Wateree Blog

Certain parts of the internets have been abuzz with news that OS X 10.5.3 adds Gmail sync to Address Book. Yes, it’s true… there’s a new gorilla in the room. However, I believe there are some very convincing reasons to use Syncman instead of this new competition:

• For whatever reason, Apple requires that you have (and sync) an iPhone or iPod Touch to take advantage of the built-in Gmail syncing. Syncman of course makes no such requirements.
• Syncman respects the effort you’ve put into maintaining your Address Book, and therefore gets your confirmation before making any changes that could potentially cause you a whole bunch of headache. I’ve read a few reports of disgruntled users unhappy with Apple’s offering.
• Wateree Software is a small and agile company that can adjust quickly to our customers needs and desires. We already have a nice list of upcoming features for 1.1 based on user feedback.

So there you have it.  Of course, I welcome any further suggestions on what will set us apart from the alternatives.  Just drop me an email or leave a comment here.  Competition will only make us better!

I’ve just released version 1.0.2 of Syncman, which takes care of some more annoying but non-critical issues.

• Fixed a bug that could cause Syncman to always want to update certain contacts on Gmail.
• Automatically handle situations that could lead to errors like “Phone Number must not be empty”.
• Syncman now tries harder to respect a contacts name structure (first, last, etc) in Address Book.

And here are the notes for version 1.0.1, just in case you missed it:

This is a highly recommended bugfix release. A few annoying issues were found after the launch of 1.0 and a few more popped up later (more on that below).

• Fixed a bug that would cause completely unrelated contacts to be merged during the initial sync.
• Give Company contacts a name on Gmail so they display properly in the list view.
• Display more descriptive messages for certain errors.

Google recently changed some things (unannounced) which could cause Syncman to think that it needed to replace all of your Address Book contacts. This seems to have only affected Google Apps accounts, or possibly those who were recently updated to the new Gmail interface.

Regardless, this release should fix the problem, but of course if it doesn’t then please let me know.

I’ve gotten a few reports (and have verified myself) of a recent problem that’s coming up during synchronization. As far as I know, this only affects Google Apps accounts (not normal Gmail accounts), but of course would like to hear back if that’s not the case.

So it goes like this. You’ve synchronized before and everything is peachy. But all of a sudden Syncman wants to delete all of your Address Book contacts and add a whole new set. Syncman might look something like this…

From what I can tell, this seems to be the result of Google changing the ID format for Google Apps contacts. I’m working on a seamless fix and will try to get it out as soon as possible. If you absolutely can’t wait, a workaround is to empty the ‘Mapping Cache’ in Syncman’s preferences. This will cause Syncman to ‘recalculate’ the mappings between your Address Book and Gmail. This can work perfectly, but there’s also a chance that some duplicates are created.

I apologize for this inconvenience, and will update this post as things progress.

Update:  I’ve just released version 1.0.1 which fixes this issue. You can update by clicking ‘Check for updates…’ from the ‘Syncman’ menu.

Here it is, the official blog of Wateree Software.  Sure would have been nice to have this up last week for the launch of Syncman, but… well… you know how it goes.  Anyways, this is the place to look for updates and news about Wateree Software.

Speaking of that launch, it’s gone very nicely and there’s clearly a desire for good, simple synchronization between Address Book and Gmail.  There were a couple of issues that slipped through, so I hope to release a bugfix release real soon now.  I’ve also gotten great feedback on what features all you folks are looking for and will start working on some new stuff as soon as I can.

So there it is.  First Post!  Looking forward to lots more.

ps.  Please bear with me as I set this house in order. I’ll get around to consolidating more with the Pomoto site and getting rid of this Kubrick theme before too long.