Consolidating Contacts: From Outlook to Address Book via MobileMe and the 5th Circle

This option is, for now, only open to the few people who have MobileMe accounts. Maybe iCloud will add something like this. I'll pass it on for the record.

The time had come to consolidate my work and personal contacts. No, I'm not changing jobs. A change in work policy meant I could no longer sync my iPhone to Exchange. I need my work contacts on my iPhone to do my job, so I needed to consolidate.

This is what I did. I bit imperfect perhaps, but it was reasonably fast.

1. Using Outlook 2007 at work I copied all my Contacts to a PST file. That copy action makes Outlook resolve Exchange format email into standard email format. Took the PST home.
2. Use Address Book export to save an archive. Turned off MobileMe sync on all machines. Put iPhone into Airport mode.
3. Started up my VMWare Fusion XP with Outlook 2007 standalone. Using MobileMe on XP I did a sync to MobileMe.
4. In Outlook 2007 standalone I imported the PST file Contacts (1012 items) from the external PST file into a new subfolder of Contacts. I then did another sync to MobileMe.
5. Switched to OS X then turned MobileMe sync back on. It said there were 1007 (not 1012) items to install. When it was done, there 1002 "cards" in a new "Group"

Note that, at face value, I lost 10 contacts during the import process. However, Outlook still showed 1012 even after I repeated a sync there. It's mostly likely 10 contacts won't sync, but it's also possible Address Book does some kind of duplicate merging on import -- but doesn't add the correct recreate Group-Name relationship.

I then ran Contacts Cleaner from Spanning Tools (App Store, cheap). It found 635 "conflicts" (issues, really), of which a surprisingly small number were duplicates. I set to work cleaning that up (Contacts Cleaner has an annoying habit of flagging academic suffixes as "bad".

After an initial cleanup I went back and forth between OS X and XP/VM, each time repeating a sync then running Contacts Cleaner. It only took a few minutes to find problems and settle things down.

Some data is lost of course. Sync must have its price. I made liberal use of 'Categories' (now we'd call these 'tags') to slice and dice my Outlook Contacts. They are all gone now. That is sad.

On the other hand, OS X allows a Contact to be associated with more than one Group. I can make use of that. It's too bad MobileMe Sync didn't try to turn Categories/tags into Groups. (And too bad you can't edit group assignments on an iOS device!)

There was only one funny thing. I've seen this once before. I created a Smart Group for all Cards that had no Group assignment. Over 1,000 showed up unexpectedly. I quit and restarted and all was well. It's a good idea to quit and restart Address Book after a large update.

Once I had things sorted out between my XP and OS X sources I turned on my iPhone and let it reconcile to the new addresses. I found some oddities on searching while Spotlight sorted out the additions.

The iPhone sync added more duplicates! Yes, Synchronization is Hell. I'd almost be disappointed if it weren't.

Back to Contact Cleaner again and I returned to 1805 total contacts. Even so, I readily found a contact that wouldn't sync to my iPhone. I made another backup of my Address Book.

So I turned off MobileMe Contacts sync. That should have removed all Contacts from my phone, but quite a few remained. I had to remove my MobileMe accounts and add it back. Yes, even though we've yet to develop artificial sentience, we have developed artificial dementia.

All were back on my iphone, but we were back to 1043. Clearly, we had a problem. I removed more duplicates but ended up with only 1804. So I restored from backup.

I was in the 5th circle of sync hell, but I've been here before. Call me Dante. I used advanced MobileMe sync to forcibly replace everything on MobileMe with what I had on my home server. I confirmed MobileMe had 1805 contacts, then reenabled Contact sync on my iPhone. Then I forced sync from MobileMe to my other two Macs. At last all showed 1805 contacts [1].

For now. Synchronization is Hell. I don't think iCloud will be any better. In fact, I expect it to be worse.

[1] I'd written previously that Address Book for Lion didn't show a count of cards. It does; you have to scroll to the very bottom of the address (card) list to see it.

Google App upgrade heck: conflicting email accounts

Google continues to upgrade old Google Apps accounts. It's part of their mandate to unify identities. The new Google (G+) is ruthlessly focused on owning our identities. That's not all bad, because the alternative is probably Facebook.

Still, it's pretty bad.

