Treo 650 - Mac OSX: Incompatible iSync for multiple address entities

[francissuh]

Hi,
I am having an incompatibility problem for iSync (v2.1.1) between the Contacts data field of Palm Treo 650 and the Address Book data field of Mac OS X (10.4.5). I could not find any previous report saying that it has been a known issue. So, I decided to post this question to macosx.com hoping somebody here can help me out.
The trouble happens mainly between multiple address entities in the Mac Address Book and the Palm Contacts. For example, if I have a multiple addresses (home and work) in the Address Book, the iSync only copies the home address into the work address field (not into the home address field) in the Palm Contacts. The work address field from the Mac Address Book is never copied into the Palm Contacts. This trouble also happens with isyncing the multiple addresses from the Palm Contact into the Mac Address Book.
Is this a known issue? Or, am I the only guy who is having this problem?

Looking forward to hearing from an expert.
Francis

[kafene]

Originally Posted by francissuh

Is this a known issue? Or, am I the only guy who is having this problem?

Looking forward to hearing from an expert.
Francis

I've got the exact issue (as well as many others from my research on the web). People have been doing hoakey things to try and deal with this absolutely unacceptable program issue. It's like the programmers all wanted to go home early that day and left us with, "it's better than nothing" kinda crap.

HOME in Address Book syncs to Palm as WORK address. Anything in WORK vaporizes and never syncs at all. Some people just deal with the fact that they can only HOME on AddressBook and WORK on the Palm. Others I've read have either changed the CUSTOM FIELDS to use as the second address or are using the "NOTES" fields for that purpose, all which are crappy work-arounds.

I've just accepted defeat and went back to the Palm Desktop. *SIGH*

kafene.

[kafene]

I'm switching yet again and giving the iApps another shot. I read a post somewhere and this guy has been using the Work Address in the NOTES field and it seems to be working well for him, so I just tried it out and I think it may work. Here's his post.

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hschickel
11-18-2003, 07:53 PM
I had this same problem. I gave up Entourage and I'm more and more heavily using my .Mac account.

I sync between 3 of my own machines, a few accounts on customer machines and a Palm. While Entourage does nearly everything better than Mail, iCal, Address Book and iSync there are three things that are not even close.

First, the Apple products keep many separate databases for the various items. This makes granular backups much easier which keeps my data much safer. Second, and more important for me, the Apple products ability to sync across multiple machines is fantastic. Last, Address Book is integrated quite deeply into the OS. More and more applications are taking advantage of this linking in wonderful and surprising ways. These things are completely changing the way I deal with information. The more I use them the more uses I come up with for them.

The biggest problem is iSync to the Palm. This is far less robust than the Entourage conduit. Groups in Address Book are vastly superior to Entourage/Palm and they don't transfer. Special fields can't be changed and they don't transfer. iSync defaults to the home address; this can't be changed and it will give no address if the home address is not available. Palm's Memo Pad can only be used with Palm Desktop. etc, etc. The only potential deal breaker for me was the address problem. My workaround (I only have a few hundred contacts) was to spend a couple of hours and add the work addresses for all my contacts that had them into the notes field. When I add new contacts I do this automatically and the problem is solved. I suspect the time I spent typing would have been more productively spent scripting. But then I would not have culled my contacts database.

I'm ecstatic with this move and less than 2 months after doing it I'm wondering how I ever worked the other way. Look closely at why you're keeping Palm Desktop and Entourage. You may find the switch makes sense too.

Hugh

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Good Luck in your search for nervana. I'm giving up for now and "settling" :/
kafene.