WordPress 3.0 has been released. At some point in the near future I am going to upgrade this site and overhaul the theme. I’m not as thrilled with this layout as I’d like to be. Most likely because I stopped working on it in the middle of the project. Story of my life.

I upgraded my MacBook to OS X 10.6.4 last week. Unfortunately that broke my Time Machine backups. I’ve been using my Ubuntu server as a Time Machine backup system but with 10.6.4 it started verifying the backup and suggested I clear out the old backup and start from scratch. I wasn’t so worried about my backup history so I decided to do that but then I couldn’t get it to back up again. After much frustration and failed attempts at upgrading my Ubuntu server to get a newer version of netatalk I realized that the actual problem was that I needed to create the com.apple.TimeMachine.MachineID.plist file under the sparse bundle and add the following XML:

<?xml version=“1.0” encoding=“UTF-8”?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC “-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN” “http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd”>
<plist version=“1.0”>
  <dict>
    <key>com.apple.backupd.HostUUID</key>
    <string>YOURUUIDHERE</string>
  </dict>
</plist>

I try to make notes of this sort of thing in my wiki knowledge base, but in this case I left that step out. That was a time costly mistake.

I’m going to upgrade to an iPhone 4 in the near future. I’m still on the original 3G which is getting a little long in the tooth and the volume button just fell off which cemented my decision to upgrade. I considered preordering but I think I’ll wait until they are more general availability in case any problems start to be reported. Apparently there are issues with holding the antenna causing signal problems but that’s not a showstopper for me since I will no doubt get a case for it.

My friend Ken Foreman posted some example pictures on Facebook of panoramic pictures taken with the iPhone app Autostitch. I never use my iPhone camera but with the iPhone 4’s higher quality camera I expect I will start using it more and will definitely have to give Autostitch a try.

I mentioned the other day that I downloaded MacJournal to try as an offline composer. I’m writing this update with MacJournal and while I think it’s going to work well as private journaling software it’s not a great blog writer. It seems to be missing features such as posting items as drafts, etc. So I’m going to look for different OS X blog composition software.

And for today’s media item, my friend told me about this video on YouTube of a Lego printer someone made. It’s pretty impressive!

While Google mobile sync does indeed sync my contacts automatically, it does not provide the same sync quality as Sync in a Blink.  I had forgotten that one of the things that drove me to Sync in a Blink originally was that many of my contacts do not have email addresses.  Unfortunately, Google’s sync algorithm still seems to key everything off of the email address.  Which means that notes or updates that I add on the iPhone do not propagate to my Google contacts database when those contacts do not have email addresses.

I suspect I’ll turn off mobile sync and go back to using Sync in a Blink.  I may try to get them working together, although my initial attempt at doing that clobbered my contact list and I ended up having to restore my iPhone from a backup.  So I’ll be more careful if I decide to go down that road again.

Once I did that, Sync in a Blink’s show ungrouped contacts option stopped crashing the app and instead correctly displayed these five rogue contacts.

Unfortunately the ability to see contacts not already in a group is not working for me.  It crashes every time I attempt to refresh the contact list.

I’m not sure if this is due to my having a large number of contacts or for some other reason.  I’ve posted on the Sync in a Blink support forum, so hopefully someone from the company will reply soon.  I will be very glad to be able to automatically filter and determine which contacts are not in contact groups.  With over 320 contacts, it’s a huge pain to keep track of that manually.

I had saved it as a draft on the server, so I logged into the panel and checked and in fact everything was there, including the post break code.  I’m glad I didn’t lose any data, but it’s frustrating that the iPhone WordPress app doesn’t support breaking the page that way.  And it’s not a very reassuring way for it to fail when it shows the post as truncated.

I wasn’t too worried as I had saved it to the server and presumably could restore from a revision, but I don’t know what would have happened if it had been only a Local Draft.  Hopefully this will be addressed in the upcoming new release of the app.

