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Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Mouse funky? Try washing the mouse pads
My Google Reader Shared items (feed)
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Import Calendar data into Google Calendar via CSV files
About CSV files - Google Calendar Help
Subject,Start Date,Start Time,End Date,End Time,All Day Event,Description,Location,Private
Final Exam,05/12/08,07:10:00 PM,05/12/08,10:00:00 PM,False,Two essay questions that will cover topics covered throughout the semester,"Columbia, Schermerhorn 614",True
Subject,Start Date,Start Time,End Date,End Time,All Day Event,Description,Location,PrivateEdgumbe Peewee Hockey,10/24/09,2:10:00 PM,10/24/09,3:10:00 PM,FALSE,Practice, Highland North,FALSE
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Friday, October 23, 2009
MobileMe: Integrating Work and Personal Contacts
It can be exceedingly difficult to get corporate Exchange Server contacts to an iPhone if you don’t have ActiveSync access to the Exchange Server.
In this setting you can’t sync work Contacts with MobileMe (you used to be able to, but no longer. I’ve never heard an explanation of why Apple pulled this capability). I don’t think you can use iTunes sync either, though I don’t want to sync my iPhone at work anyway.
There are several software solutions that claim to be able to extract these Contacts. I’ve tried most of them – they were either buggy or they couldn’t resolve EX style corporate email references. In Outlook 2003 you could fairly readily export Contacts as vCards, but when I do that with Outlook 2007 I get weird formatting problems. (Of course this is export, not sync, but we can’t be picky here).
The only solution I’ve gotten to work thus far is to put my corporate contacts into a PST file, take them home, put them in non-Exchange Outlook at home, and sync to MobileMe. [1]
I sync my OS X Address Book to MobileMe as well, then sync my iPhone to OS X Address Book. That gives me work and home addresses both on my iPhone, on my desktop machines, and on my laptop. [2]
Here are the details of the initial setup. Once you’re done with that maintenance isn’t too bad.
Notes
- The “source of truth” for the work contacts is corporate Outlook, the “source of truth” for my home contacts is OS X Address Book.
- This is not synchronization. It is publishing one way. Updates after initial sync are discussed below.
There are two sources of data that will sync to MobileMe.
- Outlook 2003 home: Starts with an empty Contacts Folder. An external data folder (PST) holds material copied from work including all Contacts.
- OS X 10.5 Address Book: Has several Groups, but one Group has no members. It is is called Contacts_Work. (Warning: If you’re cleaning out a Group in Address Book it’s easy to “remove from group” when you want to delete.)
Step one: Sync OS X Address Book to MobileMe
- Sync OS X Address Book to MobileMe.
- Sync iPhone to OS X Address Book through iTunes.
Step Two: Sync Outlook to MobileMe
- Open MobileMe Control Panel.
- Set to Sync with Outlook.
- Click Sync now. On a first sync you will be asked if you want to overwrite the computer or MobileMe. Choose to overwrite the computer.
- When you are done you will see an Outlook “folder” for each "OS X Group” beneath the original (empty) Outlook Contacts folder. [3] The one called Contacts_Work will be empty.
Step Three: Copy work Contacts into empty Contacts_work
- Move (or copy) Contacts from the work PST file to Contacts_Work. I select all, then right click and drag.
- Clean up the Contacts_Work folder. Remove lists, etc.
- Sync to MobileMe. Now Outlook and MobileMe are done.
Step Four: Finish Syncs
- Sync OS X Address Book to MobileMe
- Sync iPhone to OS X Address Book [4] via iTunes.
- Sync to additional OS X machines as desired.
Addendum - Updates
This is all 1 way, so there’s no sync back to the office. This works fairly well for me however. My corporate contacts don’t change that much, but each time I do an update like this I record the date. Then contacts added or modified after that date are periodically carried home, used to update Outlook, and then I sync as above.
Problems to expect
Synchronization is Hell, but even messaging across databases is Heck. There are attributes and properties in Outlook that Address Book can’t support. There’s location information in Address Book Outlook can’t support. An Address Book contact can belong to many groups, an Outlook contact can belong to only one folder. I try to edit the Work Contacts only in Outlook, everything else only in Address Book.
