Just an FYI.

We've promised to get sync services going by the end of 2006. We've started the design and baring anything totally unexpected (we are expecting some surprises), we will keep our promise.

The process of synching takes a lot of thought, design and trial and error.

With sync services, we'll get iCal sync (appointments and tasks), a revised Address Book sync.

One question we have is the following:
A lot of people use DL on both their business and personal lives. But they don't want business data in their iCal or Address Book.

What kind of preference settings would you like to see?

Think about both incoming (from iCal, Address Book into Daylite and vice versa).

Hello,

Just want to reassure everybody that we are constantly reviewing our Calendar, we read all feedback that is sent in. To help our developers please use the Help -> Send Feedback... in Daylite.

Martin, I would ask that you report this error that you have to support, perhaps we could get a copy of your database to look into it further. - If you email support@marketcircle.com we can arrange to get a copy from you. (Quote me I will make sure that we looking into it further for you.)

We cannot talk about future versions in details, but we are actively working on sync services.

Regards

AJ

They way I’d want to handle what gets synced and what doesn’t is via the category mechanism, across Contacts, Orgs, Tasks, etc.

For me, separating out business and personal life is done via categories, but so to are task contexts (a la GTD), so there is little point in sending ’@Office‘ Tasks to a PDA, where I’d be unable to do them anyway.

I’d be quite prepared to have ‘Business—Birthdays’ and ‘Family—Birthdays’ as categories for Events, if I knew I could set only one of these to sync to iCal, for instance.

So, for me a least, the ability to filter what gets synced by catgeory is very important.

quote:

Originally posted by KEVINO:
At the very least, it would be nice to have the ability to have calendar info from DL constantly and automatically synced into iCal

I'll second that. Without this feature I much prefer the benefits of iCal. I'm sure there are some benefitds to using Daylite over iCal but they would have to be very appreciable in oder for me to take on the extra burden of having to constantly update a database. IMO, Daylite would be a great program if it sat seamlesslessly on top of the iApps and provided a unique colaborative and interpolative environment to use that data. I will be watching with intterest to see if DL is able to do this in the future.

Warmest,

Kevin

This is what sync services support will bring, and what MarketCircle has noted multiple times they're working on, and will be available in the next version.

Note of course that Sync Services is functionality that's in OS X 10.4, so it will *require* everyone use 10.4 to get this functionality.

I would be happiest if I had the choice of including both business and personal objects in the sync. Choosing which items to sync via categories seems to make the most sense (to me).

Somehow it seems like you are looking for some more specifics though, so perhaps if you had some specific questions it would help us formulate a better reply.

quote:

Originally posted by Gareth Watson:
Just want to reassure everybody that we are constantly reviewing our Calendar, we read all feedback that is sent in.

I have no doubt about that but sometimes it’s hard to realize because the results are so hard to see

Like Andy and Howard I also would like to be able to control the sync process by chosing the categories I like to be synced.
In case of iCal it could work similar to the current system, where every category would be synced to a separate iCal calendar.
In case of Address Book, it would be great, if categories could be synced to AB Groups.

What about multi-user scenarios?

I would assume you would want a separate calendar for each user you've selected. In the case of another user, categories are ignored.

quote:

One question we have is the following:
A lot of people use DL on both their business and personal lives. But they don't want business data in their iCal or Address Book.

In iCal I've created different Calendars for each of these categoies... Business, Personal, Studio Manager business, Wife's Biz, Wife's personal, Daughter, Bill Pay dates. I also have separate calendars that I download from AIGA, a professional design organization.

These calendars all get posted on icalexchange.com, which keeps us all in sync every 15 minutes. The sync happens via webcal:// protocol over the internet. The calendars are encapsulated in the .ics file format, each with a different name. When one downloads these files and subscribes to a Calendar in iCal, you're given the option of naming the calendar... something similar would help you guys with the calendar categorization problem.

If MC were able to allow access to webcal:// files, and then parse it all out into the DL calendar, that would be great. So I selfishly think the sync that you build should work via this webcal:// protocol rather than building a pipe directly to everyone's local iCal on their computer. This way you could take advantage of what's already out there.

My humble, but hopefully constructive opinion,

Jay

Jay...

This is a great idea! One of the new services in Leopard Server is iCal Server which Apple has made open source. It's basically an extension of the webcal protocol for businesses to share calendars. Like Exchange Server meets iCal. Or maybe it will just be a matter of subscribing with the permissions tied into open directory.

Tony

I have five Macs between my home and office. They all use iCal, and sync through .Mac. Each Mac uses the same .Mac account. I have not had to publish or subscribe to any of my iCal calendars, they automatically appear on each of my Macs within at least one hour [the .Mac sync setting I use]. Any of the five Macs can add, modify, or delete any event or task. We have fifteen calendars 'PATRICK'; 'LYNN'; 'KATHY', 'WARRANTY'; 'PROJECTS'; 'INVOICE', etc. Each calendar has a unique color and appears in the correct color on every Mac. Many of these calendars are only used for the 'task' feature. By doing this, all of my project events and/or tasks can be easily viewed, and even printed out. Because all of my calendars can be viewed within one window, scheduling conflicts can be easily seen and adjusted. Most of the time, I keep many of the other calendars 'unchecked', so I view only what I need to ... Keeping it simple.