When I’m on my computer, bloglines is my preferred newsreader. Unfortunately I am not a fan of their mobile site and they don’t have an iPhone app, which is too bad as I’d buy it.

Google Reader also has a mobile site which is better than bloglines but still not what I was looking for. So I decided to browse the app store.

There are a number of RSS reader apps available. Which one is the best? I don’t know but after a bit of browsing I bought Newsstand for $5.

So far I like it. It was able to import all my subscriptions from bloglines and honors my groups. I wish it would do two way status syncing, but that is not supported. Oh well.

The Newsstand UI has a cool feature where when you turn the iPhone sideways, it displays all the blogs as magazines and newspapers on a shelf. It looks similar to how albums are displayed with Coverflow. Unfortunately the scrolling animation is a bit slow. Probably because I am subscribed to a lot of blogs.

The coverflow interface is really slick but it needs a few improvements to make it truly great. First, there is a small tag displayed at the beginning of groups. This is nice, but it would be even better to be able to tap that tag to scroll to the next group.

The second improvement that I would highly suggest would be the ability to filter the coverflow view to show only those blogs with new content. It does display a red stripe across the cover of blogs with unread content but it’s not that useful when scrolling through hundreds of subscriptions. Also, limiting the view to unread content would no doubt speed up the scrolling animation.

The solution may be for me to edit and pare down my subscriptions. I probably don’t need to subscribe to the whole kitchen sink on a mobile device. But on the other hand, if they made the improvements above there wouldn’t be a reason not to. Having so many subscriptions does make the refreshing process a bit long, but I don’t suppose there’s a good way around that.

More thoughts to come after I use the app for a while. I’m interested to see if my blog reading goes up. I hope so; I feel out of the loop.

Unfortunately, the way contact groups are supported on the iPhone and their interaction with Sync in a Blink is not entirely intuitive.  After configuring Sync in a Blink to only sync the “iPhone Contacts” group, I found that newly created contacts on the iPhone were not syncing back to Google.  I initially thought this may be a limitation of the iPhone, but it’s not.  There is a way to make this work.

When I added a new contact, I tried editing the contact details to add it into the “iPhone Contacts” group, but unfortunately the iPhone contact editor doesn’t support editing groups.  Hopefully some day it will, but today it doesn’t.  The key is to create the new contact within the “iPhone Contacts” group.

When I clicked on “Contacts” from my iPhone home screen, it was defaulting to “All Contacts” but if I clicked back to “Groups” I could then select “iPhone Contacts” and add then add a new contact.  That contact would be added into the “iPhone Contacts” group.

If you always remember to add new contacts into the correct Contact Group then you’re done.  Happy syncing.  Unfortunately, I didn’t figure this out until I already had added several contacts in the “All Contacts” group and no easy way to move them over to “iPhone Contacts”.  There may be a way to change the Contact Group of an existing contact, but if there is I don’t know about it.

Instead I found a different workaround.  It’s slightly clunky but better than not having my contacts sync.  It uses the Merge Contacts feature of Sync in a Blink.

The first step is to create a contact within the “iPhone Contacts” group with the same name.  This new contact doesn’t need to actually have any other contact details, just the name.  Everything else will be merged from the existing contact with Sync in a Blink.  When browsing “All Contacts” there will now be two people with the same name, one in “All Contacts” and one from “iPhone Contacts”.

In the above example you can see there are two copies of “Example2 Person”.

Now we need to use the Sync in a Blink Merge Contacts feature to sync the “All Contacts” version with the “iPhone Contacts” version.

Notice in the above screenshots I have selected the “iPhone Contacts” version of “Example2 Person” to sync. This is important! While I could have selected both from “All Contacts”, that will not preserve the fact that the new blank contact is in “iPhone Contacts”. Why? I don’t know, but it doesn’t. So be sure to select the new dummy contact from within your contact group!

Next we select the original “Example2 Person” contact to sync with.

