Monday, September 29, 2008

iPhone Configuration Article on theiLife.com

Nuevasync user Keith Hobin from theiLife posted an excellent article today that has a step-by-step Nuevaysync-on-iPhone configuration guide, including the first documentation we've seen on how to preserve your existing contacts and calendar events (the iPhone rather unhelpfully deletes them when you enable sync). We're grateful to Keith for taking the time to research and write the article. Thanks Keith !

19 comments:

Peter Hollo said...

I'd love to be able to have my entire calendar on my iPhone - both forwards and backwards - as I have a calendar which I've been keeping since my first Palm in 2000, which I've now got on Google calendar.
Obviously it's huge. Unfortunately I'm pretty sure that even syncing through iTunes like this will mean that I lose all the old stuff except for two weeks in the past when I turn on "Exchange" sync again with NuevaSync...
Sound likely?

David Boreham said...

Hi, this sounds unlikely. I think you're saying that your events are already in Google Calendar. If so then nothing about Nuevasync will change those events. However only future and 2-week into the past events will be synced. This limit is to constrain server and network resources. It's possible we will allow syncing infinitely into the past with a future paid service. We'd need to test that the iPhone and other devices can cope gracefully with that many events.

Peter Hollo said...

Hi David,
Thanks - yeah, the events are all there in the Google Calendar, and they aren't touched by NuevaSync so it's fine in that respect.
It is just the desire to have access to my full calendar on the iPhone. Of course this is limited by the iPhone calendar's limited utility for distant events, given the way you have to navigate it - if you could search the damn thing it'd be different ;)

I'd pay for a limitless service though!
I think what I was hoping for was a magical solution that meant that I could get my entire calendar onto the iPhone in one fell swoop and then not have it erased when using Exchange sync. Obviously this isn't a matter for NuevaSync but rather for the way Apple implement Exchange sync, so it turns out I was merely musing aloud. *sigh*

vestini said...

I'd like to report a strange occurrence. Today (Sept. 30) I made a correction to an old entry (Sept. 11th). The entry had been labeled "all day" and I changed it to "9am to 12pm" to have a more accurate record of how long the event really lasted. But when I returned to the Month View, all the entries before September 16th had vanished.

And yet they were still present on Google Calendar.

So I turned off the iPhone sync (all entries disappeared), turned iPhone sync back on and all entries returned just as they are on Google Calendar -- except the entries before September 17th, all gone! (This means that from Sept. 16th, the vanishing point had now moved to Sept. 17th.)

Since these are past events it's not a big deal to have lost them. And I haven't really lost them since they are still on my Google Calendar. Still, I'd like to have a record of past dates on my iPhone...

So I wonder what's happening? I also disabled and then enabled the Calendar on the NeuvaSync status.htm page: same result. (Except the vanishing point remained Sept. 17th.)

The really strange thing is this. I use Sunbird calendar on my desktop which syncs with Google Calendar, too. It has an import feature that adds holidays for any given country. I had installed it on my Sunbird calendar some time ago. Believe it or not, with Sunbird running or not, the holiday dates have not vanished. They alone remain on the iPhone calendar for the period from Sept. 16th backwards as far as I go.

Before the incident today I had made no changes either to the Sunbird or to the Google Calendar. In fact I've made entries only to the iPhone calendar for the whole day.

Stumped? I sure am!
.

David Boreham said...

vestini: what you're seeing is that we only sync events 2-weeks into the past. Older events will remain on the device, once they're there. However when you turned sync off and on that initiated a clean 'resync' and then only 2 weeks of events into the past synced. The two week limit is there to prevent users that have huge numbers of historical events from overloading our servers and bandwidth.

David Boreham said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Doug said...

First off, this product looks fantastic! I've been annoyed with the mobile version of the google calendar for months now, but I can't live without the desktop version. A couple comments questions:

1. Why do the calendars have to be read/write? I would really like to see some read-only calendars in my iPhone calendar application.

2. I would love to be able to see different calendars in different colors and be able to turn their display on and off separately.

3. It would be nice to be able to add events to specific calendars (instead of just the default), but this isn't critical.

4. Can you say a bit about how you store our gmail usernames and passwords? Releasing this info to a small company just makes me nervous.

Thanks much and keep up the great great work!

Doug

LIrunner9 said...

Thanks Keith!! Worked like a charm.

However, today when I added something to google, it did not sync to my phone. I came right here to the blog to read (and learn) and noticed on the previous post (SERVICE WAS DOWN FOR AN HOUR OR TWO) the following comment by C.J.M "I found that my account would not synchronise today but re-authorising the google access has solved the problem"

I did this, and it synced immediately. Thanks C.J.M!!!

It was a very easy thing to do and now I'm syncing again:)

Keep up the great work Nuevasync, I love your service!!!

David Boreham said...

Doug: some answers--
Q: Why do the calendars have to be read/write?
A: Originally we felt that allowing users to modify events on their device that we couldn't sync back to Google would be confusing. We will shortly add the ability to both select which calendars are synced, and to sync read-only and public calendars.
Q: I would love to be able to see different calendars in different colors...
A: We are working on this.
Q: It would be nice to be able to add events to specific calendars
A: This comes along with the multiple calendar support.
Q: Can you say a bit about how you store our gmail usernames and passwords?
A: We don't see, or store any GMail passwords. We use Google OAuth (Google search for more information). Additional details are available on our privacy policy: http://www.nuevasync.com/policies/privacy.html

Doug said...

Thanks Dave! That's all great news and I really like the use of oauth!

I'm looking forward to the next release--let me know if you need any beta testers.

Doug

Balaji Dutt said...

Hi Dave,

Posting here on the hope that you might see this first and reply.

Discovered yesterday that I haven't been able to sync my Windows Mobile 6 calendar to nuevasync for 3+ days and I've tried out all the troubleshooting steps on the site with no success.

I don't want to put in the whole details here but I sent a mail to support@nuevasync.com about 24 hours ago. Would much appreciate it if you could help me out!

Michael said...

What would be the ETA on multiple calendars feature? I am not asking for a firm commitment or anything, but just curious if we are talking about days, weeks, or months.

I am asking because MobileMe is completely incapable of doing this right (unable to sync any non-local calendars without 3rd party sync tools) and I am really hoping your solution will.

Unknown said...

Whats the point of a sync guide if the 2.1 freezing problem has not been resolved? I can't use Nuevasync at all until I know you have fixed this.

David Boreham said...

We're hoping to be able to post an article about the freezing problem tomorrow.

Unknown said...

Could it be possible to sync over the air ICal, Google Calendar and Iphone? I want to keep using ICal as my main calendar application. Is there a way to do it?

David Boreham said...

Yes, you can use either spanning sync, or Google's CalDAV support to sync iCal with Google. Then Nuevasync to sync Google to the iPhone. Many users have this setup.

topcat said...

i just want to say that i've been searching for hours and hours for a solution to the google calendar/outlook calendar > iphone problem. Thank you thank you thank you. This is top class. Look forward to regular updates.

Unknown said...

It's only reading this thread that I've found that the problem I've been trying to solve is, in fact, a Nuevasync design feature - namely it only synchronizes 2 weeks back.
I understand why you're doing this from a bandwidth but from the user's point of view it sucks. I really need to know what I was doing more than 2 weeks ago! Any chance this could be changed?

Unknown said...

It's only reading this thread that I've found that the problem I've been trying to solve is, in fact, a Nuevasync design feature - namely it only synchronizes 2 weeks back.
I understand why you're doing this from a bandwidth but from the user's point of view it sucks. I really need to know what I was doing more than 2 weeks ago! Any chance this could be changed?