iPhone sync to Google contacts - 3 methods and work/home implications

[Before you do this, ready my update!]

Why, among all the OS X blogs I read, have I not come across much discussion of this July 2008 iTunes 7.7 Apple knowledge base article: iTunes: Syncing address book contacts with your Google contacts?

For that matter, why does iTunes OS X have no relevant Help articles on the topic?

Maybe it's because synchronization in OS X/XP/Address Book/Outlook/iTunes/iPhone/MobileMe/Exchange/Google Apps/Yahoo! is just ... you know ... a wee bit complex? Maybe I'm not the only one lost in the mine field?

Well, it's time to explore this particular quadrant. I hope to update this post over the next few days, but here's the first draft.

I have made progress lately with Work/Home integration. I use Google Sync to one way sync work calendar information to a secure calendar outside my family domain. I found traditional "subscription" (.ics) to this calendar failed due to Google Calendar problems, but that I could acquire the data via either iCal CalDAV support or Spanning Sync. The latter seems faster and more reliable and I'm using that.

So what about Gmail contacts?

There are several options:

1. gContacts for iPhone - pulled from the App store but supposedly to relaunch without trademark issues. I have this, I use it for read-only access to my Google Contacts. No search however.
2. Spanning Sync for OS X: This will pull Google Contacts into the OS X Address Book. The problem here is duplicate resolution -- I don't know how it works. Note that OS X Address book has a Merge facility I've never tested.
3. iTunes 7.7+ will supposedly sync Google Calendar contacts to the iPhone directly (not via the Address Book). On XP this will replace your iPhone Address Book, but on OS X it apparently creates a separate "account" so you can sync the iPhone via iTunes and the USB cable to both the OS X Address Book and Google Calendar. Note the iPhone Contacts has a limited search capability.
   

I'm going to try #3 after I back up my OS X Address Book and my Google Contacts. Be warned, however, that the Google Contacts backup is CSV based and does not include relationships to mailing lists. It is impossible, given the format, to completely restore the data should anything go wrong. At best you will restore an approximation to your original Google Contacts.

The interesting possibility is that one could synchronize Outlook work contacts with Google, then sync that to the iPhone via iTunes, and, on OS X iPhones only, have some integration of work and personal Address Books/Contacts.

Did I mention than Synchronization is Hell?

PS. Despite the lack of documentation, the very existence of this option, and it's implementation as a separate 'account', is encouraging. It suggests Apple may eventually support Google Apps synchronization as a (far better) alternative to MobileMe. Maybe.

Update 11/2/08: Ok, didn't work. I've restored my OS X Address Book from backup.
If you active iTunes sync with multiple sources, it combines them ALL into a SINGLE source, which it then broadcasts back to all sources. So my OS X Address Book, iPhone and Google Contacts all had the sum of all addresses -- without much attempt at reconciliation (though OS X Address has an interesting "detect duplicates" function). I left my Gmail contacts as the sum of all sources, it's never been a very controlled data set so this probably won't cause too much harm. I turned of Gmail synchronization. Someday I'll fix things up, but for today the project is on hold.

Update 12/1/08: See the comments for a bad outcome from one experiment. Synchronization is Hell.

Google calendar iCal share fails - CalDAV or Spanning Sync instead

Google recently announced a quality of service guarantee for their apps:

The official update feed from the Google Apps team: SLAs available for Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites and Google Talk:

... Google Apps Premier Edition now includes a 99.9% uptime guarantee for Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites and Google Talk....

Google has been comparing their App up time to traditional services, and boasting how much better they are.

My experience is different.

For example, today sharing stopped working from one my Google Calendars. Very annoying.

I run into a variation of this sort of failure every few weeks. Of course my XP work environment is also unreliable, but I ask more of it.

Personally, I'd give Google a "B" grade for reliability. Not B+, but not B-. Just B.

Update 11/2/08: The iCal calendar continued to show an update error icon, and I couldn't connect to the gCal share with a browser. I recalled that Google Calendar has CalDAV support and so does iCal, so I followed the subscription directions.

That worked.

Around that time it finally occurred to me that I own Spanning Sync. Now Spanning Sync only syncs with one Google account (our family domain), and that's not the account that has my work calendar, but that's no problem. My family domain account has read/write privileges with my personal gmail account calendar, so I could reach it through this indirect route.

