synchronized with Gmail and Calendar on the web. New events are pushed in real-time to your phone and any changes you make on-the-go are immediately available on the web. If you ever lose or break your phone, all your data is safe and secure in the cloud.
• Designed to work together. Search is now available as a feature in many applications, including non-Google ones, such as the music player. While you're listening to a song -- like something from Depeche Mode -- just 'long-press' the artist's name. You'll see a menu pop up that let's you search Google for the Depeche Mode Wikipedia entry, or search YouTube for the music video. The contact application lets you see your friend's IM status, view his address on a map, and communicate with him using Gmail or Google Talk. And, of course, you can call or text him as well.

Depeche Mode? Shades of my ancient Quebecer (eng) past.

Emily's Blackberry isn't the greatest. I'd like to get something better. It has to work well with our family Google Apps. Could be she'll be getting an Android.

Apple needs to get their *** in sync. They need to either match Google on the server side (impossible) or fully support Google Apps as competitors to Mobile Me.

Or my next phone, won't be an iPhone. I may not be the only one ...

Thanks Google. I love these bloodless tech wars.

Palm to iPhone: do I need an iTouch as well as an iPhone?!

I’ve made my personal Palm to iPhone transition (see report)…

Gordon's Tech: Palm to iPhone - only the notes remain

….The current collection of solutions makes an interesting contrast to the simplicity of my original Palm III - even if I ignore the migration challenges!

• Calendar: iPhone <-> iCal <-> Google Calendar via Spanning Sync ($25)
• Contacts: iPhone <-> Address Book
• Tasks: iPhone ToDo <-> Toodledo ( -> iCal + Google Calendar as read-only) ($35)
• Notes: iPhone Evernote <-> Evernote service (temporary)

It was bloody hard work, but now that I’ve done the job it’s not so hard for anyone who wants to replicate it. The key tip for Palm users going to iPhone on OS X is to pay $50 and buy Missing Sync for the iPhone with the bundled migration assistant. Oh – and read my posts.

That still leaves the workplace problem. On the Palm, after wasted years of trying to get to a single calendar (see also), I ended up using Chapura’s KeySuite (vs. DataViz Beyond) to sync to my office Exchange server/Outlook 2003.

So at home I used the Palm Outlook conduits to sync the standards apps to Outlook 2003, and KeySuite conduits at the office.

It worked, but it sure was stupid. Flipping between calendars was a pain.

Now, with a mounting sense of horror, it occurs to me that, at the moment, the only viable workplace option is to buy an iTouch for sync to my corporate environment. [1]

Imagine that.

Of course I’ll keep my Palm Tungsten E2 going as long as possible, but if I need to replace the half-broken Palm PDA the iTouch is about the same price. If an iPhone alternative does not emerge (and I’m thinking, I’m thinking) it makes sense to replace the Palm Tungsten E|2 with an iTouch.

So I’d have an iPhone and an iTouch to carry about.

This would be funny if I weren’t crying.

[1] Apple has designed the iPhone to sync to a single home machine. It’s more or less mandated by their DRM requirements. The Palm was more or less designed to sync to more than one machine.

Update 8/18/08: Results of an early experiment in trying to sync in two places.

Project Contacts: Now mixing Outlook/Exchange, PST file, Outlook/Home, MobileMe Sync, OS X Address Book and the iPhone.

A recent Apple Discussion Thread led me to take a new direction with Project Contacts.

To put it mildly, there’s a lot of complexity in this post. However initial results are very positive. This method will require me to purchase a MobileMe account, something I was hoping to avoid. (See below for a partial index to past efforts.)

The end result is that I have a single collection of work/home contacts across iPhone and OS X Address book at home. The work contacts portion of this collection is updated weekly. At this time the update is one way, from Work to Home.

For anyone who may be facing these challenges, I have provided a skeletal outline here of what I did and what I would do if starting from scratch. You will see how insanely complex this is. Note that as of this writing the care PIM data that was once in Palm/Desktop is now scattered across Google (Calendar and a detached set of Contacts), Outlook/corporate, Toodledo and MobileMe. Everything does come together in my iPhone. The current solution involves a wide variety of vendors. For example, Apple's MobileMe calendaring is pathetic; far weaker than Google Calendar and a joke compared to Outlook (which makes Apple's no-show on tasks even more crazy). On the other hand Apple's Contact framework is very robust, much stronger than Google and a rival to Outlook.

This ruddy mess is a real indictment of Apple and a fat opportunity for the PalmPre.