Notice in the above screenshot that it shows the “iPhone Contacts” Contact Group selected. If it doesn’t show that option, a step was missed and this procedure isn’t working. Normally there would be phone numbers, email addresses, etc. In my case I don’t have that information for my example contact since it’s not important for showing the procedure. But when you merge your contacts you should actually see all the contact details. Make sure that the real data is checked so you don’t lose any information.

Once everything looks good in the Merge Fields screen, it’s time to complete the sync.

As the screen suggests, it would be a good idea to sync with Google Contacts at this point.  In the sync summary screen you should see that your iPhone contact was added to Google.

While none of this is rocket science, it did have me banging my head against the wall slightly.  So I hope this information will help others avoid my frustration!

It would be nice if a future version of the iPhone software and/or Sync in a Blink would make it easier to directly edit the Contact Group of an existing contact, so that creating a dummy contact and then syncing it would not be necessary.

I also wish there were an easy way to get a delta between the “All Contacts” group and my “iPhone Contacts” group so I could see exactly who is included in “All Contacts” and missing from “iPhone Contacts”.  At the moment I have to do this manually, and as I have over 330 contacts in my phone it’s tedious and error prone.  I still have about 6 more contacts in my “All Contacts” group than in my “iPhone Contacts” group.  One of these days I’ll have time to track down the differences.  But not today!

When I got the iPhone I was hoping to be able to sync it with my Google calendar via iTunes, but no such luck.  That may work on the Mac version of iTunes, but it does not on iTunes under Windows.  So I haven’t had good access to my calendars on my iPhone.  Until about a week ago.

I recently found SaiSuke in the iTunes App Store.  It is a replacement calendar application that syncs wirelessly over the air with the Google calendar service.  It does not integrate with the built in iPhone calendar, as the iPhone SDK does not support interaction with the native calendar.  So I simply moved my native calendar off to an unused page, and replaced it with SaiSuke.

There are two versions of SaiSuke, free and paid.  I went directly to the paid ($10) version, although the free version may suffice for some users.  The primary difference is that the paid version allows one click synchronization of multiple calendars.  Because I do in fact use multiple calendars (Birthdays, Personal Appointments, Business Appointments, etc.) this was a useful feature for me and worth the price of the application.

The application works wonderfully and the only complaint I can think of is that it does not support creation of recurring events on the iPhone.  Recurring events created in the Google calendar web application show up fine, but you cannot create new recurring events.  There is a local “SaiSuke” calendar that supports creating recurring events, but that doesn’t help me.  Since the whole point of the application for me is about syncing my iPhone to my Google calendars, I don’t even use the local “SaiSuke” calendar.

I’ve contacted their support organization about this and have been informed that they are working on this functionality and will have it in a future release.  The only other “nice to have” feature I can think of would be support for the new Google Tasks feature, but that’s a bit of a reach since it’s still a part of Google Labs.

If you are a Google Calendar user with an iPhone, I highly reccomend SaiSuke.  And since there is a free version there is no risk in evaluating the product and then purchasing the full version if needed.

The application allows wireless over the air (OTA) synchronization between the iPhone and Google Contacts.  It works with GMail contacts, but I use it with my Google Apps account for the secretelite.com domain.

Aside from the benefit of wireless OTA syncing, Sync in a Blink also addresses the issue I wrote about in August where Google uses the email address as the key for the contact entry and so it doesn’t do a good job of syncing phone contacts that don’t have email addresses.  It also supports the syncronization of contacts that don’t have names, which is important for me since I tend to add businesses that I frequently contact into my iPhone contacts and now they can sync well with Google Contacts.

The other nice feature of Sync in a Blink is that it keeps a sync history and shows the details of what exactly changed, including before and after views for each contact that has changed.

If you are an iPhone user who syncs with Google Contacts this is a “must have” application.  Very well worth the $5.

I can understand that the iPhone version of Google Earth is necessarily more limited than the desktop version.  They provide the Wikipedia and Panoramio overlay layers.  Why not street names?  Google Maps for the iPhone certainly includes streets.  Hopefully this will come to Google Earth shortly.

Other than that, cool application.