Work and home calendar integration – false signs of iPhone hope

I’m sorting through this warily. It’s like juggling antimatter. I have backups, don’t try this if you don’t.
I’m still striving towards the primeval goal of an integrated work/home calendar view. Palm failed this test. I thought the iPhone wasn’t even in contention, but I’m now seeing some faint signs of hope.
Here’s what I see so far:

• The iPhone more or less supports multiple calendars.
• It appears possible that an iPhone can sync differentially with multiple machines. I sync with an iMac at home, but in cautious testing I can connect and charge my iPhone at work while turning off the automatic sync option. I can differentially configure sync options for the work machine. [Update: this is not correct. After real world tests on OS X and XP I am convinced that iPhone 2.0 can truly sync with only one machine, and that machine better be a Mac. I think 10.4 may work, haven't tried 10.5. This is a regression from iPhone 1, which could sync safely with Outlook.]
  
• iTunes PC has an option to sync Outlook with a “selected calendar”
• Apple - Support - Discussions - Sync iPhone with work Outlook (Exchange ... confirms that Exchange server sync (includes some Sharepoint access!) takes over the entire phone. So while it has lots of appealing features, it’s out of the running for my purposes. In any case, Apple’s Exchange implementation is very weak: “"There are several common-- nay, fundamental-- things that you cannot do with the iPhone calendar application. You cannot:
• create a meeting request and invite other people to attend..
• create a recurring meeting unless it is repeated daily, weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, or yearly. That's right-- no more "first Thursday of every month" or "every Monday, Wednesday, Friday" appointments…
• view suggested meeting times or free/busy times, either for your own calendar or for others'…
• move to an arbitrary date, in either the future or the past…

But how does the iPhone do selectively synchronizing via USB cable with an Outlook Exchange Server client? Will it safely sync with an Outlook appointment that has attendees and schedule exceptions without wrecking the appointment? If I could enforce one way update of the iPhone rather than true bidirectional sync I’d test this out.

I’ve opened an Apple Discussion thread on this. More updates as I learn more.

Update

• signs of hope 
• here there be bugs - and bad ones 

Update 2 

Complete despair.  The list of calendars to sync with is a list of Outlook calendars, not iPhone calendars. If you sync with the work calendar it wipes out all the home calendars. Heart breaking, really. (There is an option, btw, to force unidirectional updates from Outlook, but it must be manually set with every synchronization.)

Update 3

Just for the heck of it, I did a one way calendar sync from Outlook to the iPhone. I acknowledged my iPhone calendar would be replaced from Outlook. After about a half hour the progress-indicator free process stopped. My Outlook calendar was still intact. That was good. My iPhone calendar was empty. Nothing there.

Wow. No wonder Apple is pushing iPhone 2.1 out to developers. They really mucked this release up!

(See comments for a rumor that a combination of MobileMe and Exchange Push can produce a joint calendar on the iPhone. I recommend against trying any iPhone sync until after 2.1 is out.)

The iPhone Remote will control iTunes Airtunes in a multi-user system

So far I've learned 11 things about the iPhone I didn't see in any reviews. Mostly not bad.

One thing, however, has really impressed me.

First, some background ...

Gordon's Tech: Remote control of iTunes and AppleTV: will AirTunes return?

... Apple has, years late, added a remote control feature to the iPhone/iTouch:
... I’m wary though. I suspect:

1. It won’t work with background sessions.
2. The AirTunes streaming will still be messed up by microwave use.

It’s not totally hopeless though. I haven’t tested AirTunes with 10.5 or the new AirPort Express. If the remote will communicate with iTunes running in a background user session on a 10.5 machine I might try testing again. The background user problem doesn’t apply to an AppleTV of course.

I was suspicious. Years ago I spent weeks trying to make AirTunes work. I needed a way to control my upstairs iMac from the downstairs kitchen, but I was defeated by our multi-user configuration.

Today I tried Apple's Remote app for the iPhone/iTouch.

I connected to my iTunes library, chose the "stay connected" setting, and then switched users. iTunes was then running on the background ... in 10.4.11.

I was able to control it. I could even control what speakers it used -- local or the speakers connected to my Airport Express.

Wow, I didn't expect that to work! Now I'm tempted to give iTunes a go again. Maybe I should buy an iTouch for the family ...

Apple's messed up Apple ID system: what are they smoking?!

What are they smoking out in Cupertino?

The latest muck-up has to do with the old Apple ID.

For years, even after I gave up on .Mac, my Apple ID was jfaughnan@mac.com. That's what my iTunes account and all my iTunes purchases are tied to.

Now, however, iTunes won't let me buy anything because my "email is invalid".

Turns out, somewhere in the bowels of Apple's increasingly messed up corporation, there's a requirement that the AppleID, to which all my transactions are bound, needs to be also my valid email address.

