iSync: Slow Sync but Steady Progress

Yes, iSync has been with us for few years now. It should be rock solid. It’s not — yet. I recently wrote about my impres­sions of data detect­ors. Not rocket sci­ence, but a small and power­ful addi­tion to use­ful work­flow on a Mac. That they also remind me of the prom­ise that was the New­ton makes them all the more wel­come. But what can I say about iSync? One of the things that makes OSX such a com­pel­ling choice for day to day com­put­ing is the con­sist­ency of inter­face between applic­a­tions and their abil­ity to share information…not just data, but con­texts and pref­er­ences and thus recog­ni­tion and adapt­ab­il­ity to user pecu­li­ar­it­ies that anthro­po­moph­ise the laptop. The com­puter becomes some­how just some­thing a little more. A trus­ted com­pan­ion — not merely a clone of mil­lions of other identical col­lec­tions of alu­minum, sil­icon and other substances.

When I was gif­ted an older Power­Book a few months ago and redis­covered OSX for every­day com­put­ing, I was delighted to dis­cover just how much the OS had matured and been refined since its repack­aging from NextSTEP. There are a pleth­ora of cre­at­ively con­ceived ‘little’ apps avail­able that marry ingenu­ity, cre­ativ­ity, beauty of exe­cu­tion and most import­antly work seam­lessly with other applic­a­tions within a cohes­ive workflow/space.

iSync is one of the more in your face ways that this magic hap­pens. When it works, its great and don’t get me wrong, iSync is very right. It has the mod­u­lar­ity to recog­nize dis­par­ate logical devices and some­how draw them into this cohes­ive envir­on­ment. But it doesn’t always seem to be able to ful­fill this Her­culean task.

I use iSync to carry out a few cru­cial tasks:

Syn­chron­ize inform­a­tion with my Sony Eric­sson W580i cell phone

I loc­ated an iSync drive for the phone at www.mroach.com. I installed the driver, com­pleted the wiz­ard that led me through a series of steps to determ­ine what sort of inform­a­tion I wanted to share and in what way. I saved the pro­file and whenever I click the brushed alu­minum iSync but­ton on my dock, the magic hap­pens. Bluetooth com­mu­nic­a­tion is ini­ti­ated and iSync always seems to work.

User story on get­ting the data to the Mac in the first place:

I should men­tion that iSync was par­tic­u­larly valu­able in pop­u­lat­ing my per­sonal con­tact and schedul­ing inform­a­tion to the Mac in the first place. With all of my data nicely ensconced in Out­look on the PC, it seemed destined to stay there. I expor­ted a CSV file to import into Address Book on the Mac claimed it could handle csv files. After a couple hours of abort­ive exper­i­ences, I gave up on that approach. Some googling soon determ­ined that there were issues with this pro­cess, but that there was a paid pro­gram that would allow you to export the data from Out­look in a more use­ful man­ner. But, a sub­stan­tial cost for a one-time oper­a­tion. Another solu­tion was to try and sync the Out­look data with Google Cal­en­dar and Con­tacts and then sync from the OSX side. Again, prob­ably works, but only with paid solu­tions. Being habitu­ally parsi­mo­ni­ous, I was determ­ined to find a bet­ter way and this is where a clever iSync solu­tion emerged. The inter­me­di­ary was my Palm TX. It has lan­guished lately as I have been laptop focussed. It used to be sync’d daily with Out­look using Key­Suite, but it has lately been used for a par­tic­u­larly addict­ive little game that is use­ful when sit­ting wait­ing for an appoint­ment or other short delays. I rein­stalled Key­Suite and sync’d to the Palm. I then installed the Palm Desktop soft­ware on the Mac, went into the prefs and enabled iSync sup­port so that data could flow to other Mac apps. Suc­cess! All of my con­tacts and appoint­ments appeared in iCal and Address Book after a suit­able amount of wait­ing. Moreover, this was all accom­plished via Bluetooth and wire­lessly. The only caveat is that I was not able to carry over all my metic­u­lously applies cat­egor­iz­a­tion, but it gave me a start. Most import­antly, iSync does so a good job of syncing that inform­a­tion go forward.

I give iSync top marks or this. There are drivers for so many mobile devices (most user con­trib­uted) that this mobile sync is very prac­tical and efficient.

