Google's Exchange services now support 25 calendars on iPhone OS 3

In the odd parallel universe I live in, most of the hyped iPhone OS 3 features have been pretty unimpressive.

On the other hand, the features nobody is talking about are pretty nice. I now have my Google, Work and Personal iMac contacts all living together on my iPhone. The Work/Personal are coming in from my desktop (iTunes) sync, and my Google Contacts through Google's version of Microsoft's Exchange (ActiveSync for Mobile) Service.

I currently sync my iPhone Calendar (grrr) only to Google's Calendar, that hasn't changed since last March or so. What's new is that until today there was a 5 calendar limit on what you could sync:

Gordon's Tech: Google saves my iPhone

.... I chose my sync calendars (config site is http://m.google.com/sync [1], 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 appears to be related to an iPhone bug....

I actually need to sync about 7-8 calendars, so I've been waiting for a fix. Today I looked and the new limit is 25 calendars. Much nicer.

[1] Google documents this feature, but it's not easy to find. If you don't go to this mobile-only page you'd think you can only sync your primary Google account calendar to your iPhone. In fact anything that you can display on your Google Calendar can go to the iPhone. I think you can even turn off sync to your primary (default) Google Account (Gmail) calendar.

Project Contacts: iPhone 3.0 means I hack away at Google Contacts, and discover another rough spot

In my last installment of Project Contacts (Launched 2/14/09) I discovered that copying my Corporate (Exchange server/Outlook) contacts to a PST file converted email addresses from EX (x.500) to standard SMTP. I brought the PST to my home Outlook (on XP box) and then used MobileMe Sync to get the work contacts nicely integrated with my iPhone and my iMac.

That took me 70% of the way to getting my Contacts mega-mess sorted out. The cost was a subscription to MobileMe (later canceled within 30 day limit) and some modest manual updating [1].

I figured I’d wait a bit before tackling the last bit of the Contacts mess – my Gmail Contacts. I need to merge them in to my OS X Address Book repository [2]. Google is supposed to migrate to a more sync friendly format (structured names), but it’s going slowly. I figured I’d wait.

Then I got iPhone OS 3. The one good feature so far is that I can sync my Google Contacts to my iPhone via Google’s exchange server support while ALSO synching my OS X Address Book (with work and home) to my iPhone.

I did that and ended up with thousands of duplicates, but this isn’t as bad as it sounds. They were segregated by account. Still, it made phone searching pretty slow.

So I spent an hour slogging away at Gmail cleanup. I removed a large redundant group of about 800 contacts, then hand deleted another 200 or so. The 30-40 minute process reminded me that I’ve lived a fairly long time already; some of those names had pretty old memories with them (they still exist in my main contacts – I was just deleting unwanted redundancies).

The good news is that Google’s Contact Merge feature works quite nicely. The bad news is that every time you delete a contact, the screen redraws and you start over again at the top of the Contacts List. Sigh. More evidence nobody at Google uses the Gmail we use.

So now I’d say I’m 77% of the way to completing Project Contacts. I’m waiting now for Google to compete their structured name transition and for Spanning Sync to be suitably updated. Then I’ll start working on the last step. On my iPhone, at least, I do have every Contact at hand at all times. That’s progress.

[1] Turns out my work Contacts don’t change all that quickly, so for various reasons I won’t go into I don’t actually need MobileMe to manually copy changed Outlook Contacts to my iMac. I am probably going to get MobileMe for other reasons however.

[2] Address Book is the least weak of Apple’s astoundingly unimpressive desktop PIM suite, but it’s still not an ideal repository.

Update: I was so pleased with Google's Contact Merge feature I decided to try the same feature in OS X Address Book. Oops! Address Book's Merge is completely automatic. In Gmail Contacts you can review the merged record and revise it or reject it. In almost every merge I did make some corrections. OS X Address Book just executes the merge, it doesn't even identify the merged records. Damn, but Apple sucks so abysmally at everything Palm was good at.

Update 12/23/10: I've been using Spanning Sync, MobileMe, Address Book OS X, iPhone Contacts and Google Contacts all more or less in sync for about a year.

Converting Eudora email

I have a large archive of email on my XP machine, all of it Eudora 7, an application that was last supported in 2006. You can still download the XP version, but the Mac download appears to be broken.

I need to migrate it to my Mac, but it's a tricky process. I don't like the odd ways OS X Mail.app handles an email database (mostly to support Spotlight search) and I fear crushing Mail.app with the archives.

