"Daylite has encountered a fatal error during synchronization and must close"

I'm getting this every time the program synchs or I add or delete anything. This has rendered the program useless.

Anyone having similar concerns?

In most cases, this is caused by a record we cannot handle for some reason. There might be some unexpected data. Unfortunately we can't just skip the record because it would delete it from your whole system. We'd rather avoid that.

Hopefully you've emailed the sync failure. I'll ask engineering to look at it. They can *usually* identify the exact culprit after you send it in the logs.

quote:

Originally posted by vashondan:
"Daylite has encountered a fatal error during synchronization and must close"

I'm getting this every time the program synchs or I add or delete anything. This has rendered the program useless.

Anyone having similar concerns?

Yes. And I've posted messages about it in this forum early in December here, and sent logs in (where possible) to MarketCircle.

There appears to be a bug triggered when you add a new contact from AddressBook into the "Daylite" Group - when this is sync'd to Daylite it triggers a Fatal Error. Once it happens, there is no way around it apart from removing the contact from the Daylite group and trying again. Comments suggesting that this is caused by 'duplicates' are misleading - it happens whether the added contact is duplicate or not.

If you want to add new contacts from you AddressBook to your Daylite database, only way we've found that works reliably is as follows:

• Identify contacts to add in AddressBook = use Apple-click to get multiple contacts
  
• Drag these to your desktop to create VCF files
  
• Import these contacts into Daylite via VCF files
  
• Move contacts from Daylite list into Sync list
  
• Sync - contacts appear in Address Book.
  

One major problem with this is that if you do it this way when the contact arrives back in AB it overwrites the existing contact and deletes anything in original contact plus details of all group assignments, and does this without triggering the 'conflict resolver'. So you really need to be careful with this. AB adds group assignments as a note field on exported contacts - so you can in theory rebuild the group assignments from this note - but if you are working with lots of contacts this is not practicable.

There appears to be an unexplained / serious bug here - the crashes should not occur, and the duplicate contact should not delete the Address Book version. Hopefully this is getting priority attention within Market Circle and will be resolved quickly.

I am having the same problem, and have emailed the reports, but have heard nothing back from MarketCircle.. would be nice to get a reply.

I'm now getting this as well. I have submitted the error report to Marketcircle.

What is the next stage?

Daylite is the hub of our entire company and not being able to use it is a MAJOR headache

quote:

Originally posted by Matt Rycroft:
What is the next stage?

Daylite is the hub of our entire company and not being able to use it is a MAJOR headache

Someone in marketcircle is looking in to the crashes reported in December - but most of the time so far has been taken up with them reaching some understanding of issue as was reported. I think they now agree it is a repeatable fault that needs to be fixed - but not had this confirmed in any clear sense yet. As a result, it is not surprising that so far they've not come up with either an explanation or a suggestion for a fix.

Until then, the work-around described in my earlier post is an option for you - simply don't add contacts to Daylite via the Address Book sync system: add them direct to Daylite and sync-back to Address Book. It's not ideal for lots of reasons, but at least it seems to work.

Add me to the list...just turned off syncing...but that kills my Blackberry sync as well

This is absolutely killing me. Company wide, sync is no longer working and we can't and shouldn't have to figure out. Please solve this ASAP - like now! So far I've had no response from Marketcircle folks.

Also experiencing the issue.

Also experiencing this issue. Have sent several error reports, received no reply. DL seems like a really nice application - except for this. My trial period has now come to an end, and I'm not going to fork out the money for a licence until this thread confirms that the bug has been fixed.

I too am getting the same problem, but it looks like my contacts are syncing but my calendar is not, which is what I really cared about. Please fix asap because we are about to start looking into another software option that will do this automatically.

Although travelling hopefully, have bad feeling about this. I just got a response from DL tech support today that was a verbatim copy of the 'solution' they sent through to me just shy of a month ago. This despite me sending in multiple crash logs in December demonstrating that the suggested fix doesn't work.

I've also written fairly (I think) clear description of problem, which suggests that at least the bit of support I'm talking to isn't actually listening.

