All Articles Tagged sync

When Gizmodo honcho Brian Lam found out via Twitter that one of his readers was experiencing a brutal 8-hour iPhone sync, he did what any EiC worth his postings would do: secured time-lapse video! To put 8 painful hours fully into perspective:

That’s a full night of sleep. That’s a full day of high school. That’s longer than it takes to fly cross country, or drive from SF to Los Angeles. After seeing this video, I stopped complaining and tried to figure out what caused Brandon’s problem with him.

Heck, it’s a wait in an launch day Apple Store line! They tried syncing via a MacBook Air and an iMac, and even switched out cables, but the 74 App sync just wouldn’t — indeed couldn’t! — be tamed.

Atypical? For certain. Incredible? Pretty much. If it were us? We’d probably nuke the thing, bury it upside down, cover it in concrete, and salt the earth — then politely ask Steve Jobs to start over…

Luckily, my longest sync has probably never topped 5 minutes. What about you? What’s your longest sync been to date?

Mild Mannered Industries, which claims some experience with Sync Services, has an interesting and insightful blog post about how MobileMe syncing probably works, why syncing in general is so hard, and if we can ever look forward to a day where MobileMe actually, really, truly “just works”:

Is this really Apple’s fault? In the case of Mobile Me, and .Mac before it, all of the code is essentially Apple’s, but I think this just goes to show how hard it is to get a sync client and the core sync services code right. When you add in all of the third-party Sync client code, and mail synchronization, it just seems inevitable that many users will hit a problem at some point, and become very very unhappy.

Their glass-not-only-half-empty-but-broken-and-spilled-out-on-the-table outlook?

Personally, if it was me, I would have let .Mac die a quiet death. The problem set for ubiquitous syncing is just very very hard, and the consequences of failure, in terms of user dissatisfaction are too high. I suspect that, in time, MobileMe will go the same way as the Newton …

Our take? Pretty much the opposite. Not to get all Tennyson about it, but Apple is strong of will as they come, and striving, seeking, and finding the most reliable sync solution possible is only going to increase in importance when it comes to the mobile world they’re embracing with the iPhone and related technologies. Perhaps they won’t crack the nut, but they’ll mess it up something fierce in the attempt. And come on, would any of us really rather have no sync at all?

(via Daring Fireball)

Mac nerdery stalwart John Gruber over at DaringFireball has put together a very interesting essay about how iPhone Calendar syncing has evolved from firmware 1.x (1.0 - 1.4) to firmware 2.0, and how the current iTunes syncing differs in functionality from syncing via Apple’s MobileMe service.

From welcome improvements to frustrating choices, from new methods of use to evolving work-arounds, Gruber ultimately comes to the ultimate question:

Whither the “digital hub”?

While iTunes originally served as the one-stop location for all syncing and sync settings, MobileMe now works outside the iTunes universe, but does not offer the options (e.g. selecting individual rather than all calendars to sync) iTunes does, nor does the MobileMe pref pane.

Is there a way for Apple to cleanly present a unified place to manage all iPhone syncing, with a robust set of options?

My vote remains iTunes. When MobileMe is in use, keep the settings enabled, and pass the preferences along to the “cloud”. That keeps data, media, and commerce all in one place, with one interface, in a familiar context. Just “push” choices of calendars, contact groups, etc. back up to MobileMe.

Vindication! Well, kind of. Our MobileMe is still having problems but at least Apple admits that the transition from .Mac to MobileMe was “rocky” by sending an e-mail/apology letter to all MobileMe users. Billed as Exchange for the rest of us, MobileMe is still having problems with syncing, calendar, duplicate messages, etc. Not quite that Blackberry killer we envisioned.

Also, Apple will stop using the word push to describe MobileMe until syncing is “near-instant” on Mac and PCs like it is for the iPhone and Web Apps. Not that “15 minute” version of push it currently is. Either way, Apple is begging (read: bribing) for your forgiveness with a free 30 day extension to all current subscribers.

It’s good to see Apple admit mistake and take care of their customers, but I’m fairly certain most of us would have rather had a product that ‘just works’. Unreliability, problems, and false promises are for the folks over in Redmond, this is supposed to be Apple right?

Thanks for the tip Cherryhead25!

Read on for MobileMe’s full apology letter!

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Although Apple forces you to get your iPhone activated in-store before you walk out the door, that may not mean that people are going to have a trouble-free syncing experience today. To wit: the error message above is the best I can get when I plug my iPhone 3G into my Mac. Apparently iTunes wants to double-check that my iPhone really is what it’s supposed to be. With the presumably massive number of people getting iPhone 3Gs today, iTunes is not handling the load so well.

The store itself is up, but I find it aggravating in the extreme that I can’t sync over any of my apps or media without this initial call-in to the Apple mothership. Thank god Mobile Me is working for me, otherwise I wouldn’t even have contacts on my iPhone.

