SyncTogether
Our address book has been on our home computers since since the early-1990’s. First in Lotus Organiser, for a long time in an MS Access database, then in Act! and finally in Palm’s Desktop application, which we switched to when we changed to using Macs a few years ago. Looking back, I think the software I was most satisfied with was Act!, which is very flexible and powerful. It should be, as it’s aimed at business users, rather than home users. However, when we switched to the Macs, Act! only ran under Windows, and the Windows emulation software for Power PC Macs was slow, which is why we migrated the address book to the Palm Desktop.
We started using Palm PDAs in mid-1990s and since then, have always had the challenge of keeping contact data on a number of Palms and two or three computers in sync with each other. It’s not easy as the sync conduits which Palm supplies doesn’t handle multiple PDAs being synced with one PC well – they get confused and you can easily end up having several copies of the same contact in your database. It’s not a problem if you spot it quickly – you can check the date when each version was modified and manually delete the older copy, but it used to generate a lot of work until we got Palms which don’t forget their contents when the battery is empty, as when that happened, the conduit would usually allocate different internal keys when the contents of the database were recovered to the Palm after re-charging it and then sync them as new records to the other PDAs. I have manually removed 500-odd duplicate contacts more times than I care to remember because of that.
Of course, life gets even more complicated when you also want to keep the Palm Desktop synced across multiple Macs. We also print address labels for addresses in various international formats (the UK address format is by the worst to cater for as the British have almost completely unstructured multi-line addresses) and do a Christmas letter in OpenOffice (OOo), which gets printed out using the mass-mailing function in OOo. Both the labels and the mass-mailing documents rely heavily on OOo macros to format the addresses and other personal data correctly before it’s printed.
Where is all of this leading, you may be asking yourself? Well, as you can imagine, the whole process of managing and using contact data has become quite complicated over the years – store contacts in Palm Desktop, extract as a CSV file to store in a FileMaker database (I hadn’t mentioned that before, had I?) for selecting and printing in OOo, develop and maintain the macros needed to format the greeting texts and addresses.
A few weeks ago I realised that over the last 2 releases, Mac OS X’s address book has become quite powerful – it can store addresses in the correct format for several tens of countries (not Zimbabwe, where we do have a contact, however!) and and print correctly formatted address labels for each country. It also provides both static and “smart” selections of addresses (Smart, as in smart playlists in iTunes – the content changes as you add and modify addresses, depending on which addresses currently satisfy the selection criteria). And it is well integrated with iCal (the Mac calendar program) and Pages (Apple’s equivalent of Word), which can handle the serial letter / mass mailing requirements. And, the best thing of all, a month ago, Mark/Space finally brought out SyncTogether, which allows the Mac address books and calendars to be synced across a network (without using Apple’s outrageously expensive .Mac service, which has always allowed this).
We already use Mark/Space’s Missing Sync to sync the Palm PDAs with Palm Desktop, so now all the pieces are in place to allow us to migrate the contact data to the Apple address book and:
- keep the address books on three Macs in sync with each other
- keep three Palm devices in sync with the three Macs
- handle our international address format label and mass letter production (without using FileMaker as an interim storage place)
- and additionally sync Ruth’s Sony Ericsson T68i phone with the contact data to keep the phone numbers and e-mail addresses in the phone up to date
I have spent this weekend migrating and cleaning up the contact data and testing the syncing fairly thoroughly, and am very impressed with Mark/Space’s software. We haven’t had any duplicate or lost contacts and all 7 devices are in sync. Yes, we could have synced Ruth’s phone before, but iSync (the Apple sync software) has a tendency to remove the Palm conduits and disturb things, so we have never bothered previously.
Buying SyncTogether is a bit of a risk as it costs $50 and there is no trial version you can use to check it out in advance, but in our case it seems to be working flawlessly and is well worth the price. Recommended!