AIM on iPhone: push notification – and a big bug (bonus Gmail bug too)

AIM, AOL’s iPhone instant messaging client now now has Push notification services. So I bought a copy to play with it ($3).

I logged in with my old AIM username – it still worked. Then in Google Gmail Chat I liked my Gmail chat to the AIM account. That’s supposed to link chat buddies and the like.

I sent a few IMs back and forth from Gmail chat to my iPhone. That worked. I updated the status message on AIM/iPhone – that didn’t seem to propagate to the status message in Gmail Chat.

Then I clicked on the “Contacts” icon within AIM/iPhone and ….

It blew up.

Ok, so it just crashed. One time it actually launched GV Mobile, my iPhone Google Voice client, and it tried to open GV Mobile contacts. Mostly it just exited.

So that’s interesting.

Of course, being me, there are several kinds of bugs that could be in play

• GV Mobile and AIM could be truly interacting. I didn’t think that was possible on an iPhone!
• AIM/iPhone could be retching on the combination of linking my Gmail account to AIM and my synchronizing my iPhone with both Address Book and Gmail Contacts via Gmail ActiveSync Exchange services. The one time GV Mobile launch was an accident of an errant pointer.

I’m not a Gerserker on the desktop any more, but I guess on my iPhone I’m still on the edge.

I reported the bug via the iPhone App Store client ‘bug report’ button.

Update: There's a special bonus Gmail bug as well! You can sign into AIM from your chat settings, but you can't sign out from there. You have to find the sign out button hidden in your Chat drop down. I tried signing out of AIM on Gmail but that didn't fix the 'crash on touch' bug with AIM Contacts.

Update 2: Beejive 3.0 with push is now available. WTH, I spent $10 on that. I don't want to use my AIM credentials anyway; Beejive works with GoogleTalk credentials. I should have tried the ad-supported version of AIM first though! I'll give AIM a few days to fix things then I'll try requesting a refund through iTunes support.

OS X parental controls still broken in 10.5.7

I checked after the 10.5.7 update. The Parental Controls log is still broken,

if you set the range to anything more than 1 month you get no results:

Alas, it doesn't end there.

In theory you can use parental controls to configure managed accounts so that a managed user can change their password.

In practice, when I do that, the managed user cannot click on the Accounts PreferencePane (it's grayed out). So the setting to enable password change does nothing.

Lastly, if you switch a user from managed to standard so you can change their login password and keychain password together, OS X loses all the allowed and disallowed websites configured in Parental Controls. If you switch back to Managed User you start over.

Apple's Parental Controls have been broken in every version of OS X I've used. I think they last worked in Mac Classic version 8 or so.

Why, oh why, can't we customers be more demanding?

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.