i want my sync services
July 4th, 2007 by Dylan
Because of the iPhone’s amazingly convenient mechanism for syncing with OS X’s Sync Services, I’m impatiently waiting for the non-Apple apps that I use to adopt sync services. For example, Daylite currently offers sync with the address book service, and the iPhone makes it surprisingly not painful to manage hundreds of contacts. The Verizon UI on my old LG phone, by contrast, was painful for managing just 20 contacts. Daylite is still working on calendar syncing which is going to be hugely useful for us.
On the email side of things, I use Thunderbird because I prefer the way Enigmail handles GPG over the extension for Mail.app, so email sync between the desktop and iPhone is currently a no-op, though IMAP is still an option (and probably a better one except perhaps for speed over a mobile network). On the browser side of things, getting Firefox’s bookmarks synced with Safari’s bookmarks collection would be highly useful because typing in urls on the iPhone is a lot more painful than using a traditional keyboard… though still less painful than with a normal cell phone or smart phone!
IMAP works great, except for the occasionally encrypted GPG messages. I’m not sure either why I was originally thinking that there would even be a way to sync email locally rather than through a mail server.
I use Daylite now at my office with a Treo and my wife just got me an 8 MB iPhone. Not clear from the post above–does Daylite indeed work well with the iPhone for contacts and calendar?
Contacts works great, but requires a local sync with address book. From what I have read, they are currently testing the calendar… currently you have to re-export to iCal, import that into an iCal calendar, and then sync that.
Thanks Dylan. I believe am the only known human in full possession of an iPhone who has resisted taking it out of its box.
I hope someone is notifying the Vatican, and I hope “St. Nimrod” is not yet spoken for.