Mobiles and macs

[Chris Devers]

On Thu, 11 Sep 2008, David Cantrell wrote:

> On Thu, Sep 11, 2008 at 11:53:03AM +0100, Nigel Metheringham wrote:
> > On 11 Sep 2008, at 11:45, David Cantrell wrote:
> > >Completely unnecessary for PalmOS, which comes with a Mac desktop
> > >thingy.
> >
> > Well it would be unnecessary if the PalmOS offering worked right. 
> > When I was using a Treo I ended up forking out for the MarkSpace 
> > sync tools which, once set up, didn't randomly duplicate, delete and 
> > change entries quite so frequently.
> 
> I wonder what you were doing wrong.

It can be a royal pain in the butt to set up right if you've never done 
it before, or can't ferret out the procedure on Apple's support site. 

And even if you do get it working, it's surprisingly brittle. 

(I've had to help a lot of people get it working, or get it working 
again after it blew up for who knows what reason.)

It's a pain that you need pay for a copy of Markspace's Missing Sync 
when in principle you can get it to work for free, but in practice, if 
you time has value to you, it can be worth it. 


That is, of course, if you're stuck in 2003 and still prefer a Palm. 


If you join the iPhone horde, things tend to Just Work. (Aside from the 
small mountain of infuriating bugs & unimplemented capabilities, but 
nevermind that, drink your kool-aid, there you go.)

For Blackberry phones, PocketMac is dead simple to set up, and free. It 
wasn't written by RIM, but apparently works better than anything they 
were able to come up with on their own, because they allow you to 
download it from their web site. 

For a huge number of other phones with Bluetooth support, iSync can 
often Just Work, no problem. My mom had a bottom-end freebie Nokia phone 
that took all of 45 seconds to get syncing with iSync, and most of the 
other ones are about that easy. Apple has a list of supported phones on 
their site, but for a lot of others it's a matter of tweaking a .plist 
file to get it to work as well as the officially supported ones. 

  http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/isync/



-- 
Chris Devers
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL