The Syncing Apple

I hope this turns out to be true.

I’m sick of reading about the Tivo Deathwatch… I love my Tivo and I’m not ready to invest the time and energy in Myth TV. Apple will do it right, and they should be flush with cash by now, after making their 40% on all the ipod shuffles they’ll sell.

Om Malik discusses how to save Tivo.

This is a little stale, but Chatter Email is now 1.0 and already surging ahead to 1.1. Not only is it all fancy with hirez icons, it’s now rock solid and the absolute #2 app on my Treo 650. The number one app of course is the phone….

There is a whole new website, www.chatteremail.com which is a huge improvement over the old site. This has great forums, so now there is no more hopping around from mytreo and treocentral forums to get the latest skinny on Chatter.

It’s now just $32, which is a steal compared to some other more bloated packages out there….

The coolest thing you can do with Chatter is read an email, realize you need to contact the sender, see that their email sig has a phone number, double tap on the phone number and have the Treo dial the number. It’s Newtonesque.

If you were wondering (like me) if this is ever going to pan out, I got a new hit today on google regarding this. This was introduced back in May of 2004.

PalmSource Mail for BlackBerry Connect Overview

PalmSource Mail for BlackBerry Connect is the standard email client for Palm OS Garnet to connect to a BlackBerry Enterprise Server™ or BlackBerry Internet Email Service™*. The mail client provides end-to-end secure access to corporate mail servers and seamlessly integrates with existing BlackBerry Enterprise Server installations.

This looks very interesting. (Less so I should say, since I’ve found ChatterEmail and Chatter has gone 1.0.) However, reading more about this I see a strange thing in the suppport details: it’s only going to work on GPRS networks? What? So Blackberry Connect is only going to work with the GSM Treo’s- like on Cingular? I just got my 650 from Sprint, and Verizon would be my second choice. How can this only work on GPRS?

I started this site out to keep track of my travails with the many, many options and pitfalls of syncing my pim data back and forth from my Macintosh to my current PDA of choice. I feel stupidly proud over the fact that I have some core pim data that was originally entered into my first PDA, a Newton 110. About 30 PDAs later, I have moved back and forth from the mac to windows (ActiveSync vs Hotsync) supplementing with various ancillary 3rd party products (mostly for syncing stuff to the mac, like the Blackberry or PocketPC) that I’ve lost track. The one thing that doesn’t change however, is that it just never syncs right. Not more than a few months at a stretch. Sooner or later it gets whacked and I spend time re-categorizing all my contacts, only to find that the categories don’t sync around properly.

My current hell revolves around my Mac, my Treo 650, Microsoft Entourage and iSync (and the Apple apps- AddressBook and iCal).

Then again, at some point invariably some incredibly cool new PDA is released, and I must have it, which entails a move off of Palm to PocketPC (or vice-versa). They seem to one-up each other every three years. For instance– Palm device development seems to have ground to a halt. Sony has dumped the Clie, PalmSoft has released some new versions of the PalmOS that no one has bothered to built a device for. Palm might very well be dead but for the Treos. Speaking of which, I’ve really taken to my Treo 650, since it is both my phone and PDA. However, this choice in devices makes syncing harder on the Macintosh, even with the absolutely necessary extra software made by Mark & Space, Missing Sync. Why? Beacuse the Mac is again becomeing a pariah with Palm.

Meanwhile, the new Blackberries are very attractive, since they are just the same size as the Treos but much lighter and their unique keypad really does work. I’ve been able to play with one and have tried it– it works. But you still can’t run much other software on it, which is the best part of the Treo– all the Palm software.

Back to the point: at some point in changing or updating blog software on my server, I totally spaced out and started calling this Syncing Mac instead of Syncing Apple. I have no other reason, except that it sounded ok at the time. Now, with the move over to WordPress, which I think I’m going to be happy with for a long time, I’ve moved back to the Syncing Apple nomenclature– it sounds better. When I say it I think of a washtub full of floating apples that you used to bob for at grade-school Halloween parties.

I’ve moved SyncingApple over to the new WordPress 1.5, which is a really amazing piece of software. As support for MT 1.x dwindles away, I wanted to find a more robust and dynamic blog server. WordPress fits that and has many cool features that are nowhere to be seen on MT. Plus now the xmlrpc support is built in, so edits with MarsEdit work without any problems at all.

I’ve been playing with some themes, but its hard to top the simplicity and elegance of the Kubric theme, which is what you get out of the box in 1.5. I also hope that the built in spam controls in WP will work better than MT-Blacklist did.