#osx

Sync iPhone and Google Calendar via NuevaSync

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I have been tin­ker­ing around try­ing to get GCAL­Dae­mon work­ing again after the update to Leop­ard, but it just hasn’t been the same from its for­mer self of 1-to-1 sync. Thought you can find dif­fer­ent appli­ca­tions that may allow you to do this, it’s one thing to get it for free and do through the power of the crowd. But things have been look­ing grim lately as get­ting GCAL­Dae­mon to work with Leop­ard is still up in the air. Enter NuevaSync.

Nueva­Sync allows direct, over-the-air, native syn­chro­niza­tion of cer­tain smart phones and PDA devices with pub­lic PIM, and cal­en­dar­ing ser­vices includ­ing Google Cal­en­dar. Nueva­Sync does not need any soft­ware installed on your device because it uses syn­chro­niza­tion pro­to­cols that are already built in.

I had given it a chance. It requires you signup w/ nuevasync.com. Yah, I know its another account to keep track of from the many ser­vices out there, but hey… if it works—it works. The setup is pretty sim­ple. You pretty much just have to fol­low the instruc­tions which were writ­ten in terms of a 7th-grader—easy enough.

A cou­ple of facts that I found out along with NuevaSync’s FAQ:

  • It cur­rently sup­ports the fol­low­ing mobile devices:
    • Apple iPhone 2.0, iPhone 3G and iPod Touch 2.0
    • Win­dows Mobile based PDAs and smartphones
  • You’ll be doing push/fetch to NuevaSync’s “Exchange Server”
  • Adding an alarm noti­fi­ca­tion on an event will default to a “Pop-up” reminder in the event’s Google Cal­en­dar (gCal) ver­sion. Vice-versa; you’ll need to select “Pop-up” as the type of remind when cre­at­ing the event in gCal in order to have it also avail­able in your iPhone.
  • Hav­ing your iPhone’s set­ting of “Push to OFF” and “Fetch to Man­u­ally” will still enable to Nueva­Sync to per­form its job while allow­ing you to save your iPhone’s mojo.
  • It can sync to mul­ti­ple cal­en­dars under your gCal account of those Cal­en­dars you have a per­mis­sion to write to. You may find out which ones via going to the Nueva­Sync sta­tus page.
  • Even though you can sync with mul­ti­ple cal­en­dars, cre­at­ing an event in your iPhone would default to your main cal­en­dar. This you can say would be a step back if your try­ing to keep things very orga­nized and cat­e­go­rize your events (i.e. Per­sonal, Work, Project A, Project B, etc.).

Sounds good right? So, if you aren’t really using more than one cal­en­dar or don’t care if the events from your write-permitted cal­en­dars are merged together into one in your iPhone, I’d def­i­nitely rec­om­mend you to give Nueva­Sync a try. But don’t worry, they have that item in their TODO:

So when will you sup­port mul­ti­ple cal­en­dars on the Apple devices?
Soon, it’s one of our top new fea­ture priorities.

Any­ways, I hope this helps. Please do let me know if you hap­pen to find new, inter­est­ing things about it. Have a good sync!

Find Duplicates in Address Book

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Ever had the sit­u­a­tion where you have synced your iPhone (to iTunes OS X) and hap­pen to sync both the con­tacts from your Address Book and Google Con­tacts? Or, just hap­pen to add someone’s new con­tact info as another contact-card? Well, here’s how I cleaned and merged dupli­cate con­tacts so that my Address Book per­forms like a champ.

  1. Launch Script Edi­tor (Applications/AppleScript/Script Editor)
  2. Paste the fol­low­ing code snippet 
    tell application "Address Book"
    set biglist to {}
    set theGroup to count every person
    if not (exists (group "Duplicate Entries")) then
        make new group with properties {name:"Duplicate Entries"}
    end if
    set the_names to the name of every person as list
    repeat with i from 1 to number of items in the_names
        set this_Name to item i of the_names
        set theName to name of person this_Name as string
        if this_Name is not in biglist then
            copy this_Name to end of biglist
        else
            add (people whose name is theName) to group "Duplicate Entries"
        end if
    end repeat
    save addressbook
end tell
  3. Save your newly cre­ated script (would usu­ally default to ~/Documents/AppleScripts/), and just open/run it

Now, the eas­i­est way to fig­ure out if its run­ning or not (at least for me) was to run the Activ­ity Mon­i­tor and sort by CPU. I sim­ply just waited to see if Address Book would climb to the top doing 90+, and back down to nil. When this is done, you should be able to see a group called “Dupli­cate Entries”. From there, you may now sort through the details and delete the ones that you don’t need.

Note: You can also do a quick merge via Address Book itself from dupli­cate con­tacts. How­ever, you won’t be able to see which con­tacts are being merged as its just a set-it-and-forget kind of deal. If you do not care and sim­ply just want to get rid of those dupes, you can do so by doing the following:

  1. Launch Address Book
  2. Select Card from its menu
  3. Then, select Look­ing for Dupli­cates… and just go through the fol­low­ing prompts after search results finishes

Adium Chat Transcripts Location

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This applies to those using the ever-popular IM client, Adium.

Adium is a free instant mes­sag­ing appli­ca­tion for Mac OS X that can con­nect to AIM, MSN, Jab­ber, Yahoo, and more.

If you are in a sit­u­a­tion were you would need to back up your chat tran­scripts due to account migra­tion, or in need to do a clean instal­la­tion of your OS X machine, here’s where to start:

~/Library/Application Support/Adium 2.0/Users/Default/Logs

Note: This is cur­rent as of Leop­ard OS X 10.5.4, and Adium 2.x.

MacBook/Pro — Disable Wake on Lid Open

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It seems like the cur­rent Soft­ware Update nul­li­fied my tweak (YMMV). I think this might be help­ful as most of the results showed only how to “dis­able sleep when the lid is closed” vs. dis­abling wake on lid open.

Any­ways, to do so, do the fol­low­ing in your Ter­mi­nal (Appli­ca­tion > Util­i­ties > Terminal.app):

Check cur­rent state (i.e. “lidwake”):

$ pmset -g

Dis­able it:

$ sudo pmset -a lidwake 0

Or put it back to nor­mal (re-enable):

$ sudo pmset -a lidwake 1

Check the cur­rent state again to ver­ify (i.e. “pmset –g”). You shouldn’t have to restart. I hope that helps. Would’ve saved me a cou­ple of min­utes for sure.

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