So much for prelude. Here’s the outline, strictly for the uber-geek:

Here’s what I actually did:

• Copying contacts from Outlook/Exchange root to Outlook PST caused the EX (Exchange server x.500) email addresses to be updated to SMTP (standard internet) email addresses.
• PST on thumb drive to home (simple)
• Copy into Home Contacts
• Sync to MobileMe
• In MobileMe web assign all to a Group
• Sync to OS X Address Book (small conflicts)
• Sync to iPhone (ok)
• Sync to Outlook Home: Each Group in OS X Address Book became a Contacts Subfolder in Office 2003. This means the cardinality relationship to Address to Group may have to be One to One.

Expected problem:

• Contact belongs to two Groups in OS X Address Book (multiple inheritance)
• Contact assigned to ONE Subfolder in Office 2003.
• In OS X change Group assignments.
• What happens in Outlook?

Here’s what I suggest doing (LOTS of backups of OS X Address Book as go along)

1. Outlook/Corporate create PST file, copy work contacts. Do not copy lists or groups of contacts, only contacts.
   
2. PST file to thumb drive
3. Home Outlook mount PST data file. Make sure Contacts folder is empty
4. Sync iPhone to OS X Address Book
5. Create new group in OS X Address Book that will hold corporate contacts
6. Sync to fresh MobileMe Account
7. Sync fresh MobileMe account to home Outlook
8. Now Outlook will have an empty subfolder. Dump the Contacts transported into the PST file into that empty folder.
9. Sync from Outlook to MobileMe
10. Sync from MobileMe to OS X Address Book
11. Sync to iPhone

A partial index to past and related efforts at work/home Contact integration:

• Synchronization (all)
• MobileMe (all)
• Outlook (all)
• Contacts (all)
• Synchronization is Hell.
• Root causes: Why you can't sync your work and home calendars to your phone
• Project Contacts: Integration across iPhone, Google and whatever
• Work home contact integration: Outlook to Google to OS X Address Book (X.500 EX email problem)
• Synchronization case study: Address Book, the iPhone, and Google Contacts
• iPhone sync to Google contacts - 3 methods and work/home implications
• Outlook contacts to OS X Address Book - 3 techniques
• Google saves my iPhone (Google Exchange Server emulation for iPhone)
• Googaby: Novel approach to Google Contacts and OS X Address Book integration
• OS X Address Book to Google Apps Contacs using Google ActiveSync
• Work home contact integration: Outlook to Google to OS X Address Book
• Access OS X Address Book records using OpenOffice database?
• Synchronizing iPhone and Gmail contacts: getting OS X Address Book into Gmail
• gSyncit vs Google Calendar Sync with Outlook 2007
• gSyncit for Outlook 2007 to Google Calendar and Contacts Sync
• Prediction: We won’t see a fixed MobileMe until 10.6 is out
• MobileMe alternatives – including for iPhone Sync (MacWorld)
• Palm Pre is Exchange sync based
• iPhone: MobileMe vs. Google services
• MobileMe, Microsoft Outlook, Exchange, iTunes and yes, sync Hell
• Is it too late to go back to Palm 1994?
• Palm to iPhone - the update
• Synchronization is hard - more evidence
• Palm to iPhone migration - address book and notes
• Spanning Sync tells us what's wrong with Google's free CalDAV sync
• Apple can't do synchronization - again
• MobileMe syncs with Outlook (but then Apple turned it off for Exchange clients)
• Interoperability and my Contact information: Microsoft Outlook and Access, FileMaker Pro and Palm Contacts

Update 5/15/09: Now that I've got this working I'm trying various optimizations. For example, my contacts don't change that often. It's easy to create a view in Outlook that sorts by modified date. It's fairly trivial to send out a few changed .msg in an email and let Outlook at home merge them in. I still have to think about how to work with Google's Contacts, but I'm seeing a few interesting options.

It's weird how powerful MobileMe contacts are, yet how feeble MobileMe calendaring is. We're due for a MobileMe relauch, so I expect some developments before September.

Lastly, I should probably mention why I took this route. The more I looked at the workarounds for getting Outlook/Exchange corporate contact data to Google or the OS X Address Book the worse they looked. Their are problems with data models, problems with the intractable horror of the Outlook Add-In architecture, problems with Exchange server and problems with corporate access. This approach is crude, but for me, once I figure it out, fairly painless. I think it will fly until we get something better.

In the meantime, I'm rooting for the PalmPre to humiliate Apple and make them reconsider the direction they're taking.

Update 5/15/09b: Now that I've got this setup working I can see weird new affordances. For example, one of my top 10 OS X frustrations is the inability of FileMaker to work with the Address Book SQLite data stores. Ahh, but now my address data is synchronized between Outlook/Home and Address Book, and I can use Microsoft Access with Outlook/Home. So I can clean things up there, and MobileMe sync will propagate my fixes. I think I'll find a way now to get my Google Contacts into the battlefront.

Update 5/16/09: Great comment by Faheem, who's achieved a similar outcome using Plaxo without paying for MobileMe. I took a look, but Plaxo didn't feel right for me.