Update: Rene just called in to say that all of Rogers in Canada is basically down an unable to activate iPhones, so he’s just sitting pretty in the store until things clear up. Let us know — any delays at AT&T or Apple stores when trying to activate?

…Speaking of downtime: yeah, we know, TiPb is not performing up to spec lately. We’re upgrading servers over the weekend (we hope) to bring it back up to acceptable levels. Pardon our 503s.

During the 2008 WWDC Keynote today, Apple VP of Marketing, Phil Schiller, confirmed the rumors of a .Mac maga-revamp in the form of MobileMe.

Apple’s answer both to previous critiques of the admittedly out-dated .Mac service, and the expected cloud computing boom (see Android, Google), MobileMe features ActiveSync-like “push” email, calendar, and contacts syncing between your iPhone (or iPod Touch) and your Mac or PC, or via any web browser with some pretty spectacular looking Web 2.0/AJAX style online apps. It also adds photo syncing, clearly targeting consumers.

iDisk (the online storage service) gets a bump to 20GB, and goes fully online as well. Mac user? Still enjoy the Mac sync, iWeb, and Back-to-my-Mac that you know (and I) love.

Launching in July in time for the new iPhone 3G, and priced at the same $99 as .Mac, it still smacks the expensive, but if your don’t have Exchange, and value highly polished syncing and web-based solutions, this might just be the service for you.

Existing .Mac customers will be rolled into MobileMe — see Apple’s migration page for details — with a choice of maintaining their old @mac.com address, or the new @.me equivalent.

For more, go to me.com (which will redirect you to Apple.com/MobileMe), where a handy-dandy MobileMe guided tour awaits!

Ah, .Mac, the poor abandoned stepchild in Apple’s 360 degrees of spherical integration. It’s the online service Google, Yahoo, and even Microsoft Live kick sand at on the playground.

Sure, Back-to-my-Mac can rock, and syncing can be oh-so-sweet, but c’mon, what have you done for us lately?

Could be a lot, if rumors pan out. We’ve already brought you word on possible iPhone 2.0 .Mac “push” mail, and even reports of a total revamp. Now it seems the revamp may be more of a full on renovation, including a brand spanking new name!

[Dmitry Chestnykh, the CEO at Coding Robots] went through the iCal Localizable.strings file in the recently released 10.5.3 update and found a number of changes. In particular, he found a lot of evidence that the .Mac brand name is going to be replaced. Apple is apparently using a placeholder %@ which will be dynamically replaced by the new name, whatever that is, when it’s released.

If Apple wants to keep charging $100 a year, then changes, and big ones, are a very necessary way to justify it. Here’s for something game-changing in the online “cloud” services realm. What do you think?

Read

Updating yesterday’s story about .Mac getting the push-email treatment in iPhone 2.0, TUAW’s tipsters are back with this little gem:

According to our anonymous tipster, .Mac will undergo a complete revamp that will coincide with the iPhone 2.0 launch (which everyone expects to occur at WWDC 08).

Again with the asking and receiving, eh?

Rumored highlights for the updated .Mac include full wireless (cell + wifi?) calendar, contacts, and email (an Apple Exchange anyone?) and .Mac support for — you guessed it! — Windows.

First El Jobso gives PC users a cool glass of iTunes and iPhone, and now a possible consumer-centric push service.

Did I mention how June can’t come fast enough yet?

No sooner did our own Chad Garette lay out the case for .Mac syncing via the iPhone, then iPhone Alley, (via TUAW), brings word that El Jobso might be doing just that:

In the just released SDK beta 2, iPhone Alley found a string within a preference bundle that reads: “Syncing with this Dot Mac account will turn off syncing for other Dot Mac accounts and delete any existing synced data.” This suggests the possibility of wireless syncing for non-Exchange users.

This would be awesome additional functionality for both the iPhone and for .Mac. 2.0 really can’t come fast enough.

And note to Chad: How about an article on why the iPhone really needs immediate release in Canada? Please?

I spent a bunch of time getting Leopard installed and set up on my mac to find out what goodies it would bring to the iPhone. It looks like syncing notes from the iPhone to Mail might have been pulled just before it was ready, or that it’s going to come in a future iPhone update. When I tried to change the default font in an edited note from Marker Felt to anything else, I’m given this warning message:

“Convert this note to rich text format?
Changing the style or formatting requires that this note be converted to rich text format. Rich text notes may not be editable on iPhone and other devices.”

The language is there, as you can see above. Based on the language that I see above, I think it’s safe to assume that it should be available soon.

And in other news, it looks like Apple hasn’t made up their mind whether or not we’ll be able to edit rich-text notes in the future. The fact that there’s a warning at all indicates that we should be able to edit notes on the computer and have them sync to the iPhone.