iPhone displays only 1500 characters from a calendar note

I get off my plane, confidently open my iPhone Calendar to check where I'm staying and ... the note is truncated!

WTF?!

I retrieved the data from my Gmail calendar (no truncation there!). So what's the deal?

It was surprisingly hard to find out about this iPhone Calendar.app limitation. An Apple discussion forum post by Everett Marshall was the only source I found:

Apple - Support - Discussions - Outlook calendar entries get truncated ...

... To address your specific issue (and I have the same frustration with travel itins being cutoff ...gggggrrrrrrrr!!!!!!!!!!) the ENTIRE note is actually on the phone. You just can't see it.

What you can do is select 'Edit' for the note in question. Then touch the Note to enter Edit mode. The entire note is there.

I guess someone at Apple has decided if 140 characters is good enough for Twitter, 1,500 characters is more than enough for an iPhone user's Note field.

Fix it Apple. This is basic stuff. Oh...And while you're at it why not make phone numbers clickable in the note field....

Sometimes Apple's decisions make me want to bonk my head on the wall. Palm did better than this 10 years ago!

I confirmed that if you try to edit the note text, you get a small window you can scroll through. I don't know what the field limitation really is; Outlook will go to 32,000 characters. I suspect the iPhone limit is less than that.

I suspect the limit applies to all Apple iPhone Notes but I can't confirm that.

I'll add this to my growing list of surprising things about the iPhone (along with more detail on the dry finger problem!).

Office Online: don't bother

I've experimented with Office Online's calendar sharing features:

Publish a calendar on Office Online - Outlook - Microsoft Office Online

... You can use the Microsoft Office Outlook Calendar Sharing Service to publish and share and calendars on Microsoft Office Online with other people. You have control over who can view the calendar and who can remove the calendar at any time....

Don't bother. They've messed up their security certs so badly Firefox and Safari/iPhone fight hard to stay away. It all smells abandoned; so much for Microsoft's Office in the Cloud strategy.

I think this initiative was overtaken by the Outlook Connector for Windows Live.

Update: Nope. Outlook Connector just displays Windows Live calendars in Outlook; they can then be edited in either environment. It doesn't get Outlook calendars to Windows Live.

Office 2007 Diagnostics includes memory and disk check tools

I was trying to decrypt my latest Microsoft Office 2007 XP puzzle – why Outlook was telling me …

"Either there is no default mail client or the current mail client cannot fulfill the message request. Please run Microsoft Office Outlook and set it as the default mail client."

The word on the street is that this is, you guessed it, a MAPI32.DLL version problem.

All together now, sag to your desk and cry out “OS X, Why hast though forsaken me?”

We wander lost in the desert of XP …

Anyway, a google hit mentioned a useful first attack is the new Microsoft Office 2007 diagnostics test:

Diagnose and repair crashing Office programs by using Office Diagnostics - Help and How-to - Microsoft Office Online

… Microsoft Office Diagnostics in the 2007 Microsoft Office system is a series of diagnostic tests that can help you discover why your computer is crashing (closing abnormally). The diagnostic tests can solve some problems directly and might identify ways that you can solve other problems…

Yeah, it’s in my Office install, along with the usual set of neglected goodies. It includes a memory tester and disk diagnostic, so it’s a handy tool for all kinds of problems.

The Setup Diagnostic packages can take a VERY long time to run.

Update: The Setup Diagnostics (formerly Office Repair) took one unspecified "corrective action". The problem is gone. I bet it fixed the MAPI32.DLL problem. It's not obvious how to get more information from the results.

SATA drive dock but no Google Checkout

Recommended by Daring Fireball readers: ThinkGeek :: External USB SATA Drive Dock.

Sold by ThinkGeek, which I'd forgotten about. It's nice to see they're still in business.

Unfortunately ThinkGeek does not use Google Checkout. Makes me wonder how geeky they really are.

I'm done with creating vendor specific accounts. If a vendor doesn't support Amazon or Google Checkout, or at least an OpenID authentication, forget 'em.

Which iPod was best?

I've bought six iPods. Four are still in use in our home, including my first - the third generation firewire sync iPod.

From left to right: 3G iPod, 5G iPod, 2G Nano, 3G iPhone.

Not shown are a 2nd generation shuffle that I was happy to lose to the washing machine, and the great 1st generation shuffle that my mother owns.

So which iPod was best? The answer depends on use of course, but it's not entirely obvious.

1. Absolute worst: The second generation shuffle and its proprietary charging and sync connector. Yech.
2. Best music player: A close race between the 5G iPod (#2) and the Nano. They're both great music players; the scroll wheel and interface features make them much better than the iPhone for listening to podcasts. If I had to choose one I'd favor the 3G for its additional video features and greater capacity.
3. Most versatile charging and accessory compatibility: Nano and 5G iPod both charge with Firewire, USB and all auto accessories. Yech to my iPhone.
   