I like to think of .Mac as the iHub for syncing. Here all my devices, applications, subscriptions, etc., can, or could sync and then radiate out to the other Macs, devices, etc., whether through internal syncing or through iSync. My laptop can be anywhere there is an internet connection and still sync with my office, etc.

One nice use [in iCal] has been the ability to quickly create a project calendar for a client which then can be published using .Mac. I did this for the first time this year. I entered the project's time-line [events], from start to finish. I made these events 'all day' events. That way they would appear at the very top of my iCal window, which helped keep a clutter free calendar. Whenever I made changes to the project calendar, I simply emailed my client. After I published the calendar to .Mac, a url was generated showing where the project calendar could be viewed, or even subscribed to. My client loved it!

I use Apple's Airport Extreme for connecting to the internet, both at the office and at home. While on the road, I use a Verizon Card to connect my laptop to the internet and to sync through .Mac.

I mention the Airport Extreme as there is a special setting for .Mac syncing if you have an Airport Extreme or Express Base Station. Here are the details from Apple ...

Enabling the NAT Port Mapping Protocol

In the Finder, choose Utilities from the Go menu.
Open Airport Admin Utility.
In the resulting Select Base Station window, select your Airport Extreme or AirPort Express from the list.
Click Configure, then enter the base station password when prompted.
Click the Base Station Options button.
Select the Enable NAT Port Mapping Protocol checkbox.
Click OK.
Click the Update button and wait for the base station to restart.
After your Airport Extreme or AirPort Express restarts, NAT-PMP will be enabled.

About iDisk Syncing and NAT-PMP

If you enable iDisk Syncing in the .Mac pane of System Preferences, or any other .Mac-based sync service, making a change to a synchronized item on one computer will result in the same change being made to another computer on which you have the feature enabled.

NAT-PMP speeds up this process by allowing .Mac servers to initiate contact with other Macintosh systems behind your NAT router as soon as an iDisk update occurs. Otherwise, the sync will occur when another one of your computers initiates contact with the server, which might take up to an hour.
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I have found that syncing through .Mac has been awesome! Instead of everyone [software developers] trying to reinvent the wheel, it is my hope that a simple link to iCal [maybe set up through a preference setting] with the possibility of linking that event or task back to the contact, etc, could be accomplished. However, If an automatic true two-way sync is possible between DL's calendar and iCal, that would be awesome!!!

In either event, I feel .Mac, Address Book and iCal must remain an integral part of DL's syncing approach as it moves forward. By providing that benefit, other company or family Mac users who don't need the high level of control and detail DL provides, could still access a scaled down version of the same information with ease.

I hope this approach may prove useful. Thank you for your consideration.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: wpdv,

I just wanted to add my 2 cents here as well. I'm a huge advocate of SyncServices as well for multiple reasons.

First, (and I don't know if any of you have noticed this) but when you export an iCal calendar from DL (the only feasible way to get calendars on to my Treo), invited meetings DON'T SHOW UP!!! Seriously, that's a major oversight as far as I'm concerned. I've basically stopped exporting to iCal because it's pretty much worthless if I'm only getting a fraction of my meetings to show up. Also, I tend to agree that MC is a great company, but this is one area where I've asked again and again to have this addressed--even if just for a stop-gap solution until SyncServices--and still nothing. IMHO, this is a, if not THE, major shortcoming of DL right now.

Second, I really want SyncServices for integration with QuickBooks. I recently discovered that QB2007 (don't know if it was there before) supports SyncServices for contacts. Now, I know that DL supported exporting to contacts to QB prior to 3.0 but now that feature is MIA and it's a major PITA.

In short, SyncServices can't come soon enough as far as I'm concerned and I'm glad there's so much activity on this thread. Maybe this way we can push this to the very top of the agenda.

Don't forget to submit your suggestions to feedback!

Just to re-inforce the message. We are currently working on Sync Services.

I cannot give a timeline as of this point.

Hopefully it's still before the end of 2006, but I don't mind hanging on for a little while longer if you've been told by Apple to wait until Leopard and the iPhone come out for the API to be set-in-stone

(If that's it, and you are under NDA, leave a 16 pixel leopard icon on the homepage of your website for 2 minutes after midnight GMT on Tuesday… <wink>

In all seriousness, I'm syncing fine with a Treo 650 and Missing Sync direct from Daylite, and have been from pretty much day one, so it is possible to get something 85% of the way to ideal right now, even if it’s probably one of the hardest things to set up on any system successfully.

(That’s not to be-little anyone having issues, as—sadly—syncing is one of those black arts from both a user and developer perspective, and I’d rather see Marketcircle get it done right, rather than done fast.)

But I agree that, hopefully, Sync Services will allow a much more seamless sharing of data across the whole OS, regardless of the underlying data formats and mechanisms in each specific app.

I still longer for the days of Newton ‘soups’ for this kind of shared data, which seemed to make it a lot easier, at least from a user’s perspective.

quote:

Originally posted by AJ:
Just to re-inforce the message. We are currently working on Sync Services.

I cannot give a timeline as of this point.

AJ,

I apologize if you took any offense to my previous post. I'm not 100% used to this forum software and I didn't even realize that you had posted that this was expected before the end of 2006. Had I seen that, I probably would have posted something entirely different...