See also
- The MobileMe Massacre begins
- Work home contact integration- Outlook to Google to OS X Address Book (EX problem)
- Project Contacts- Now mixing Outlook-Exchange, PST file, Outlook-Home, MobileMe Sync … – an earlier version of this post.
- Project Contacts: Integration across iPhone, Google and whatever
- Google saves my iPhone
- gSyncit for Outlook 2007 to Google Calendar and Contacts Sync
- MobileMe, Microsoft Outlook, Exchange, iTunes and yes, sync Hell
- MobileMe syncs with Outlook (yes, once it did. Apple disabled this Exchange sync.)
-- Footnotes --
[1] I’ve not tried synching my iPhone via iTunes to two machines at home – XP/Outlook and OS X/Address Book. I just didn’t think of that one until I wrote this post! I know there’s some multi-machine sync capability with the iPhone.
[2] I also sync my iPhone to Google by ActiveSync (Exchange server) protocol. So I have my Google contacts on the iPhone too. There’s a ton of duplication on the phone between the OS X source and the Google source. Resolving that is a future task.
[3] The symmetry is misleading. A single Address Book entry can belong to multiple Address Book groups, but an Outlook Contact can only belong to one folder. (Acyclic Graph vs. Tree)
[4] This is what I currently do. I may try just synching wirelessly to MobileMe.
[5] I assume Contacts that belong to several OS X Groups are duplicated when they go to Outlook. I wonder why they don’t proliferate, breeding with each sync.
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Microsoft Access 2007 - it's still lousy
In the interim I've been using Access 2003 again.
There are some good things about 2003 (ok, just Sharepoint support), but, by and large, it's busted. It's broken in deep and inexplicable ways. Heaven be your friend if you should change a column name -- you may get weird and persistent side-effects.
--
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Wednesday, October 21, 2009
MobileMe - Sharing Contacts and Calendars in a Family account
You can't.
Use Google Apps.
See: The MobileMe Massacre begins
Mobile Me back to my Mac for remote maintenance – a complete fail
I’ve had some luck so far with MobileMe, but this time I ran into a complete fail. It wasn’t completely unexpected.
I’ve been using LogMeIn to do remote maintenance of my mother’s Mac Mini, often using my old XP machine. It connects at the machine level; I can log out of her account and connect to the admin account in one session. Today performance using the Firefox plugin was excellent.
MobileMe’s Back to My Mac works very differently. It connects at the account level, and it’s designed as it’s named – to connect between two OS X machine-user-accounts that share the same MobileMe name. In other words, to connect to one’s own account – at the machine level, not the account level.
I had to setup an account on one of my machines with the same MobileMe user name as my mother. Then I could try the connection. As promised it did show her machine in my Shared device Finder display, but when I tried to connect I got a “connection failed” message. I assume my mother’s cable modem/router configuration is not supported.
Even if it had worked though I wouldn’t have been able to switch to her Administrator account, B2MM is an account level connection only.
OS X remote maintenance is certainly unimpressive. I’m even more impressed now with LogMeIn. This MobileMe feature failed.
MobileMe – The iPhone iDisk.app
With MobileMe and the free iPhone iDisk.app files copied to an OS X or XP mounted iDisk (WebDav) share can also be viewed on your iPhone. I know there are other apps that do something similar, such as Air Sharing, but I think this will work for me.
Note that as the “Master” of my family MobileMe account I have 20GB of iDisk storage.
Here’s an illustrative example
- Work around XP SP2 bugs so you can mount an iDisk as a Windows (WebDav) file share.
- Drop a PDF into the share. It’s now accessible through all iDisk clients, including my server synchronized iDisk folder.
- Open iPhone iDisk.app and view PDF. The iPhone PDF viewer is quite impressive.
- From iPhone PDF viewer you can send an email. The email will contain a link that points to the shared file (doesn’t actually contain the file).
Slick. I assume the iDisk viewable file types are the same as those viewable as email attachments:
Viewable document types: .jpg, .tiff, .gif (images); .doc and .docx (Microsoft Word); .htm and .html (web pages); .key (Keynote); .numbers (Numbers); .pages (Pages); .pdf (Preview and Adobe Acrobat); .ppt and .pptx (Microsoft PowerPoint); .txt (text); .rtf (rich text format); .vcf (contact information); .xls and .xlsx (Microsoft Excel)
See also: Gordon's Tech- The MobileMe Massacre begins.