So I'm researching conversion options, not for the first time. This Thunderbird kb article outlines several options. I'll be doing more research and updating this thread. I'm not particularly concerned about conserving the address book.

Once I get it converted and tested I'll look at dumping the IMAP setup I currently use with Mail.app to get my email from Gmail and possibly regress to a simple POP configuration that's less messed up by Google's peculiar folder emulation.

I'll do my test conversions with a special purpose user account I can delete after I'm done testing.

See also:

• Migrating Outlook Express email using Eudora
• Eudora mailbox cleaner (Probably the top choice)
  

iPhone 3: Bad, yawn and good

Apple really does have some kind of mind lock thing going.

Here's the antidote -- what's bad, yawn and good about iPhone 3.0. I'll update it over the next week or so. The functional updates are actually very limited, so we'll have to see what third parties do.

Bad

• The maximal interval for a meeting reminder or alert is still two days. Every other calendar app on every other platform in history has better functionality.
• Byline, one of my favorite apps, is completely unstable if you view by source. I'm sure we'll find other problems. In some cases the updated apps may have more problems than the older, non-updated apps.
• Some UI glitches even in newly updated 3rd party apps. These should get fixed soon. Evernote is particularly troubled and even slower than before. I've kind of given up on it.
• Extremely dumb change to the screen lock while on phone behavior.
• Battery life reduced on iPhone 3G - especially if subscribe to push notifications.
• Problems with iPhone 1 may be pretty significant. First generation iPhone users probably should not upgrade.
• More issues with Wifi connectivity.
• Worsening AT&T service, but that may be due to the 1 million plus new iPhone 3GS models crushing AT&T's cruelly burdened network.
  

Yawn

• Spotlight is good for finding contacts, appointments and finding apps in the crummy iPhone "Finder". It's not clear, but I suspect 3rd parties can't use it.
• The Voice memo is nice enough, but they should have used all that space for a giant record button (for car use). My old VoiceRecord.app is better, so I'll stick with that one.

Good

• Thanks no doubt to the Palm Pre, I can now sync my iPhone with both my Mac Contacts and my Google Contacts (via Google's Exchange service) and keep the two sources distinct. This is a very large benefit for me. I do hope to get a single source for my Contacts but this feature is worth the update all by itself.
• A bug fix in OS 2 means Google's ActiveSync service can now sync up to 25 separate Google Account calendars to your iPhone.
• It doesn't use up any of your precious storage space. The OS is stored separately, so even if it's bigger your usable memory is unchanged.
• When you install new apps, instead of messing up all your screens it creates a new screen between the first and 2nd (unless you hit the maximal number of screens).
• iPhone is now a better podcast player
• I updated sooner than expected because the new versions of my apps required the update. I haven't yet had the kind of disastrous problems I expect with major Apple product updates.
• Moving the App icons between screens is much easier. No more bumping repeatedly trying to force the iPhone to jump screens.

I've yet to test all the old bugs, like the bizarre behavior of Calendar and Contacts Notes fields with large notes (like airplane itineraries).

Byline – the better version of Google Reader Mobile

Once upon a time there were several excellent Windows feed readers. They’re all dead. We’ve got some good ones left for the OS X desktop, but there I’m very happy with Google Reader.

On the iPhone I’ve been using Google Reader Mobile. It’s pretty good, but it has some obvious and subtle flaws.

The subtle flaws have to do with the read/share/note/star workflow and the back and forth between the reader web app and web views of blogs.

The obvious flaw is that it’s dependent on my network connection and Safari performance. It’s useless on a plane and it can be slow even on my WiFi network.

I stuck with Google Reader for many months, but about two months ago I went to Phantom Fish’s Byline, an iPhone extension to Google Reader …

…. Simply use your free Google Reader account to subscribe to websites you’d like to keep track of. Byline will automatically bring you new content, putting thousands of RSS and Atom feeds at your fingertips.

When you read an item, it stays read. The same goes for the items you star: Byline will let Google Reader know the next time you have an internet connection….

… Even when you have no internet connection, Byline’s offline browsing feature gives you instant access to complete web pages.

Perfect for flights, subway journeys, and (if you’re an iPod Touch owner) those long dry spells between Wi-Fi zones…

It works beautifully. In addition to the marketing blurb above, I really appreciate the way Byline uses WebKit to display external web page views within the Byline context.