Using Outlook Tasks: a mini-tutorial

This post, reused from another setting, is a bit more complex than I typically do. I think it might be of interest to heavy-duty users of Outlook tasks.  It’s also a marker for comparison to the plethora of iPhone/OS X task/gCal/project mgt tools that are emerging.

Obviously I push Outlook tasks into the domain where I ought to be using a lightweight Project Management tool; there are reasons for my sticking with Outlook …

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This mini-tutorial is really a guide to what’s possible with Outlook task management. For more details on how to do things, I’d recommend the Outlook Help file. It’s pretty good once you know what’s possible. Google will usually point you to Microsoft tutorials on these topics as well.

The first three topics are relatively basic, but the Views take some getting used to.

Tasks: Key things to know

Create a task by drag and drop email or appointment or contact on a task icon, such as an Outlook Shortcut to your task folder.

If you create a task by dragging and dropping an email, you’d normally file or delete the email. You can always find it by search.

If you use Task Views (below), you can drag and drop to change Due Date (including remove), Priorities, and add categories.

You can drag and drop tasks on a calendar to create appointments with matching dates..

Ignore the “start date” field, it’s worthless and behaves oddly. Just use the Due Date.

Before you drag and drop an email to create an appointment, task, or note, first click in the subject line and make it something useful. That way you kill two birds with one stone – you have a descriptive subject to help with search and replies and you have matching descriptive subject in the task. The fact that they match also helps if you want to do full text search to locate an email you’ve dropped in your “save” folder.

Tasks: priorities and dates

I’m not always consistent, but this is the meaning I give to Task priorities in Outlook.

High priority: must have due dates. Move forward if not dealt with. Assign to categories. Often has a calendar slot reserved for associated work.

Normal priority: may have due dates if quick or topical, otherwise do as available. Assign to categories. Some may be abandoned. Rarely has a protected calendar slot.

Low priority: never have due dates. Mostly keep as a record of “like to do”. Tend to discover on searches. May have categories.

Task format: the “mini-project”

An Outlook task doesn’t have much structure. I use the Subject, Category and Due Date attributes, but I follow a convention of my own for the Task note:

“next steps” as bullets at the top so I can quickly see what to do next

History items (past actions) with a date stamp

Notes and emails that get attached to a task

Tasks and Categories: A Project can be a Category

I take a loose approach to Categories. You need to know that Outlook 2003 stores it’s “master category list” in the registry (!), when you change machines you lose it! Happily the Categories are just strings stored in the tasks, so they don’t go away.

Because of this I just ignore the Mater Category list. Examples of my categories include:

• Product names
• Release numbers
• People names
• Project names
• Customer names
• Business partners

Creating Custom Views for Reviewing and Editing your Tasks

You can use Outlook’s canned Task Views, but they’re feeble. There’s no “due date’ view, for example (amazing!).

Once you define your Views (see below) the easiest way to select them is to configure your Outlook toolbar to show your Views in a drop down list.

For example, here I have “jf_Priority_DueDate” selected as my View. I have the headings collapsed so you can’t see the tasks, but if you opened the heading you could drag and drop a task to change priority or due date using this View.

From this drop down list of Views you can chose the “Define Views” item to create custom views.

If you choose to Define a View, I recommend copying from a default view rather than editing it. I prefix mine with jf_ to differentiate the ones I’ve created:

Here’s an example of a Custom View screen:

Tasks: View by Category (and the bug)

Outlook 2003 has a major bug with Category views. So does Outlook 1999, 2000, XP, etc. This bug was only fixed in Outlook 2007.

If you view by category, then sort on any header, your custom view loses the category setting. You have to recreate it. The hundredth time you do this you learn not to sort when in category view. It took Microsoft 8 years, from Outlook 1999 to Outlook 2007, to fix this.

Tasks: View by Date

Tasks: View by Priority and Date

I’ve just started using this view but it’s quite powerful. I can assign tasks to both priorities and dates in a single move.

Tasks from Palm to iPhone via Toodledo

I don't think this was available when I moved my PalmOS tasks to my iPhone.

Toodledo will import PalmOS Task archives: Toodledo : Palm PDA Import/Export.

So you can import your tasks to Toodledo, then sync them to your iPhone using either the Toodledo iPhone app or Appigo's Todo.app.

I've used Toodledo and Appigo Todo.app for over a year. Neither is perfect, but they're both a solid B+. I really don't know a better solution.

PS. How could they be better? Well, if Appigo doesn't make any more bone-headed changes to the Todo.app (they've mercifully reversed some past mistakes), and if Toodledo stopped deleting tasks > 1 yo and changed quick search to scan all task fields, then they'd be a solid A.

Update: Incidentally, I'm experimenting with the RSS feed view of my tasks in Google Reader. I think I'll figure out a good use for this feature.