MobileMess troubleshooting and why this may be worse than it looks

I think the MobileMe problems are worse than they look ...

MobileMe

...The MobileMe rocky transition is still an ongoing battle for us. We have not been able to successfully synchronize our iCal calendars nor our Address Book to the MobileMe website for 3 days now. The MobileMe website contains OUTDATED information from our Address Book and iCal calendars. We are running Mac OS X 10.5.4 on a MacBook Pro, with the MobileMe 1.1 updater applied. We have tried all the troubleshooting steps on Apple's website, including unregistering & re-registering our computer from the MobileMe system preference, completely resetting our sync data from the MobileMe System Preference, resetting our SyncServices folder using the Terminal command in this tech info article - http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1627 - repairing permissions, and running Keychain First Aid. All to no avail...

I deal with synchronization issues professionally, in a high-reliability domain (healthcare). In this domain we call it "integration" or "message-based integration" and the "standards" are HL-7 RIM 3.0 and CDA, formal ontologies (SNOMED), knowledge bases (NDDF for example) and data sets (ICD, CPT, etc).

Synchronization is technically hard. Semantic communication between disparate data models is not only an "unsolved problem", it's not perfectly solvable even with human intervention. To the extent we succeed it's by converging data models.

Technical challenges are one thing, but what makes Synchronization a killer problem is that most executives in most domains don't understand why it's hard. So they don't treat it as something to fear and budget for. Synchronization projects tend to be career killers, so people who know something about synchronization tend to find other work to do.

My fear is that the Apple engineers who understand synchronization have found other projects to work on. Meanwhile Apple execs demanded Exchange support, along with iCal support, along with Outlook support, along with an expectation that it would "just work" (so no options for undirectional messaging, just bidirectional synchronization).

It ain't going to work. iCal and Address Book have very different data models from Exchange/Outlook.

This wouldn't be so bad if the iPhone weren't locked down. If small, smart vendors had access to the hardware connector they could work around Apple's mistakes ...

Things - task management on the Mac

Things - task management on the Mac is another entry in my OS X alternatives to Outlook tasks.

This is nice:

Yours forever. We don't lock you in. Things uses an open XML file format to store your data. This gives third parties a transparent way to communicate with Things.

It's scheduled for release in "summer 2008" (previously "spring 2008").

This review suggests Things might be a rival to OmniFocus, though I doubt they're any better at data import. They claim to have an iPhone client.

Update: It's hard to tell what's going on with them, but I think they put their desktop app on hold to create an iPhone app. The two don't appear to have any current connection or synchronization, and their blog mentions rewriting the desktop app. That's ominous.

Codswallop reader favorite software - including Daylite

Codswallop's reader list of favorite tools is surprisingly good. I recognized most of them, but Daylite is new to me.

I'm surprised I've not heard this integrated productivity suite -- but the $1000 5 user license fee might be part of the reason. Their sync would have to be extremely good to justify even a license for Emily and ($400).

On another note, I was surprised to see Total Commander on the list. It's been a while since I've seen a Norton Commander clone. Those were the days ...

Update 7/24/08: Great comment from Carolyn. If Daylite can't do basic task/calendar integration, how can we take them seriously?

Directory of conversion tools

Conversion Central: 101 Tools to Convert Video, Music, Images, PDF and More : Codswallop. There's some good stuff here. It's a reference work a pointer or two. Most XP, some OS X and GNU. There's no date on the post, but I think it's 1-2 years old.

The author also offers a Creative Commons PDF converter and happens to be a mind mapping fan.

These are all rather good signs.

The blog has some other interesting posts, but a peculiar URL: http://www.cogniview.com/convert-pdf-to-excel/. The blog feed is via FeedBurner, I'll give them a try.

MobileMe - calendar sync and the work-personal-family calendar triad

Grateful I am, to be still on the 60 day free trial of MobileMess. It is at least five months from stability, but at least I can see the skeleton of its future. It looks a tad ominous.