It seems to work fine. Spanning Sync support means I could theoretically update the work calendar from iCal or even my iPhone, but I don't plan to try that -- ever. The arrangement is too rickety to support true synchronization. Publication is fine.

I have given up on .ics subscription.

PS. I like the way the CalDAV accounts work in iCal Leopard. It's a positive sign in several ways ...

Create your own Quartz filter to reduce OS X PDF size

If you scan a B&W text page at 600 dpi into Adobe Acrobat, and apply fax-style run length compression you'll get a file of about 60K.

Use OS X to create the PDF and the size will be 2MB.

The difference is compression choice. Lossless run-length compression works very well for B&W, OS X is probably using JPEG or TIFF.

What you want are better ways to control PDF size in OS X. The default "Reduce Filesize" quartz filter is lousy, but this page tells you how to create your own filters: Shrinking and Compressing PDF's - Yeraze's Domain.

The trick is to use the ColorSync utility.

I'll have to see if I can create a good one for B&W text ...

iPhone consumer polling app - interesting

Vote for your preferred iPhone fix: Most wanted ever | Please fix the iPhone.

Don't forget:

1. Cut, copy, paste.
2. Search.
3. Sync with Google Calendar and Contacts.
4. External keyboard.

However, do note that many of top requests are silly. (In that they require new technology or address things that the App Store could provide if we had push notification.)

Safari - still a 2nd class client in Google land

Firefox 3 isn't bad on my MacBook, but it still pegs the CPU on my G5 iMac (PPC). The Mozilla team broke PPC support with FF 3, and I guess they're not going to fix it.

So I'd like to make more use of Safari. Problem is, Safari is still a 2nd class client in Google-Land.

Today I tried using Safari with Blogger in Draft. The results looked ok and first, but on review line feeds are missing. An old problem, still there.

Google has a lot of work to do before Safari is a good alternative to FF. Of course even their own Chrome browser failed when I tried it with Google Docs and Spreadsheets, so Safari's not entirely alone.

Google Lab for Google Apps and the Google Solutions Marketplace

Rumor of a "TinyURL like" service for Google Apps gradually led me to the "Google Labs" zone in the Google Solutions Marketplace:

Google Solutions Marketplace - Vendor Profile: Google Labs:

... Google is making it easier for business customers and schools using Google Apps to also take advantage of our innovations and ideas that aren't quite ready for prime time. We encourage your organization to experiment with the Google Labs features listed below to improve how you communicate and collaborate.

These features all are built by Googlers, hosted on Google App Engine, and domain administrators can install them into their Google Apps account by clicking 'Add it now'...

I tried out the "Short Links" Lab service on our family Google Apps domain.

You begin by defining a subdomain, like "sl" as in "sl.mycustomdomain.com". I clicked "activate" and waited ... and waited ...

Just as I was about to give up the Short Links service appeared on my service setting list.

It's not a TinyURL like service at all! It just lets you create redirects. So, for kateva.org for example, I could redirect "sl.kateva.org/news" to www.faughnan.com/news.html.

Well, that's nice, but not a terribly big deal if you own a domain.

So what else is in the Google Solutions marketplace? Mostly consulting services, but the list of migration and sync solutions is interesting. It includes Spanning Sync, which I use (five star rating there, it really is pretty good).

As of today there are 16 Solution Marketplace entries that reference the iPhone, though most of them have little to do with the iPhone. Not so interesting there ...

The curious story of AAC support - why not?

My SONY car stereo plays non-DRMd AAC tunes, as does my wife's BlackBerry and, I think, my old Nokia.

Why not? AAC is a non-Apple music format, as "standard" as MP3.

So here's the mystery. Why don't the iPod's competitors (not least the Zune) support AAC? I don't think it's that costly to license.

At the Target store, for example, I found a Creative Zen player with AAC support. On their web site however there new "ZEN Mosaic" lacks AAC support. You have to dig down to learn that the ZEN X-Fi and ZEM do have AAC support.

Sandisk has no AAC support in any model.

We have very little DRMd music, but a lot of AAC encoded media. I'd consider a ZEN player for my daughter if it were half the cost of a Nano.

So why so little AAC?