Multiple Computers? Synchronize them!

Many of us now have a computer at work and a computer or two at home, and a cell phone or a PDA, and we want our schedule and files to be available on all of them. Over the last year, many new file synchronizers have been released by companies, most prominently Apple's release of Mobile Me – they say they got it right this time. Did they? How does it compare?

I've tried to find a way to synchronize my files, my calendar, and my bookmarks across three computers, a cell phone, and a PDA. I have a Mac, a work PC, a home PC, a Palm Treo, and a iPod Touch. The quest is to see if we can get all or most of them synchronized – without risking loss of privacy (for example, if you want to make sure your personal calendar is stored somewhere your boss can't see it).

Bookmarks
Compared: MobileMe, Foxmarks
MobileMe only works if you use only Safari on your mac. On Windows it supports only Safari or Internet Explorer. For me, Safari was almost good enough but Firefox has a more refined bookmark manager and I found it easier to deal with my 2200+ bookmarks on Firefox – Safari with that number of bookmarks is very clunky. Firefox is not an option with MobileMe. Safari is not an option for Foxmarks.
Winner: No overall winer. Use Foxmarks if you only use Firefox, and use MobileMe if you only use Safari and an iPhone or iPod Touch.

Calendar
Compared: MobileMe, Plaxo, CompanionLink, Google Calendar Sync
MobileMe is the easiest to set up, but can be too easy – it treats all information the same way, which can be a problem for privacy if you want to keep some calendars off your work machine. I want to get my work calendar on my cell phone, but I don't want to put my personal private appointments on my company's public Microsoft Exchange server – I don't want the IT guy to know I went on a date with my girlfriend last night and that I have an eye doctor appointment on Thursday. For this, MobileMe would not work, and neither would Google's Calendar sync (which also doesn't support mac). CompanionLink almost works – it syncs with Google Calendar and it'll sync only with the Calendars you want to sync, but it is buggy (it kept putting duplicates of events up on Google Calendar which I'd need to keep deleting) and you need to buy a new copy for each computer you get – that can get pricy fast. And, it doesn't work on a mac – Windows only. So, CompanionLink is out. Next, I tried Plaxo – a little harder to find, but free across computers, and it syncs whatever calendars you want with any other calendars on iCal, Outlook, Plaxo, Google Calendar, and more. I was quite surprised! I ran into a few bugs, but less bugs than other systems and I managed to fix it and clean up my calendar. So I can accept an event at work in Outlook, a personal event in Gmail (though sometimes it fails to sync with Google calendar for an unknown reason), and they both show up on my Palm Treo – exactly what I was looking for.
One thing to remember – if you start synching your calendar with multiple computers, you start having to worry about whether your computers had time to sync with each other while they were online – if they didn't get time to synch up, one calendar can still be out of date behind other calendars, and the longer the chain of computers, the more likely something will be out of sync.
Winner: Plaxo

Files
Compared: MobileMe, Windows Live FolderShare, Unison, PowerFolder
MobileMe almost worked. It was easy to set up, but I had trouble getting mounting the files under it to work under Windows – this is probably a Windows problem. Also, it seemed to think that there were sync errors when there were none – sometimes when I turn on my Mac it makes me go through a list of a hundred items to tell it that none of them have changed.
Windows Live FolderShare was easier to set up than Mobile Me on both my Mac and Windows machine. The strength and weakness of it is that it doesn't store your files on a server, it just sends them back and forth between the two machines.
Unison is an oldie. If you're a technical user and willing to spend hours writing config files and setting everythng up, it might work. But if you have machines behind firewalls or routers, you might never get it working. Plus, the UI is depressingly simple comand line system.
PowerFolder was fairly quick to set up, although it has a fairly complicated front end (my girlfriend needed help setting it up for her and had trouble understanding when it was working and when it wasn't working). PowerFolder does a mediocre job of abstracting away the need to understand your network. However, it uses an online backup solution – Windows Live FolderShare does not have an online backup. The online backup solution worked from all of the computers I tried, and after configuration I had few problems with it.
Winner: PowerFolder


Summary
So, there is no one solution that will solve all of your multiple computer woes with no fuss – at least not yet. However, you can put together a series of tools to get the magic to happen in the background – once you put them all together and configure them all, the magic will happen in the background.