Consider the work-home-family calendar triad.

Last week I missed a haircut. I'd entered it correctly on my personal calendar, but the duplicate entry on my work calendar was off by a day. Both calendars live on my Palm (in different applications, which is one of the thousand cuts that killed the Palm), but I missed an alarm.

Typical. Two separate calendars are lousy, but putting my personal appointments on the work calendar is not optimal. Do I want my meetings with representatives of the Zorgonian trade federation to appear on my work calendar? Earth is not ready to learn of those.

Now imagine that synchronizing you work calendar with MobileMe was not a firing offense (at most companies it would be). Further imagine that synchronizing an Outlook Exchange Client calendar with MobileMe wouldn't trash the work calendar (it would [1]).

You'd still be in trouble. MobileMe is setup so that each user can have a single sync calendar per account. There may be multiple calendars on an account, but you can't sync to them from iCal or Outlook. You'd need to get the family account, and use a different username for each calendar, then share on the family account. I don't have an iPhone or a family account to test this with, but I'm guessing the iPhone would allow sync with only one of the family calendars.

What about Google Calendar, popularly known as gCal? Our Google Apps family calendar allows a very large number of users (100?), so there's lots of wiggle room. There's an open sync API, so vendors can, if they and Google ever get their act together, can implement unidirectonal sync from an Outlook/Exchange work calendar.

From what I've seen of Google Calendar and MobileMe, we're most likely to need gCal. What I fear is that I'll need MobileMe too ... More on that later.

[1] Maybe the iPhone calendar can sync with an Exchange server, but I'm pretty sure the MobileMe calendar can't handle all the eccentric metadata and relationships that are a part of an Outlook/Exchange appointment - including little details like meeting attendees and recurrence exceptions. This wouldn't be too bad if you could do one way (undirectional) "sync" - send work data to MobileMe. This is not supported however.

Remember The Milk - Tasks in the Cloud. Still in the running.

[The first time I wrote this I though RTM tasks had no notes. They can have notes when entered from the web UI. I don't think there's a way to import tasks with notes, the pro versions can sync with Blackberry or Windows Mobile, not Palm.]

My early experience with MobileMe has rekindled my enthusiasm for our familial Google Apps calendar and cloud services.

The missing links are Tasks and Notes.

I'll be tracking Evernote closely, and watching how OmniFocus matures from its rough start. Both promise some sort of application / service / iPhone integration.

So what about Remember The Milk? RTM has a Firefox plugin that provides gCal and gMail integration ...

Remember The Milk - Services / Remember The Milk for Gmail

...No need to check your calendar when setting due dates! Remember The Milk talks to Google Calendar when it detects that you're adding a task related to an event in your calendar, and automagically figures out when your task is due..

Ok, that sounds interesting. So what does RTM do for export? iCal and Atom. Not the easiest for me to process, but potentially useful.

What does RTM do for import? Not too darned much. You can email a list of "tasks". One per line. No due dates, not notes.

That's because RTM tasks are single line items.

Ok, that's not good, but it's not a complete fail either. I need to check out the Pro version.

Missing Sync for iPhone does Notes synchronization

So MobileMe ain't exactly wonderful. What about the alternatives?

For on, there's Missing Sync, which we've used with Palm devices and Blackberry devices on OS X:

The Missing Sync for iPhone - Synchronize Mac OS X and iPhone 

... The Notes application on the iPhone is great for jotting down everything from meeting minutes and brilliant ideas to reminders and shopping lists. But you can't organize notes into categories, search your notes, or copy and paste content. Unless you use The Missing Sync to transfer your iPhone notes into Microsoft Entourage, Bare Bones Yojimbo or Mark/Space Notebook (included with The Missing Sync)....

That sounds interesting.

The Mark/Space migration assistant will also move Contacts and Calendar from a Palm device to an iPhone on OS X.

That still leaves Tasks in the cold though.

This is all going to take a lot more work ...