So, should I change it? I have a bad feeling about what would happen then. Apple is not a healthy company. The world might explode!

Sheesh.

Update: I found a link to Apple's Profile service, where you can change the email associated with your Apple ID.

You can't do this from the iTunes store itself -- even though iTunes kept sending me back to the account view.

After I updated the email stored in the profile service, I returned to the Apple store, and AGAIN I got the notice about a bad email address. This time, however, the account link showed a page with a NEW field in addition to my non-editable jfaughnan@mac.com account -- one holding my updated email address. I clicked done and this time I got a notice that my Apple account had been created! Despite that ominous language my purchase history was intact, the account was not created, it was updated.

After all of that I was able to buy "Voice Record" for my iPhone.

Update 7/25/08: Thinking about this a bit more, I wonder if this is another casualty of Apple's screwed up .Mac (dotMac) to .Me (MobileMe) transition. I discontinued my .Mac service years ago, but I was still getting emailed receipts for Mac account purchases with my old .Mac userid. So Apple was storing a forwarding address that was valid, probably in the profile. I suspect during the .Mac transition Apple removed the old .Mac forwarding, probably to free up more usernames for reuse with .Me. This ran into preexisting frailties with their Apple ID system, with the usual consequences.

Salvaging 661 Symantec MORE 3.1 documents

I'd like to move the family iMac to 10.5, but I'm held back by data lock --

Gordon's Notes: Data Lock: 661 Symantec MORE 3.1 documents keep me in 10.4

... The real problem is that my ancient copy of MoRu tells me I've 661 MORE 3.1 documents on this drive. MORE 3.1 needs MacOS 9 Classic, and 10.5 doesn't run classic.

I looked at a few of my old files. There's a lot of knowledge in there I don't want to lose.

Inspiration and OmniOutliner Pro will open these as outlines, but both will lose presentation graphics. Brad Pettit's free XML converter will switch the files to plain text XML, and I think it might be able to process multiple files at once. Otherwise I can open each one and save it to another obsolete file format, or I can use CUPS-PDF to create a PDF output classic can see.

This is going to hurt.

It now hurts less.

After some promising initial results, I selected every row in MoRu and dropped the 661 files on Brad Pettit's utility. It took less than 10 seconds to produce 661 XML files in the same directory as the original MORE file. Firefox renders the XML as a collapsible outline (Safari doesn't handle it) and of course I can open it in a text editor. If I define a style sheet I can even make it look better. Spotlight will work with the rest.

I can also use OmniOutliner to view much of the data in 10.5, though it doesn't always render embedded graphics. Of course OO is itself a proprietary format app with an uncertain future, but it should work for a few years in 10.5.

The speed of Brad's utility is astonishing.

Update 8/5/08: I wrote to thank Brad. He tells me the utility was written in C++, and that it's primarily I/O constrained. He also recommends keeping the originals of course. They do open in OmniOutliner, so I was planning to do that. I wouldn't be surprised if there's a good Classic emulator somewhere in the future, so I'll even keep my MORE binaries. Brad's working on MediaRoom these days, so I'll be keeping my eye on that product.

iPhone Surprises: Notes you won't read elsewhere

I bought a white 16GB iPhone via AT&T pre-order. It took 3 days from pre-order to pickup; their email notification system didn't work.

Rather than create an annoying new stream of comments on my iPhone, I'll update this post with things I don't read elsewhere. Prior to the 2.1 update this post included a relatively caustic introduction, but post 2.1 things are much better.

This is a good time to buy an iPhone.

When I first posted this Pogue's Missing Manual wasn't out. That's a fantastic book, everyone with an iPhone should own it. I try now to only add items not covered in the book.

Discoveries:

1. When you change to the iPhone, you need to redo your voice mail. My AT&T rep forgot to mention this. I found out I had no voice mail after a week or so. I didn't have any directions, so I just tapped on the iPhone voice mail button to see what would happen. The behavior was weird. The initial setup seemed to be a standard phone setup, then the iPhone flipped over to a GUI setup. It now seems to work, but something went wrong.
   
2. The loss of firewire charging is far more annoying than I'd expected. I have several firewire chargers that worked great, including two from Apple. They also came with nice, long, cables. Worse, the iPhone cable for my SONY car stereo no longer charges -- almost all car peripherals used firewire because it's a close match to the automotive electrical system. This includes my fairly new Griffin FM broadcast and charger. Yes, those are my teeth you hear grinding.
   
3. The iPhone 2.0 USB charger is tiny. If the tines folded in it would be a perfect USB travel charger; this is an odd omission because Apple's prior chargers all had folding tines. On balance though the tiny size and weight are adequate compensation.
4. The SIM is removable, a tiny SIM removal tool is in the box. Don't lose it! You can swap the SIM from the iPhone into a lesser AT&T phone and use that when you don't want to risk the iPhone.
5. The iPhone has a single audio jack -- and it's a 3.5 mm connector. So 2.5 mm earsets won't work. I found 3.5mm to 2.5 mm adapters that work.
   
