From the desk of Mr. Monk

The Google Sync

Today I avoided tidying the mess that is my bedroom productively tried out Google Sync for the iPhone. I was scared about losing everything, but it’s not half as dangerous as everyone makes out. Just make back-ups and you can revert everything!

It’s actually pretty cool. Seeing changes happen in real-time is awesome! As a result I’m going to move all of my calendars onto the cloud and have iCal pull them in via CalDAV. The one drawback to this sync solution is contacts. Whereas Ican pull back info for calendars to my mac, I can’t do the same with address book. This sucks. I even tried Plaxo. That failed due to one-way sync. Then I saw Soocial. That failed because it would delete all my Apple stuff like contact pictures etc. Fail.

The solution? Suprisingly easy. As part of the activesync set-up you have to synchronise your contacts with Google via address book. To recieve changes etc all you have to do is make sure you have the iSync menu-bar icon and press ‘sync now’ and bam all of your contacts will be updated. The catch? If you delete a contact on the iPhone it won’t show that change online or on your mac. Not a true 2-way sync but hey, you can’t have it all. I’m pretty impressed and now migrating all of my calendar information to the cloud along with my entire address book. It was nice to go through my contacts and delete some entries that I no longer have a need for.

In conclusion, over the air (OTA) syncing is great because I rarely connect my iPhone to my macs anymore. OTA means that I can make changes and have them ready on demand regardless of where I am in the world. If I have access to the net, I have everything. I am slowly moving to a cloud-based computing environment with native access speeds. Of course this all contributes to the ‘what if the internet goes down’ danger, because if it’s down I will be too. I’m probably way too trusting with my data, but it’s a risk I’m willing to take.