4. Most powerful device: Ok, the iPhone is good for something.
5. Fastest sync: I swear the Firewire 3G is 3 times faster at sync than anything else. I really miss Firewire.
6. Best accessory range: The old 3G iPhone had a special connector for adding on radio, recording, broadcast etc. It came with a small remote control cable.
7. Best suited to a person with visual and motor limitations: The first generation shuffle.
   

So certainly there's progress, but it's mixed.

Convert Bento Library to Filemaker Database

I came across this app while looking for alternatives to FileMaker's very limited Bento product: FmPro Migrator 4.36.

It will convert a SQLite Bento Library into a FileMaker database - versions 7-9.

Sounds quite interesting and worth remember ...

Not exactly what I want just yet -- I want to be able to access my OS X PIM data (address book, calendar, tasks) from FileMaker.

Still looking for that solution ...

Windows Search 4 broken by recent update causing MDAC corruption

My XP box index is complete, but Windows Search 4.0 returns nothing. The Event Viewer has no interesting Windows Search Service events; the indexer seems happy, but the search isn’t working. Rebooting didn’t help.

On any search I get "Nothing found in All Locations for query ...".

The only hints I could find wer ea recent post with a Vista problem: SearchIndexer.exe causing problems after Search 4.0 update on Vista Home Premium system. - MSDN Forums and Desktop Search help has no recent advice.

I’ll try doing a windows update, then if that doesn’t work a uninstall/reinstall cycle.

Windows Search was much happier when I was using Office 2003. It hasn’t been the same since I went to 2007.

Update 10/20/08: I miss Lookout for Outlook. Also, Spotlight and all of OS X. Anyway, the Windows Update and reinstall didn't work. This time I'll uninstall, track down my index and trash it, and try again. As before the index is built, everything looks fine, but searches return nothing.

Update 10/20/08: Still not working. I'm running out of ideas. Next step is to uninstall Windows Search 4 and install Google Desktop Search! Instant search works in Outlook, but desktop search doesn't work at all. From a post on MSDN that I wrote:

A few days ago Windows Search 4 stopped working in my corporate XP desktop (all updated). All deskbar searches return "Nothing found in All locations for query ..." regardless of the query. I can't indentify any precipitating event but this is a managed corporate desktop. Anything can happen to it.

Web searches work. Instant searches in Outlook 2007, which use the Windows Search engine, are also working.

The index is fine and it's being maintained correctly.

I've run Office 2007 Diagnostics. I've rebuilt the index. I've uninstalled Windows Search and reinstalled. I've reviewed the Applications event log. I've deleted the index and indexed only a small bit of Outlook 2007. I've relocated my index to a new directory.

Nothing makes any difference. Instant Search works, the indexer works, Windows Search 4 doesn't work.

My corporate desktop is encrypted (SafeBoot), but I've not run into any problems there.

I don't know what to try next. Actually, my next step is to uninstall Windows Search 4 and install Google Desktop Search. I need search to work and I can't go on a lot longer without it.

Later I also reinstalled Office Pro 2007 -- to no effect. I did try Google Desktop Search, but for me it was far too simplistic. It also crashed every day.

Update 10/25/08: The hardest problem I've solved in years. I finally found a 2006 post on an MSDN board about the same problem. Search worked in Outlook 2007, but not from the desktop. It turns out that desktop search uses Microsoft's data query infrastructure (MDAC), and that infrastructure can be broken.

Repair of a broken MDAC stack is occult. Fortunately Paul Nystrom had the answer in 2006

http://forums.microsoft.com/msdn/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=901078&SiteID=1

This generally occurs when you have a corruption in your MDAC stack. You can find instructions for repairing your MDAC stack here (note this solution is not officially supported by Microsoft):

http://www.pqsystems.com/kb/activekb/questions/165/

For some additional information:

MDAC stands for Microsoft data access components. These components allow WDS to query it's index for resutls. When MDAC gets corrupted WDS can not retrieve results from the index resulting in empty query results.

Paul Nystrom - MSFT

I followed the repair advice on the referenced page (I have XP SP 3 installed):

How to repair a copy of MDAC 2.8 SP1 on Windows XP with SP2 installed.
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Right-click on C:\Windows\Inf\mdac.inf and choose "Install".

. ..point to the i386 folder in one of these places:

1. C:\Windows\ServicepackFiles\i386 (it may not like this location, if not, go to the next one)

2. The \i386 folder on your XP installation CDROM.

This reinstalls and repairs MDAC 2.8.

I used the servicepack files folder first. When asked for a file that wasn't in there I used the \i386 folder our corporate IT had on my drive.

It worked. Thank you Paul.

Hardest fix in years. Without Windows Live Search and Google I wouldn't have had a chance.

So what happened? My guess is that there's a problem with the sequence I took, moving through Windows Search 4 on Office 2003, then XP SP 3, then Office 2007. Somewhere in that sequence I broke MDAC.

The Wikipedia article on MDAC is informative:

The current version is 2.8 service pack 1, but the product has had many different versions and many of its components have been deprecated and replaced by newer Microsoft technologies. MDAC is now known as Windows DAC in Windows Vista.

XP is starting to remind me of Windows 98.