6. The newer Apple ear buds no longer have foam covers. Ok, minor detail.
7. There's no slipcase with the iPhone, just a cleaning cloth. There are no screen protectors either, I thought iPhone 1.0 shipped with 2-3.
8. The inexpensive white slipcase that shipped with my video iPod is a surprisingly good iPhone case. I wouldn't mind several like that, otherwise I'll probably buy a set of screen covers. I also saw a neoprene wrapper that doesn't add much bulk and would add some fall protection.
   
9. My helpful AT&T rep did the phone number swap -- but oddly enough it seemed like this was an afterthought. I think what he was really trying to do was move data from the old phone to the iPhone via Bluetooth, and he was distracted when he described the task. I'd already sync'd the old phone data to my iMac, so I didn't need that. This ate up some time before I realized what he was trying to do. Let the rep know up front that you don't need old phone data. (He also failed to write my phone number to the SIM, which means the iPhone can't display it. This is a common configuration error, AT&T has to correct it.)
   
10. After phone transfer the old SIM in the old phone enables the phone to be turned on, but there's no service.
11. With 3G service you can talk while you browse the web. This is a huge feature for me, and it's not available with EDGE service.
12. Apple has changed their iPod/iPhone cable. It no longer has the locks, it's a pure friction connector and more compact. I imagine too many people ripped out the cable without disengaging the locks (tyranny of the incompetent!). It's also very short, but the compact charger works well at the end of a lightweight extension cord so this is a good trade-off.
    
13. Apple has a 152 page user guide for the iPhone at the Apple User Guide site. There's a link to the manual on the Safari browser when you start, but it may get lost if you sync bookmarks.
    
14. You can charge an iPhone at multiple machines, but be careful. I have iTunes at work configured with all sync options turned off, this means when I connect the iPhone I can browse photos, but otherwise no sync occurs and iTunes does not lauch. The iPhone, however, charges. So I don't need a separate USB charger at the office, just an iPhone/iPod USB cable (I have a bunch).
    
15. Synchronization with non-Apple desktop apps is a flaming mess.
16. With daylight illumination the camera takes a decent photo of my office whiteboard; I can read my writing. It does well with low light levels. I'm experimenting with combining this with the Evernote service -- annotating images and uploading them.
    
17. Everyone needs one of the many free "flashlight" apps. The bright screen is handy to have in the dark.
18. The iPhone UI is a stress test for Parkinson's disease, familial tremor, other movement disorders and finger/thumb joint disorders. I wonder if they'll eventually get sued under the ADA act. It's a healthy young persons UI, they need to add some tweaks for the rest of humanity.
19. I miss having a "rocker" button like most phones have for navigating pages. It's annoying, and tiring, to have to use my fingers to turn pages. It also smears the screen, though image clarity is good even with a dirty screen.
20. iPhone users will develop dermatitis from compulsive hand washing. Let me make sure I get official precedence for first mention of the new disorder -- "iPhone dermatitis".
21. There's no screen indicator that the phone is in vibrate mode.
22. Many web pages render poorly on the small screen. Newspaper columns, however, work well. Safari/mobile has one peculiar design choice. The font size is fixed, you can't override it the way you can other mobile browsers. That means the initial display flows based on the fixed font size within the vertical window. Tap twice in an area of the page to zoom to fit that region's width.
    
23. I keep running into the 8 screen "pop up" limit. I think this problem could be better handled, I'm sure it will be. Annoying to close 'em. Why create so many "pop ups"? I think it's a problem with handling the HTML "open in new window" behavior.
24. Feeds and the iPhone are a match made in heaven. Google Reader (part of the Google Mobile suite) is fantastic on the iPhone; I've switched from Bloglines to Google Reader. It's a shame that Bloglines didn't have the resources to do an iPhone/mobile version.
    
25. I need to have multiple instances of Google Mobile.app on my phone - one for each of my Google and Google Apps personae. Hope they fix this soon.
26. Voice notes are essential, and the variety of apps on the market that do voice note capture, including offline transcription, reveal how valuable this will be. Evernotes requires notes to upload to the server, since non-Apple iPhone apps don't do background multitasking you will eventually have to let the uploads complete. Jott does background note transcription. Obviously speech recognition on the iPhone will be a big deal, but I suspect doing that with reasonable performance and power drain will require some special dedicated hardware. Maybe version 4.
    
