Thursday, February 12, 2009

These Calendars Go To 'Eleven'

Previously we had an eight-calendar limit. As of tonight the limit on the number of calendars that can be selected to sync has been increased to 11.

(Some readers may need to watch this).

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

New Contact Code

New code dealing with physical address processing was deployed last night. The goal was to do a good job of translating postal addresses as they appear on GMail contacts into the device format. This is an interesting problem because there are many different address formats in use around the world and the address comes to us free-form with no fields identified. The new code is able to recognize addresses from a large number of countries, although it may still be challenged by some UK addresses. If the country is present in the contact's address the iPhone map application should now correctly locate addresses in countries other than the good old USA. The iPhone seems to have bug in its contact edit screen: a contact that has a valid country (for example the phone's map app finds the address correctly) will always display 'United States' for the country if you edit the contact. This doesn't happen for contacts entered on the device itself. We will be adding a 'default country' setting to the web site soon that allows a global override for the country on all contacts that don't already have their country set. Thank you to all the users from France and other countries who helped make this feature happen.
The mysterious 'squares' in contact names problem has also been fixed, along with a few contact issues seen with Windows Mobile devices (file-as not being always set, contacts appearing as 'Unknown').

Monday, February 9, 2009

Do not adjust your set. Nuevasync is still here.

Here are some answers to the questions we've been asked today:
Is Google's new sync service similar to Nuevasync ? Yes the two services use the same sync capabilities present in the same devices including the iPhone, and today provide a similar set of features.
Did Google use any of our technology? No.
Does this mean the end of Nuevasync ? No, there will be much more to Nuevasync than today's Google sync service.
Is this good news for Nuevasync ? Yes. I'm pleased that Google have adopted our approach to mobile sync. It's also good to read that they are using their resources and influence with device vendors to enhance the quality of device sync client code.
If you guys weren't planning to become the sync engine for Google, why did you create your Google service ? We wanted to develop really solid sync server software and Google was picked as a data source back in 2007 when work began on our 'demo' service. Google had a decent calendar application and a usable API. The plan was to attract a few hundred users and fix any bugs they revealed in the code. There are 120,000 users today so we over-achieved a little on the plan but we've also fixed some very obscure bugs!
Which new features are coming next ? E-mail sync (from any IMAP mailbox), support for other calendar services besides Google, a solution for users who need to use a corporate Exchange server, tasks support, major web site improvements. We will also fix all the bugs ;) Keep the support mails coming...