This has unexpected consequences. I used to use a Google Apps email address as a backup for my personal gmail address. Different accounts mind you.

Now Google doesn't seem to allow that. They seem to be enforcing a 1:1 relationship between Google Account and email address....

Alternate email addresses can only be associated with one Google Account at a time. In some cases, a person who shares an item with your alternate email address will be able to see your primary email address

This seems borderline insane, so perhaps this is a conversion bug.

Or not ...

PS. To make things even more interesting, the Google Apps account was a Dreamhost managed (ISP) extension to their services, and it wasn't supposed to have any email (DH managed email). Yech.

Update: Even though there was no gmail service associated with my Google Apps email, it was newly associated with a Google account. So it had to be. I created a new email address through Dreamhost and made that a recovery account for my primary gmail account.

Lion points: easy connection to Enterprise WEP

I won't be upgrading my 10.6 machines to Lion (10.7) until sometime in the spring or summer of 2012 - at the earliest. When it comes to Apple's OS updates, I've never regretted joining the 3rd wave of adoption.

Still, Lion does some things well - like killing Intuit's Quicken and opening up the market for better alternatives. Mission Control  and Full Screen are a big part of why the MacBook Air 11" is the world's best personal computer. Some of the best features, though, don't get much publicity.

Take, for example, Enterprise WEP. I don't know the full details of how this works, but I think it's some kludge that runs a VPN like connection through insecure WEP authentication. It's a bear to configure with XP, and I'm not sure Windows 7 is much better.

I didn't think my MacBook would connect to it. Sure enough, my manual configuration efforts all failed. Then, as a lark, I tried the "automatic configuration".

Poof. It connected. Works great.

You're not all bad Lion, even if you are a memory hog.

Tables for Blogger: newly buggy Google Spreadsheet embedding

One of my frustrations with MarsEdit is the lack of table support. (Another is the weak management of images. Windows Live Writer has the reference design for both.)

Blogger's newish editor is no better. No table support. Tables are a bit of a lost art [2]; recently I had to summon the ghost of Netscape Composer (SeaMonkey) to add tables to a blogger post. [Update: I think AppleWorks used to 'save as HTML'. Pages doesn't. However, I discovered, Apple's bundled TextEdit.app for does tables (fixed widths only, 10.6 and 10.7) and exports as pretty clean HTML.]

This morning, apropos of nothing, it occurred to me there might be an alternative. Google Spreadsheet does tables (including, now, both vertical and horizontal cell merge) ... I found a reference (warning - the reference is obsolete)

Publishing Google Spreadsheet to Blogger - Google Docs Help

Go to the top of right of the spreadsheet view. Press the 'Share' button. Then, click "publish as a webpage". Then, click "publish this document". At this point, it is published. If you want to embed it, click "more publishing options at the top of the mock pop-up. Then, choose 'html for embedding'. Finally, generate the embedding code."

The reference, of course, is obsolete and so is Google's online documentation. I call this the Facebooking of tech -- there is no more documentation.

Here is how it works with the new editor.

1. Click on the Google Spreadsheet "Collaborate" menu item.
2. Choose "Publish as web page"
3. Click "automatically republish" and enable publishing (top half of dialog as of today).
4. Then, from bottom half of same dialog, where it says "get a link" click on the "web page" drop down and choose "HTML to embed in a page" from the intriguing list of options [4]

It publishes as an iFrame [3]. It's only partly implemented -- the obvious Named Range drop down was empty even though I created a Named Range. I tried the undocumented range specification as below ...

But although that worked when I viewed the shared web page I still got the entire spreadsheet when I tried their generated embed code. So there's a bug in there somewhere.

------

Yech. Since this functionality is clearly not finished in the new editor, I hope they'll get this one together sometime soon. I suspect it worked better in the old spreadsheet editor.

BTW, this is what the generated HTML sort of renders as. The markup is CSS infested and hence unreadable. In the old days FrontPage would have generated easy to follow table markup.

.	cell A1	B1 + C1

.	cell A2 and A3	B2	C2
.			B3	C3
.	A4

 

 

-----

[1] It sucks that they use div tags instead of p tags to mark paragraphs.
[2] The web made a bad decision when we started using CSS rather than table embedding for dynamic layout.
[3] Incidentally, how I embed iframes for Google feed lists into an old web page.
[4] Interesting list of web publishing options!