This is a superb piece of software. It’s fast, reliable, elegant, efficient, and it even manages the promised sync trick (a rare achievement). I move seamlessly between Google’s desktop web app and Byline.

I think I paid $5 to $10 for Byline but it’s worth more. It’s my most heavily used iPhone app. The one improvement I’d like is a a “read all” link at the top as well as the bottom of the scrolling list – but that’s a minor quibble.

The acid test? I showed it to someone who’s never used a true Feed Reader of any sort and it made her despise her BlackBerry Pearl more than ever.

Obviously, recommended.

Now, the extra credit question. Why does the iPhone have a superb “desktop” feed reader and Windows has none? I’ll hazard my answer in a future Gordon’s Notes opinion posting. Hint: Sometimes DRM is your friend.

Update 6/20/09: New version has been completely unstable for me on OS 3. Avoid updating if possible until a fix is out.

Update 7/24/09: They've tried to fix the bug I found over 3 releases, and they're only about 80% there. Byline only crashes if you group by feed, so I no longer do that. I wonder if the company lost the author of the app, and is now struggling to fix it. It's hard to reconcile their slow progress with the original quality of this app.

Picasa web albums uploader for OS X now downloads entire albums and more

Google's Data Liberation Front marches on. I didn't even know of the Dec update ...

Official Google Mac Blog: Upload Your Photos, Download Your Albums

... In December, the Picasa Web Albums Uploader added support for downloading a photo album to your Mac. We've recently updated the Uploader to include the ability to download all photos from all albums in your account. To start the download, sign in to your account with the Picasa Web Albums Uploader application and select the Existing Album tab. Holding down the Mac's Option key will change the title of the Download Album button to Download All. Then one click will bring all of your albums home.

This update also improves reliability of the uploader's iPhoto export plug-in. The uploader typically keeps itself up-to-date, but you can also get the latest version, 1.3.1, from the download page...

This is why I like Picasa Web Albums.

Very nice. Viva La Data Liberation!

iPhone 3.0: Apple fixes tune scrolling

I was briefly tempted to install iPhone 3.0, but I checked Macintouch. Lots of issue reports, so I'll wait at least a few more days. I'm trying to be strong.

Meanwhile, I read that Apple fixed something I'd found very annoying. The iPhone is now a better iPod, especially for podcasts ...

iPhone 3.0 Update: 10 Hidden Features - PC World

... Previously, while listening to a song, you had a simple dot on the song bar to rewind or fast forward. But now in the 3.0 update, you can scroll through songs at various speeds. Put your finger on the scrolling point and it will start glowing. Now, if you drag your finger left or right, you will scroll through the song at 'high speed,' and if you do this movement while dragging your finger down the screen, the speed decreases to 'half speed,' 'quarter speed,' or 'fine scrubbing'...

Navigating a podcast is pretty annoying on iPhone 2.0. I often miss my iPod scroll wheel. I really appreciate this particular fix.

Windows Search 4: Cannot select drive or folders (grayed out)

I recently reinstalled Windows Search on a freshly imaged corporate XP laptop.

I was dismayed to discover that the only thing showing in my “Indexing Options” / “Included Locations” list was an unused Outlook Express account. When I clicked ‘Modify’ to get to “indexed Locations” and “Change selected locations” (notice some labeling inconsistencies here?) Outlook didn’t show at all and all but one uninteresting folder on my C drive were mysteriously grayed (greyed) out.

The Outlook problem went away with a restart and a review with Outlook running. I’m having complex and intractable issues with Outlook/Exchange authentication, so I can’t make too much of this one.

The mysteriously unselectable grayed out C drive folders persisted however, and the Windows Search 4.0 Troubleshooting Guide was of no use. My clue came when I clicked down into the tree display. Turns out the UI is misleading; even when a folder is gray it may contain searchable subfolders.

Once I saw that, luck played a role. By chance my mouse rested on folder, and a yellow contextual popup appeared. The message told me the folder was not marked for indexing.

Aha! The original disk image was flawed. Somehow the default “allow indexing service to index this disk” had been altered. I opened the context menu for the C drive and checked the appropriate box.

Windows Search 4 now worked.

Update: Incidentally, the machine transition revealed that I'm utterly dependent on Windows Search. I can no longer work without robust full text search and a powerful collection of search operators. A new dependency ....

