The Syncing Apple

So the site we’ve been working on at my new job was announced yesterday, in conjunction with the larger announcement that CIM (Comcast Interactive Media) has purchased Fandango. Fancast has been consuming all my time since I joined Comcast back in September, and it’s going to be cool destination.

As you can see, the announcement has caused quite a stir so far:

Posts that contain Fancast per day for the last 30 days.

Get your own chart!

I think the net is ready for something like fancast- and with CIM’s weight behind it, its going to be a fun ride. If you are looking to work on something cool, and live in Philadelphia drop me a line- we’re hiring and we have a lot more work to do on this.

Normally, I don’t like little flash games. Even normal games, for me, require a delicate balance playability and strategy before I grow tired and bored with them. But I stumbled across DTD a few days ago and gave it a shot. A few hours later, I realized that DTD is so addictive, so engrossing, that it is nearly indescribable. There is a nice Tutorial that is worth reading, but the game is one of those dead simple games that can played over and over again. I’ve spent whole afternoons trying to best my score of about 5500.

Word around was that Apple introduced a new version of iSync with 10.4.9, and with it the promise of direct OSX support of the V3m. And Apple did add support for the V3m model to iSync, but they didn’t add support for the Sprint version! It still wouldn’t pair correctly with a fresh install of 10.4.9 and my razr.

Luckily however, Clockskew has been keeping pace with his excellent iSync plugins. He has recently introduced a forum, where he stashes his latest downloads for his plugins as well and support for them. The forums help, I’m sure, as individual emails to CS don’t benefit other users.

I had some issues with his earlier plugin (my post here) but this one seems to work OK, with some reservations. It won’t work when you choose (in iSync) to erase device and sync, which is what I wanted, as I don’t trust that it won’t just dupe a whole bunch of contacts in my Addressbook. iSync started to clear the existing contacts from my phone, but but quit claiming it couldn’t delete them. Upon looking at my phone it had deleted all contacts save one, and thought it may be that one sticking up the works. However, when I manually deleted that, iSync still wouldn’t complete the erase and move on to the merge, until I manually changed the ‘on first sync’ option in iSync to just merge data on device and the Mac. Which wasn’t an issue now since all the contacts on the phone had been deleted.

I have yet to try the calendar syncing, since I keep most of my important calendar items on Entourage. I still have to enable the Entourage/Addressbook, iCal syncing that Entourage has introduced.