*scottstuff*

I upgraded to 10.3.3 over lunch today, and everything seemed to go well. The network browsing support in the Finder is nice, and things seem slightly zippier across the board.

It took me a couple hours to notice the first problem: I can no longer sync my palm (Sony Clie T615c) via the cradle. Something, somewhere is missing, and the palm times out without connecting to the sync software on the computer. Google is nice, but it’s worthless when you’re looking for problems in software that’s only 2 hours old.

Fortunately, the cradle problem isn’t fatal–my PowerBook is old enough that it still has an IR port, so I can use it for syncing. It’s slower, but it works well enough, and I’ve done it before, when I’ve forgotten to drag the cradle home from work. It’s aggravating, though.

At this point, I’m just counting the days until Palm introduces something exciting enough to get me to replace this old Sony. What I want is a union of the Tungsten C and the Tungsten T3. Bluetooth and 802.11, a big screen and a keyboard, and the fast CPU and big RAM that the two share.

I had a weird thought a couple hours ago. Suppose you set up two Macs with ab2vcard, both syncing to the same Subversion repository, and then added a bit of extra magic to handle conflicts and deletes. Then hand conflicts and remote updates off to Address Book and let it handle it on its own (that was one of the improvements in Panther–the Address Book has a merge dialog).

Wham, instant version-controlled shared address book. Have a nice day.

Of course there are a few little details that need to be handled. Most of them involve tracking deletions and doing the Right Thing. ab2vcard’s current deletion tracking is hokey, but it works when it owns the vCard repository. In a shared environment, you need better logic. It’s not rocket science, though.

As mentioned yesterday, I’m now exporting all of the entries in my OS X Address Book into Subversion. In order to do this, I needed to hack up a conversion tool. Since I have it working for me, I figured I’d share it. So, I’d like to announce ab2vcard version 1.0. You can download an OS X installer package plus the source.

The whole thing is pretty trivial to use. Just run /usr/local/bin/ab2vcard directory, and it’ll create a vCard for everyone in your Address Book in the directory directory. If you add the -d flag, then it’ll erase files that aren’t currently in your address book. If you add the -s flag, then it’ll try to check changes into Subversion. The README that’s included gives more detail, as does the manpage.

It’s written in Objective C and derived from ’contacts’ by Shane Celis. Since I now have a whopping 4 hours of experience with Objective C, don’t expect the code to be spotless, but it shouldn’t be too bad. Objective C is a surprisingly easy language, if you already know C and are somewhat familiar with other Smalltalk-influenced languages. The hard part is getting the hang of all of the framework code, but Apple’s documentation helped with that.

Let me know if you find any bugs, or if you find this useful for anything.

Continuing the theme of backing up my PIM data via Subversion, I’m now exporting the contents of the OS X address book into a subversion tree, and then syncing that from my laptop onto a box at home.

This was a bigger pain then I anticipated; I couldn’t find a tutorial that showed how to use AppleScript to export data from the Address Book, but I could find an Objective C program that extracts data from it. I’ve never used AppleScript or Objective C, so either choice involves learning a new language. At least with Objective C, I have working source to start from. It took most of an hour to rip out the text printing code from ‘contacts’ and substitute in code to save vCards to individual files, but the result seems to work quite nicely. I’ll clean it up and release it eventually; if anyone is interested, send me mail and I’ll speed it up.

Update: I’ve released this as ab2vcard. Let me know if you have any problems.

Okay, so I posted yesterday that I’ve decided that a PDA without top-notch desktop sync support is worthless, and that Palms are the only PDAs that sync right with OS X. Great timing–according to Brighthand, PalmSource isn’t going to produce an OS X sync program for “Cobalt,” their new name for PalmOS 6.

It’s not really the end of the world–it’s unclear if the basic sync protocol has changed, although the formats used by the native PIM applications is different. So, there’s a chance that Palm Desktop 4 will work along with a small update to iSync (which replaces the native PIM conduits in Palm Desktop). Failing that, Mark/Space has committed to producing an OS X sync solution, and they’ve been pretty good in the past.

Basteges.

As part of my current organization kick, I’ve been thinking about what I want in a portable computer (PDA, handheld computer, smartphone, tablet PC, whatever). I’m a geek and a bit of a gizmo freak, but I try to be at least a bit practical–do I really want a Linux-based PDA that’s going to need ongoing sysadmin work just to be usable?

My experience with the Windows-based Motorola MPx200 smartphone rammed home another point–an organizer that can’t sync reliably is useless.

Finally, playing with Life Balance and ReaderWare has demonstrated that organization applications with both a PDA and a desktop component can be more useful then either component would be on its own.

Three simple points that most of us already know, but they’re easy to forget when faced with gratuitously cool new hardware. In short, the purpose of computers is to run software, and the point of software is to give you access to information, and if your handheld can’t run your software, or it can’t access your information, then it’s really just a cool paperweight with a nice display.

Since I’m running OS X on my primary computer, it stands to reason that I’d be best-served by a handheld that syncs with the Mac, and has as many applications as possible that can sync application-specific data between the Mac and some PDA application. And, since I want to run Life Balance, I’d be best served by a handheld that can actually run it. In every case, the best choice is some flavor of Palm, either a traditional one from PalmOne, a Sony Clie, or a PalmOS-based phone.

Now that I’ve finally answered the question “what do I want a PDA for?” I can stop looking at PocketPC handhelds, Zauruses, and whatever else is out there, because they aren’t going to do what I want them to do. It’s a nice realization, and I guess I have Motorola to thank for that, mostly. Who knows where I’d be now if they could build a battery that worked :-).

Now, if only PalmOS 5 didn’t suck so bad…