Configuring Outlook 2003 to use Contacts for email in an Exchange Server environment

I recently had to migrate to a new machine using old Office software (don’t ask), so I had to rediscover how to fix a common problem with Outlook 2003.

When you first start Outlook 2003 in an Exchange server environment it’s not configured to look for email addresses in your Contacts folder.

If you right click on your Contacts icon you’ll see, somewhere in a mess of tabs, one that says “Outlook address book”. In it you’ll find a checkbox “Show this folder as an e-mail Address Book”, but it will be grayed (greyed) out and uncheckable.

Turns out, as described here, you need to …

1. Tools/E-mail accounts
2. Choose “View or change existing directories or address books”
3. Click Add …
4. Click Additional Address Books

You should then see an option to add your Outlook Contacts. I suspect, however, you can’t add any old Contacts folder from a PST file, it must probably be the Contacts folder you synchronize with Exchange server.

Once you do this if you return to Outlook the check box will no longer be gray and Contacts should be checked.

Windows Live Writer: moving between machines (yech)

I love WLW, but it has an Achilles heel. On XP it’s pretty much impossible to move your configuration data between machines.

Of course that’s true for almost all of  Microsoft’s products, but we expect better of WLW. On the other hand, I hear rumor there’s a configuration migration service built into Vista (some OS), so maybe it works fine there.

I found out about this after I switched machines. I have the old data of course, but I’ll just migrate manually. It would be nice if the WLW were to build in a migration utility, but for now here are two somewhat useful references:

• Backup your WLW Settings: a post about this utility, but the utility is quite old and hasn’t been updated
• Migrate Windows Live Writer data: reveals location of the files, unfortunately key data is in the foul pits of Hell, aka the Windows Registry.

There’s some accessible data in ..

• C:\work\My Weblog Posts (path will vary)
• C:\Documents and Settings\[userid]\Application Data\Windows Live Writer

You might imagine you could copy your older WLW posts and drafts to C:\…\My Weblog Posts and WLW would be able to browse and search them, but that doesn’t work. It can open them if you double-click on them, but there’s a cache/index missing somewhere.

Happily, if you copy our old posts and drafts into the new WLW folders (ex: C:\work\My Weblog Posts) and delete the XML cache files WLW will rebuild them and find all your draft and new posts.[1]

[1] I got messed up here because when I forgot to point the “My Documents” folder to my personal file store. So WLW was only looking in My Documents. I copied the data from My Documents then pointed My Documents to c:\work then launched WLW.

Update 6/17/09: Corrected my mistake about posts recovery.

Why is Safari 4 so slow, when the beta was fast?

Safari 4 feels much slower than the beta version. I often run into typing problems on my MacBook -- I type far ahead of the cursor when working with Blogger's Gmail's rich text editor.

I never ran into that with the beta version.

Did Apple mess something up?

Probably.

Deep dive into the Palm Pre

An escaped image is giving techies a deep look into the innards of the Pre. Turns out the PalmOS is based on OpenEmbeddded Linux which in turn incorporates OpenZaurus which is descended from the 1990s Sharp Zaurus PDA.

And you thought the PalmOS was built new in 2 years. Not so. The genius of the thing is how much GPL software it contains.

The Pre continues to please, with positive reviews from Mac folk like Scott Gruby. Maybe I'm not the only one who needs a phone that excels at basic PIM functions (see Andy, I'm not always a market of one). I think Apple made a mistake blowing off the entire personal productivity domain.

One big caveat however. I fear the cloud. The Pre is a cloud phone -- it syncs with Google, Facebook and other Cloud properties. That's a problem for me.

Nisus Writer Pro 1.2

Three years ago I wrote a review of Nisus Writer Express. I recently updated to last November's Nisus Writer Pro 1.2 so I figured I'd supplement my original review.

In general, I'm a contented user. I wish I could use it more, but most of my printed writing is done with Word on an XP box. I use it for limited writing on OS; I've never really given it an acid test.

Over the years I've had two medium and one big issue with Nisus.

The first medium issue is that earlier versions didn't manage Word .DOC images well. Nisus would open the document, but when it saved the documented the images were not compressed. In particular, Nisus did not implement even PNG compression. I don't know if this is still a problem, but I've never seen mention of a fix.

The second medium issue is that even at NW Pro 1.2 you still can't save in Open Document Format.