Syn­chron­ize Inform­a­tion Between the iMac and Laptop

Syncing inform­a­tion between machines is handled right through the Mac OS. In the Sys­tem pref­er­ences, Apple likes to drive you to use their .Mac ser­vice — and syncing I will admit is a use­ful way to drive people to use .Mac. While it doesn’t handle file syncing per se, I use Folder­Share for this, what this syncing tries to do is give you a seam­less work envir­on­ment regard­less of which Mac you find your­self using. So a laptops con­tacts, sched­ules, pref­er­ences, web book­marks, and wid­gets are kept syn­chron­ized between machines. You set the sched­ule in the prefs panel (how often and what you want to syn­chron­ize) and iSync via .Mac does the rest. This sys­tem largely works, and apart of sched­ules that inad­vert­ently use dif­fer­ent timezones, you are rarely presen­ted with any decisions or even noti­fic­a­tions that the sync hap­pens. It just does. This works well.

Again I tip my hat to the effi­cient integ­ra­tion of data through iSync.

Syn­chron­ize between OSX Applications

Here is where it all comes together. Basic pro­ductiv­ity for me steps bey­ond just straight word pro­cessing in Word or Pages or num­ber crunch­ing in Excel or Num­bers. I use a GTD app to track my tasks. I have been using iGTD and exper­i­ment­ing with oth­ers, such as Omni­Fo­cus or Things. I have been doing focussed research writ­ing in Scrivener. I am online most of the time and flit between online web ser­vices and local apps. As it turns out the best way for third party developers to share inform­a­tion is via iSync.

This is where things start to get a little less smooth. The build­ing blocks are in place, but unlike the user inter­face, where there is a nice tool­box to enforce some con­sist­ency, at a data level, there is iron­ic­ally much more lat­it­ude for each developer to decide they have a bet­ter way and to imple­ment such. This doesn’t absolve Apple of some com­pli­city in this same hubris. Applic­a­tions like Address Book are built up from very simple under­pin­nings, going back to NextSTEP days, but they have sub­sequently been tailored to an Apple defined life­style focus. It’s the ‘i’ thing. It’s really not a busi­ness focus, that’s for sure. Address Book has to work with other apps to mange con­tacts for busi­ness use. Oth­er­wise you end up pop­u­lat­ing the notes field with all sorts of cru­cial, but undefined pieces of inform­a­tion. Inform­a­tion that very quickly turns Address Book into an isol­ated silo as there is no way to deal with the Notes field as any­thing other than a blob. Inform­a­tion there is com­mit­ted to a black hole. Search­able via Address Book search and Spot­light, but not address­able by other apps that may be able to use it. So when you actu­ally go to invoke iSync prefs in an applic­a­tion that is aware, you wade into undefined ter­rit­ory. Too much lat­it­ude? At this stage, iSync has no real way to com­pare apples with oranges, but it tries. I guess I can’t blame ‘it’ for doing so. The prob­lem you run into is that it does tend to assume some data con­form­ity and receiv­ing apps such as iCal receive the inform­a­tion assum­ing the same data conformity.

iCal is an applic­a­tion in need of some real love right. I don’t think there is any real way to excuse its state right now either. For the past couple of months, it has been crash­ing with some reg­u­lar­ity and present­ing me with the Apple requests for more inform­a­tion about what went wrong. I actu­ally was filling these things in. I now have this vis­ion of Apple employ­ees actu­ally fil­ter­ing these for those gull­ible enough to waste time sub­mit­ting these and chuck­ling at the most earn­est and hon­est explan­a­tions. Because it is such a sol­it­ary exper­i­ence (Apple thanks you for this, but doesn’t sug­gest a link to a prob­lem that sounds famil­iar in their know­ledge data­base — as Microsoft does — bet­ter than Apple here!) I actu­ally wrote a final piece sug­gest­ing what they could do with their app and all the bug reports I was fil­ing. Great prom­ise, but sadly broken.

In the end, I star­ted out with this piece to rant a little and relieve frus­tra­tion over slow syncs and broken dreams ;-) but I have to admit that data syn­chron­iz­a­tion actu­ally works very well in this envir­on­ment — it’s just at a nas­cent stage. There’s much work to be done, but the prom­ise is evid­ent and tem­por­ary frus­tra­tion is alle­vi­ated by appre­ci­at­ing where this is all going. The dream of con­formal com­put­ing where the device learns about you and adapts to your needs. Adapt­ing to your pecu­li­ar­it­ies and yet meet­ing needs that emerge from your use, not from the developer’s tre­mend­ous foresight. This either goes all to HAL…ha, ha, ha, or to back to the golden age of 1984 (the Apple ver­sion) where we do actu­ally exper­i­ence a com­puter for the rest of us, and if they are so smart, why don’t they learn about how we work, rather than sub­ject­ing us to adapt to their way of doing things.