27. Apps keep asking me if I want to use location services. Very annoying -- I always do. I'm looking for a global setting. There are a bunch of usability quirks like this, including unnecessary taps with many apps. This is trivial stuff that will get quickly sorted out, but it's good to expect it.
28. Screen capture (transiently hold the home and power buttons) is a great workaround for various UI limitations, and a good way to put Picasa photos on the local iPhone. I'm sure apps will figure out how to attach metadata to these.
29. I'm beginning to understand why audio pocasts and video podcasts have some value.
30. The dictionary app does not have a UI. It learns from your actions, so try not to mislead it! If it suggests a single word that's right, tap the space bar to accept it. If you don't, you'll hurt the dictionary's feelings. Curiously it is only suggesting short words for me. I preferred the approach of the long defunct predictive text behavior of Palm apps, but those did require tapping with a stylus. This might be better in the long run.
31. The iPhone understands that multiple people may share the same phone number. An incoming call is assigned the first alpha sort name in the list as in "Home plus 3 others". Photos associated with incoming numbers display when the phone rings -- this is very cool.
32. Apple "improved" the launch time in version 2.1 by speeding address book launch and slowing down the launch time of every other iPhone app. So now many apps take 4 seconds to launch but contacts aren't too bad.
    
33. Search on the Address book is first and last name only. If you define a company name, search is on the company name only. This is, needless to say, really dumb.
    
34. The iPhone is a mediocre iPod, but there are some real improvement over prior iPods. You don't have to dismount your iPhone prior to removal from an iTunes session. It's probably a good practice, but it's not necessary. (Of course you can't mount it as a drive either.) The iPhone on 10.5 and iTunes 8 also seem to have resolved the ancient OS problem with switching users when a peripheral is mounted - at least when auto-sycn is turned off in the iPhone settings. The iPhone seems to remain locked to the user who 'owns' the iPhone account.
    
35. The camera is excellent at taking screen shots of white boards in dim light. Good sharpening, good light sensitivity, right size for sharing images, resolution is adequate. Remember, the price of higher resolution is lower light sensitivity.
36. There's no way to disable data services completely and still use the phone. In rural areas the phone may detect an EDGE network, but the throughput may be effectively zero; the phone still shows visual voice mail even when it won't work. Only when there's no EDGE service at all can standard voice mail be reached. The visual voice mail problem causes expensive data charges if you use the phone outside the US, even if you turn off other data services.
    
37. If you disable data roaming (may help with voice mail travel problem) the phone still tries to use a data connection -- but nothing happens. In airplane mode it won't try to connect, but you can't use the phone either.
    
38. If you delete an application from iTunes, and then choose it again from iTunes, it looks like you have to pay for it again. You won't really be charged as long as you're logging in with the account that purchased the app.
    
39. Applications can be synched to up to five iTouch/iPhones from a single account. This is not at all obvious, the process for doing this needs improvement.
40. The silver on/off button has context dependent behavior. In standard mode it locks the phone and turns off the display. When a call comes in one push silences the ring, two sends it directly to voice mail.
41. When you search for a business on the Map and select a pin, you get a pop-up with an arrow. Touch the arrow to see the contact. What's not obvious at that point is that if you scroll down, you can add this to your address book (you cannot, however, specify to which group). I do this all the time. The form of contact that's created is very complete, including a map link.
42. The iPhone truncates the display of Calendar notes at 1,500 characters. To see the entire note you need to navigate a tiny edit window.
43. The touch screen responds to a finger, not to a stylus. A bigger problem is that it does very poorly with dry fingers. Since most iPhone uses are youthful, this is not widely noticed. If you're a geezer like me though, you'll have trouble with unrecognized touches. There's an obvious solution, but I think my salivary amylase is dissolving my screen (good reason not to touch the iPhone of a geezer). Maybe someone will sell an iPhone case with an integrated saline pad to moisten fingertips.
    

iPhone 2.1 - wait until September?

I'd gotten the distinct impression that the iPhone 2.0 launch was a bridge too far.

Reminescent of 10.5, which was supposed to ship in 2006 and became shipworthy in a month or so ago.

So I find this very plausible:

iPhone 2.0: The glory wore off in wash - (37signals)

...A couple of weeks before the iPhone 2.0 release, my friends at Apple were telling me that it wasn’t ready. Apparently they were right. They also said that the next iPhone OS release, scheduled for September, would be a vast improvement...

September is not all that far away, so people who aren't in a great rush may be wise to wait for 2.1. I generally get bit by every possible bug, so my experience ought to be a good guide. That should be out in a week or so.

AT&T iPhone availability: 1-2 days

I pre-ordered a white iPhone 16GB from my local AT&T store on 7/22, it arrived at store on 7/24 (fedex overnight).

So the availability crunch may be over.

Check the above link for some key tips on the process. The promised email notifications never got to me. I only found out the phone was in because I was checking the status page, and because I'd figured out that I needed to enter the store's zip code, not mine.

As usual the AT&T staff have done well. For an evil company AT&T has quite good front-line staff -- at least some of the vast amount of money I send AT&T must be going to the employees.