 

My G+ Profile - open to connect

My blogs are pseudonymous, but it's not hard to find my true name if you click around a bit. I just prefer that my corporate colleagues and customers don't suffer the full range of my opinions and speculations.

Which means, since G+ is open, I'm good with sharing and corresponding there. I typically share with my "extended circle" (circles and one removed) -- just a bit short of public. I use LinkedIn for purely corporate and teaching connections, Facebook is where I tell kid stories, so G+ is the intellectual slot. It's a good match to the blogs.

If you're interested, here's my profile [1] and my "John Gordon" circle.

[1] Note the URL has the number of this beast: 113810027503326386174. Just call me 113.

(cross posted to notes and tech.)

Google Reader may yet live: signs of buzz/G+ integration

Today Google added G+ search to their newly opened Google Plus services.

First thing I did was search on "Google Reader" for signs of life in one of my favorite Google products. I'd recently put it on my death list due to long dangling half-finished work that encrusts Reader.

I found several optimistic signs, including this post:  Tracy L. Crawford - Google+ - Google Reader Shares have a G+ link!.

In my case it's that the "options" drop down in posts shared by people I follow says "View this shared item in Google Buzz". If I try that it actually shows in G+.

Seems like some Buzz/Reader integration is underway. What you see may depend on whether you have Buzz enabled or not.

Keynote.app for OS X (iWork)

I've made a stepwise transition to Apple's iWork suite for OS X. Apple's App Store made it easy; module prices are low and I could evaluate each iWork app separately. The license allows me to install on any number of 10.6+ machines on my account. Keynote.app, for example, cost $6/machine.

I started with Numbers.app nine months ago. My needs are not great, but so far I've been pleased. Of all the apps it comes closes to its Office counterpart. Since Excel has always been Microsoft's great software achievement this is strong praise. The main competitor to Numbers.app, however, is not Microsoft. It's Google's Spreadsheet. With offline support for Google Spreadsheet Mac users have two good alternatives to Office. I'm not sure which I'll go with.

This week I switched from Nisus Writer Pro to Pages. That's a surprisingly big jump. I'd forgotten that Pages is more of an desktop publishing app than a word processor. I'm not sure how well it will work for the family. I'll post more on Pages over time.

This post though, is about Keynote.app. I'll update it in bullet form as I use it to present a lecture this week. Below are my initial impressions.

• There's a lot of UI continuity and functional continuity with PowerPoint. My initial impression is that the base functionality is a simplified subset of PowerPoint.
• On my machines performance is much better than Office 2008 PPT (the latter was unusable). I suspect PPT's code base is a mess on any platform.
• Importing a relatively simple PPT took a fair bit of cleanup. Slide component alignment varied. Diagram overlays scattered.
• Exporting to PPT worked much better than import (mercifully).
• Applying themes to single slides or presentations is much better than PPT (big plus).
• Bug: I was unable to italicize text on an imported PPT. Seems Keynote assigned the text an exotic font that lacked italics or bold. It's a bug because the UI implied I could italicize, there's no error when you try, and the substitution is odd. The fix was to 'View Masters', consolidate masters, and change the Master Slide font.
• Themes made a mess of an imported PPT. I'm disappointed in the Themes -- they're often tacky. Almost Microsoft tacky.
• Consolidating Master is well done. View Masters, if you delete one you're asked to choose another to apply. Really helped clean up an ugly PPT file.
• The default fonts in text boxes for my imported PPT had an odd font. I had to use the Format>Advanced>Define Text for All Masters to fix it.
• Bug: Unpredictably, when creating a new row, I get a very odd bullet point. It looks like a Satanic glyph.
• Bug: Keynote/Lion can run into issues with window positioning and external displays. There are also weird behaviors with save/versioning. These look like a mixture of Lion and Keynote bugs.
• The default font for presenter notes is ridiculously small. There's no UI way to change it but you can hack the theme. If you make the font large, however, you can't read it in the fixed and narrow speakers notes display -- and long notes are mess when printing handouts. I hope this is fixed in the next release; it needs real work.

Update 10/20: Exporting as PPT -> "An unknown error occurred". Right. Not the only keynote bug, but certainly a bad one. Apple doesn't do very many industrial quality apps, and this isn't one of them (yet).