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iSync beta released

Sync the Visor or Treo with iCal and the OS X Address Book

http://www.visorcentral.com/content/Stories/1488-1.htm

Worked flawlessly with my Visor Prism even though the system requirements said that palm OS 4.0 was needed.

iSync is great!

I synched Prism, iCal, and .Mac calendar successfully. The first time it synchs it seems like iSync is in a loop with the progress bar only moving around 1/10th of the way. Patience is needed during this first sync. Later syncs go much quicker. The Read Me file notes that the Address Book, Date Book and To Do List should be changed in the Conduit settings to a default of Do Nothing.

A separate iCal file Untitled will be created for To Do's from the Visor. Export this Untitled file from iCal and then drag the exported .ics file on top of your main iCal calendar file name in iCal to make it all part of the same calendar.

I can understand how to integrate an iPod into this mix. But will cellphones have the memory to hold all this data?

iSync Report

Here's my iSync report:

My iSync Report
----
Test System:
PowerBook Pismo (G3-400/1gig ram/30 gig hd)
OS 10.2.1
Handspring Visor Edge w/USB cradle
Palm Desktop 4.0 (Handspring distribution)
5gb iPod
----

First, I read over the discussion forums on Apple.com to learn about some of the pitfalls and solutions before I tried installing.

Then, I downloaded iSync from the Apple site. I installed iSync and the iSync conduit for Palm.

Per some of the instructions on the Apple discussion board, I deleted the existing calendar and contacts from my iPod.

Next, I opened the Palm HotSync Manager, went to Conduit Settings, and turned off the conduits for Address, Datebook, Memo, and To-do. I also activated the iSync conduit, selected sync for Calendar and Contacts, and did not select Slow Sync.

Then I initiated a Sync from my Visor. The Palm HotSync manager was activated upon connection, as it normally is, but then it got to the iSync conduit, and at this point, the iSync app was launched.

iSync showed an icon for my PalmOS device, marked with the PalmOS username. It also showed an icon for .Mac, and a progress bar for the sync.

The iSync progresses in four distinct stages:

1) Gather contact changes from each type of media
2) Apply contact changes to each type of media
3) Gather address/todo changes from each type of media
4) Apply address/todo changes to each type of media

It collected changes from the contact lists on my iPod, iCal, Visor, and the Backup conduit (which I'm assuming is some internal iSync component and not the Palm backup conduit). Since iCal, iPod, and Backup had no contacts, it evaluated the changes as 163 new contacts on the Visor, and then copied those changes to the other devices.

Next, it collected all of the appointments on my Visor as changes, and applied them to iCal, iPod, and Backup conduit.

At this point, the iSync portion of my Sync was completed, and the Palm HotSync Manager completed the rest of its sync process, including backing up other changed files, syncing Vindigo, and savings the prefs.

I checked iCal, Address Book, my iPod and Visor, and everything was in sync. :-) Behavior was as expected as described in the docs which I was careful to read BEFORE doing any of this (i.e. when it synced the calendar from my Visor, it created a new calendar in iCal named Unfiled)

Looks pretty good so far, obviously the speed is not that great right now, being that it is beta and there is lots of debugging code in there, as well as optimizations that have not yet been made. I am looking forward to a great product when this is released in the final version. Even in its current state, it seems like it will be working well for me. :-)

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