Re: [NTLK] State of the NewtSync

So, as an update, here's what I've learned since my last message.
The Address Book plugin has some more bugs that I hadn't seen at
first. In particular, it has some bugs that are destructive to the
Address Book on the Mac side:

- For contacts where the country field is not set to anything, it
seems to set it to " " (a blank string) on all contacts, rather than
a null value. This is a subtle difference, but it bugs me.

- I haven't figured out the exact pattern, but it doesn't like
multiple values for a field. For example, some of the contacts I had
in Address Book had separate work and home addresses. Now I find
that one or the other is missing. Similar behavior with contacts
that have more than one phone number or email address. NewtSync
tends to pick one, and delete the others. I didn't even notice it
had done this until a few days later. Glad I made a backup before I
started.

I also took a quick look at the iCal plugin, and learned the following:

- Calendars are stored in a different location on Tiger than they are
on Panther. Right now this is handled by having two different
versions of the plugin. However it should be possible to make a
single plugin that detects what it's running on, and behaves
accordingly.

- "Banner" (multi-day) events do not appear to be synced at all.

- As is already widely known, there are issues with recurring events.

- You can only sync one calendar.

- Changes made to events on the Newton side do not ever seem to
propagate back to the Mac side for me.

- Items deleted in iCal get deleted from the Newton on sync, but not
vice-versa, as far as I can tell.

- Event notes are not sent to the Newton.

The more I look into this, the more I get the feeling that I'm in
over my head. There's a lot of work to do here, and my spare time is
fairly limited. I should probably send the few changes and bug fixes
I made to Nowhere Man, though.

I wasn't sure at first, but I'm increasingly of the opinion that
rewriting NewtSync as a Sync Services client might be the best way to
go, should anyone want to tackle that adventure. It handles all the
conflict resolution for you, and hands you nicely packaged data,
rather than having to scoop it out with AppleScripts.

Steven
http://panic.com/
http://stevenf.com/

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