About a year ago I had a similar experience with Chronos - developer of 'SOHO Organiser' - a product in very much same space (but about a year ahead in terms of working on this iSync / Openbase integration). Their product worked pretty well except for the communications between Openbase, SyncServices, and their client app and iCal / AB etc. There, the problems where horribly worse (trashing the SyncServices 'truth' database, and requiring arcane delving into OS X to fix), and we gave up on product after several months of trying - but before any sign of it becoming reliable.

Lesson - this syncservices stuff is critical to the utility of the product, but not easy to get right. Right now the jury is out on whether MarketCircle are paying this issue enough attention. But, for now we're hopeful.

Not that this will help with your main issue here but you will find it faster to import data into Daylite from AddressBook by taking the list of vCards adn dropping them onto the Daylite icon in the dock rather than dropping them onto the desktop and then importing to Daylite.

Furthermore, the best way to keep the crashes to a minimum is to:

1. For Syncing with AddressBook make sure you use the Daylite Group option rather than synching your entire DL database with AddressBook. You can then use Sync list to control which contacts get synced with AddressBook.

2. Try to keep the list of contacts and organisations that you sync with AddressBook to an absolute minimum. That is to say 100-200 tops. Do you really need more than this in your Blackberry at one time?

3. Rather than fighting with the different data in Daylite, AddressBook, iCal and .Mac I have employed a simple rule once my data is in place.
I do not use anything else but Daylite to make changes to the data. The changes in Daylite then "propagate" out to AddressBook, iCal and then on to .mac or iPhone/Blackberry.

The issue does still need to be dealt with but the above might be of some help.

regards

Bill

quote:

Originally posted by Bill Verkaik:
Not that this will help with your main issue here but you will find it faster to import data into Daylite from AddressBook by taking the list of vCards adn dropping them onto the Daylite icon in the dock rather than dropping them onto the desktop and then importing to Daylite.

Thanks for the hint. Useful.

quote:

Furthermore, the best way to keep the crashes to a minimum is to:

1. For Syncing with AddressBook make sure you use the Daylite Group option rather than synching your entire DL

Yes, already doing this.

quote:

2. Try to keep the list of contacts and organisations that you sync with AddressBook to an absolute minimum.
3. ... The changes in Daylite then "propagate" out to AddressBook, iCal and then on to .mac or iPhone/Blackberry.

We are in process of developing the Daylite database, and to do this we need to migrate from our current system of multiple / different sets of contact info held on various Address Book databases to one shared database. Only a sub-set of the contacts in any individual's AB needs to go into Daylite, and there is high likelihood that there will be duplicates among the contacts to be added to Daylite. Clearly the easiest way to do this would be for each user to move those contacts that they want to share into their 'Daylite Group' in AB, and have conflict resolver fix up duplicates as they emerge. Dragging and dropping VCFs from AB to Daylite is less good because of the 'overwrite what is there' behaviour we've seen when contacts that exist in AB are added to Daylite via VCF copy.

As for only having a few people in the sync list - well yes, it is one way of making problem go away. Having no contacts in Daylite Group would be better still from that perspective I suspect But in real world, we are looking for system that allows information on contacts to be updated via phone / laptop / whatever and sync back to central database. This works better if there are more contacts on phone than not. The idea that we only enter data into Daylite is not a practical option for us.

We've been waiting for a couple of years for a decent shared contact system to emerge that works nicely on OS X and plays cleanly with iSync. Others have tried and failed (e.g. Chronos / SOHO Organizer) in past, and several are trying now (e.g. Now Software, j2anywhere, marketcircle). We'd hoped that Daylite would do the job (and have shelled out over £1K so far on licences to support this) but increasingly getting feeling that (as with Chronos in past) the sync features don't really work and any problem we see is written off as us 'not using the software properly'.

regarding synching, I've tested the pocketmac blackberry synching software available from blackberry's website. I have a Blackberry pearl.

Pocketmac has a native Daylite option within the program. Daylite must be running at the same time

Also, have to be careful to look thru the entire pick list and make sure no other programs are selected in the options to sync with pocketmac.

Unnamed categories have to be selected, I tested making sure all groups were deselected first.

sync'd all 371 contacts, numbers, web and email addresses, etc. not a hitch. Continues to work, but will test some more.

Jay.