Colored Calendar Phase-In

Some details on how iPhone multiple calendar support is being enabled for our users:
In planning the roll out for multiple calendars there was some concern that the extra load on our servers from processing the transition for large numbers of devices all at once might bring down the entire service. Transitioning a device from the old to the new calendar content involves re-fetching all calendar events and quite a bit of churn in the persistent store, so more CPU and disk and network resources are used than for normal syncing. This led to the adoption of a progressive roll out strategy.
In addition, in order to reduce the risk of widespread service instability, we decided to initially deploy first in a mode where 'old' users did not get the new features but newly signed up users did. The idea was that new users never had working sync and therefore if something unfortunate happened they would be much less upset than existing users who had had working sync beforehand.
The plan was to watch for any reports of badness from new users for a while, then if none were seen, begin to enable multiple calendar support for existing users.
What actually happened was that there were no reports of new problems but there was an unrelated server stability issue over the weekend. Investigating that issue delayed the beginning of the 'old user' roll out, and in the meantime someone leaked the existence of multiple calendars for new users in a blog comment.
This prompted the 'official' announcement which of course led to frustration for those users who had not yet been 'enabled'. It was necessary to proceed with caution: enabling 100 users first then watching server load for a while, followed by 1000 users and so on. As of tonight roughly 40,000 users have had multiple calendar support enabled and we expect to enable the remainder tomorrow, assuming no server overload issues show up.

New Features!

NuevaSync has several new features for the New Year:

Support for multiple, separate calendars on Apple iPhone and iPod touch devices is here!  Now you can tell which appointment belongs in which calendar, add appointments to the calendar of your choosing, and filter your display to show only events from a specific calendar.  What is most important of all, your calendars each get their own color.  We are currently phasing this feature in: if you don't see it on your phone yet, you will very shortly.

 

You can now select exactly which of your calendars you want -- or do not want -- to sync.  This feature is available for all users and device-types: just click on the setup link next to the calendar section after logging in to the NuevaSync site.

 

Read-only calendars can now be selected for sync.  This is great for common calendars, like holidays, and for shared calendars from school or work.  You can make changes and remove entries from a read-only calendar on your phone, but those changes will not be applied to the remote version.  On an iPhone or iPod, read-only calendars are marked with an "*" after the name.

 

BlackBerry Support

No, not an early April fool's joke. It's possible to use a BlackBerry device with Nuevasync. An intrepid user told us that they were able to sync (apparently without trouble) using Astrasync. Now, we're not exactly sure if this is a useful capability for BlackBerry users, since there's already a supported Google sync solution, but we thought it was at least worth mentioning here.

Google Deletion Fix

A few users noticed trouble deleting entries, particularly appointments, since yesterday.  We tracked it down to Google's new library and found a spot where, if their HTTP server issues a redirect, some necessary information is lost when it retries, causing the operation to fail.  It is pretty rare, as it only affects deletion and only if there is also a redirect.

We made a fix and built the Google libraries ourselves, which we deployed a little bit ago.  So far we have not seen any similar messages in the logs and we are no longer able to reproduce the problem.

Happy syncing!

Google contact sync problem affecting some users

As noted in the comments on the article below, there is a problem that affects some users that arose when the new contact code was deployed last night. We're still investigating but it appears that users who set up their contact sync some time ago were assigned authentication tokens that do not work with the new Google contacts API. The problem is fixed by logging into our web site and re-requesting access to your Google contacts data. This results in a new token being assigned.
This problem does not affect all users, we suspect only those who signed up several months ago. The real problem here is that our web site does not yet detect and diagnose the problem, and the 'green light' checker says that everything is ok. We will be fixing that later today once we figure out exactly how to detect the problem.
At present, if you had working contact sync yesterday, and now it's not working, and you see 'contact support' in the sync status page, and your account was setup a while ago, then please perform the request access procedure again.

Update: the web site now does detect and display this problem.

Nix on the Suggested Contacts

Syncing only your "real" contacts has been one of our most requested features, and today it is here!  Google released version 2.0 of their API for contacts today.  With this new version we are able to discriminate between your real contacts and your suggested contacts (which include basically anyone you have ever sent an e-mail).

We worked hard to get this out to all our waiting users, and we are happy to say that as of about twenty minutes ago, suggested contacts are no more.

The feature is automatic for any suggested contacts which Google creates from now on.  However, if you already have suggested contacts on your phone we won't actively seek them out to delete them.  If do you want to get rid of them, you will need to resync your contacts (instructions); and in just a few seconds you'll be free of your suggested contacts.

Happy syncing!

Service Restored

We believe that the stability issues we've been experiencing today have been resolved.