Comments | nmg: A maze of twisty PIM formats, all alike

nmg

A maze of twisty PIM formats, all alike

Apr 06, 2009 15:43

These days, I use a Mac for all of my day-to-day computing, but I've never really got to grips with Mail.app, preferring to use Thunderbird instead. I also use GMail in a limited capacity for non-work mail, and I've been starting to look at the OS X Address Book (which ties in nicely with a whole bunch of things). Unfortunately, Thunderbird, ( Read more... )

os x

Comments 13

mr_tom April 6 2009, 15:17:39 UTC

From 10.5.3, Address Book included GMail syncing

Awesome; it works! Thanks for the tip-off.

nmg April 6 2009, 20:27:33 UTC

Not sure why it doesn't seem to be working for me...

pir April 6 2009, 15:20:13 UTC

http://www.pir.net/pir/bits/gsync

Run once as "gsync setup" and it will make Address Book think you have an iPhone.
Set up syncing in Address Book preferences.
Run wit no options to do a sync run.

I use it regularly since I got an android phone and I want Address Book and gcontacts synced up.

nmg April 6 2009, 20:41:06 UTC

Thanks - I'll give that a go.

I'm still surprised that Google Mail doesn't import vCards or LDIF directly; seems like a bit of an oversight...

steer April 6 2009, 16:12:15 UTC

If you use thunderbird on multiple machines then synckolab might help you? Won't sync to gmail though.

andrewducker April 6 2009, 16:39:23 UTC

Zindus, on the other hand, will:
http://www.zindus.com/

nmg April 6 2009, 20:24:05 UTC

I mainly read email on the laptop these days; there are times when I'll resort to one of the desktops (or the old laptop), but they're few and far between. I'm more interested in having an email environment with my contacts that I can access from public machines.

bohemiancoast April 6 2009, 19:54:34 UTC

I am still struggling with gMail address book syncing and the iPhone. I have load of duplicate contacts, contacts without phone numbers and so on. I'm sure that somewhere in there is my perfect address book.

Meanwhile, have you picked up the MacHeist bundle, if you've taken to using Macs all the time?

nmg April 6 2009, 20:20:41 UTC

re: MacHeist, finally got around to it today.

gothick_matt April 6 2009, 20:06:42 UTC

I'm lazy, and a part of my Mac-using strategy was to pay other people to do the awkward stuff for me. I continued in that philosophy when I started paying for a Spanning Sync subscription, and now I let them handle syncing my Address Book and iCal between my Macs and Google.

Once you've got something syncing with Google, you can normally find some kind of tool or service to get things from there to everywhere else, often regularly and automatically. I rarely use Google for the actual applications, but they're a handy data hub.

This, along with Drop Box and a couple of other things, should let me leave the rather ropey .Mac service behind at some point, if they stop adding more apologetic free months to the end of my current subscription for long enough for it to expire...

nmg April 6 2009, 20:39:28 UTC

Hmmm. 10.5 supports CalDAV, so you can use that to sync iCal with Google Calendar (link).

Address book syncing does seem to be harder than it should be, so I can see the value of Spanning Sync. I think that I'd be a little wary of a server-based solution; GBP65 for the lifetime solution seems reasonable, if Spanning Sync last for more than three or four years.

gothick_matt April 6 2009, 21:57:29 UTC

Yah, I started using Spanning Sync nearly two years ago, so I've not investigated CalDAV. Again, just being lazy; I'm happy enough paying a competent team who are on fairly friendly terms with the Google Calendar people to deal with the issues (and there are often issues, as Google fiddles with their CalDAV implementation and Calendar itself.)

I'm pretty certain I could do it myself for free, but frankly, compared to the Spanning Sync subscription it's not worth the time I'd spend redoing things or fiddling with stuff when it went wrong. Plus, as you say, I get the Address Book thrown in for free -- that wasn't even on the Spanning Sync list of features when I signed up.

gothick_matt April 7 2009, 06:24:24 UTC

Incidentally, I'd forgotten about their lifetime subscription. But I can't see myself using it forever -- it was only going to be a stopgap while Apple and Google started playing more nicely together, which I figured would take a few years. And so far, as an "early adopter", I've only paid $40 for my first two years. This may be helping with my "just pay for it and not bother with the hard work" perspective :)