The major issue is that the 10.5 update broke Nisus Writer Express and Nisus didn't provide a free fix. NWE was the only significant Mac app I use that didn't work in 10.5. It smells like Nisus was doing something programmatically fishy, and so they ought to have provided a free patch.

On the other hand Nisus uses RTF as a native file format, so Nisus documents are more likely than any other word-processing format to be readable in 10-15 years. The Style implementation (Pro version) is simple and excellent (aside: spit upon the Beast), and now that moving Navigator/TOC entries moves document blocks is a very reasonable outliner as well. It's the closest thing to an integrated wordpressor/outliner I've seen since FullWrite Professional. (MORE, bless its heart, was fundamentally an outliner -- though it was a better word processor than most.)

One of the strengths of OS X is that we have choices about word processors. Microsoft Word of course, but also Pages, Nisus Writer (Express and Pro), Mellel, and about 3-4 others (honorable mention to MORE's reincarnation - OmniOutliner). Nisus Writer's RTF support, style sheets, performance, and outliner features mean it's worth a close look by anyone who can avoid Word.

Making sense of Google's user created "My Maps"

I've long been frustrated by the awkward design of Google's personalized May Maps. The service feels crude, and I'm unsure how long the data will stay around.

Today I decided to try and learn a bit more. I recommend the introductory video (a very young sounding narrator) and I really recommend "Browse the directory". Turns out that's not, as I'd imagined, a directory of maps (why should it be?). It's a directory of Map tools that make "My Maps" much more useful.

I'd like to see what I can do in terms of Minneapolis St Paul trails, and maybe get some use of the msptrails.org domain I registered a while back.

Update: Well, I gave it a good try, but it's still a toy. For example, there's no way to edit a map you've created; you can't revise or extend a line. I'll wait until Google puts a bit more energy into this one.

Migrating my MacBook to a 500 GB drive

I'll try to update this with a bit more detail later, but I want to write this minor post while the details are fresh.

I upgraded my MacBook Pro from a 120GB Fujitsu to a 500 GB Western Digital Scorpio Blue drive (totally bare from Amazon, just the drive in a plain brown box). I followed the directions provide by Apple, this is not a hard procedure.

I bought the 5000 rpm drive because I mostly care about reliability, low vibration, low temperature, and capacity. From what I read in this older MacBook the 7200's effective performance boost is very small and some 7200 drives have quite a bit of vibration (seems idiosyncratic).

I won't repeat Apple's directions, except to say they left off one little bit. I think this set of directions is more complete.

Briefly then ...

1. I considered creating a disk image clone on my PPC iMac then using firewire disk mode on the MacBook to clone the image over. Andrew, who is generally reliable, warned me of some issues related to using a PPC to clone an Intel Mac drive (endian?).  I had a very cheap 2.5" USB enclosure I'd used with a 80GB drive; it worked perfectly well with the 500 GB drive. I did discover that Intel and PPC Macs use different partitions for their boot drive. Intel Macs default to GUID partitions, PPC default "Apple partitions". So maybe that's the difference Andrew warned of. I did all the partitioning and cloning from my MacBook.
2. I used Bombich Software: Carbon Copy Cloner [1] to clone from my MacBook. It took about 2-3 hours; it would have gone faster if I'd remembered turn off spotlight when cloning.
3. Apple's directions omit one key step and tool. You need a T8 Torx driver to remove the metal shell that's wrapped around the disk. Maybe if you buy the replacement drive from Apple it comes with the shell? Anyway, if you have a Torx driver it's an easy task, but if you don't you're stuck.
4. Apple's not kidding about the metallic foam shield that's glued on the RAM cover you remove. It's not easy to get the shield back on, you need a non-magnetic plastic card to push it down so you can get the metal band back into place.

The first boot seemed to take an eternity. It was much longer than usual. I think the systems was adjusting to the new drive. Once it started it rebuilt some caches then completed. I almost gave up -- so be patient.

So far so good. The drive is quieter than the original Fujitsu and it feels more responsive (could be imagination, it's a 5,000 not a 7,200. I might put the original in my mother's Mac Mini, though if I'm going to bother with that hard to service job I might as well buy another 500 GB drive.

Now I can carry more media around, and I can play with more virtual machines...

[1] CCC is free and comes from a trusted developer. It now incorporates ads. Since users spend a lot of time checking up on the CCC process this is a fantastic ad platform. I donated $10 via the web site. I rarely use CCC, so I try to make a donation each time it works for me.