Comparing different phones?

This isn't usability centered -- but they do try quantitative evaluations of various phone features, mostly comparing them by amount of time to do an action if you know how to use it. It's the most thorough phone comparison site I've ever seen:

http://www.wirelessinfo.com/ratings.php

iPhone: Don't buy one yet (Part II)

Quick Review
iPhone Style: 10/10. Customer Service: 1/10 (phone still doesn't work). Touch Screen: 10/10. Bluetooth: 1/10 (no music). iPod: 9/10 (because of no bluetooth music). Compatibility with existing iPod addons like Nike Plus: 1/10 (reportedly none work yet). Web on Wi-Fi: 10/10 (compared to existing phones). Keyboard: 6/10 (incredible for a touchscreen, poor compared to mini keyboards). Photo browsing: 10/10 (great screen and touch controls). Cost: 4/10 (more expensive than comparable phones and 2G data plans). Watching video & YouTube: 8/10. Text editing: 2/10 (no copy, paste, nor undo). Calendar: 5/10 (nothing new, missing some features). Todo List: 1/10 (no Todo list like Palm or Windows Mobile).

Overall: 6/10 -- Yes it's revolutionary, and it's stunning, but I'm returning mine -- read the rest for why.


Full Review
I bought an iPhone because I thought I'd be able to listen wirelessly to music and podcasts through my bluetooth headset, or wired through my regular wired headphones -- I can't (no A2DP, and a custom headphone plug).

I bought an iPhone because I thought I'd be able to get phone calls with my existing number -- I can't (they say they can't transfer a number across mailing zip codes).

I bought an iPhone to take notes on -- I can't figure out how to copy and paste (the word "paste" isn't in the manual).

I bought an iPhone so that I'd be up and running in "minutes" -- after 9 days of waiting and many hours on hold, my phone still isn't on AT&T and they only finally told me why. By the way, you have to call at least 3 different phone numbers depending upon your iPhone problem -- if you call the wrong one they'll just tell you to call the next number. (Other reviewers had even more problems than me).

I bought an iPhone so I could look at the pretty graphics and great multi-touch UI -- and I can. But that's not enough.

Now, the iPhone does look superb. I love the UI, the graphics, and the style. Competitors will need to move quick to catch up. As Apple smooths out their bugs the iPhone could really come to dominate a niche of the SmartPhone market just like the iPod did -- the iPhone really is revolutionary, but as with most revolutions, they don't happen in a day.

Touch Screen
The multi-touch interface is the first touch screen I've ever played with that does it right. Fingers aren't too big to type because it knows where the whole finger is -- and it does the right thing. Normally your finger blocks what you are doing so you can't see it -- but when you use the keyboard a little letter pops up so you can see what you're tying (and if you hit the wrong key, just drag your finger a little to get the correct key before letting go). If your finger would block your cursor when trying to place the cursor, a little magnifying glass pops up so you can see where the cursor is really going. The flick to scroll and the pinch to zoom are finally here -- despite being in research touch-screen systems since the 1970's. So you can drop that annoying stylus! You really don't need it. (Actually, stylus's don't work on the touchscreen -- it has to be a finger to activate the sensor, which may be a benefit).

Summary
So, my recommendation? Don't buy an iPhone yet -- wait a year or two while Apple and AT&T iron out their issues and the platform matures a little -- and then buy it! You'll like it. Until then, borrow someone else's iPhone to play with it for a little while -- you'll be more happy just playing with it, not owning it -- yet. As for me, I'm repacking mine and returning it to the store -- and will try to buy it again when they release iPhone version 2.

iPhone: Don't buy one yet (Part I)

At 7pm Friday, after an hour and a half in line, I became a proud owner of a brand new iPhone. Well, I own one at least.

Activation Woes
On the third day, I have still not been able to activate my phone. There is a rumor that online activation can take only a few minutes. But for me, it's been two days and the phone doesn't do anything yet -- it still just says "Activate using iTunes". Apple won't return my phone calls, won't answer the phone, and hasn't sent me an error message saying why yet. (I have been constantly plugging my phone into iTunes to see if it was activated, to no avail).

The most descriptive error message has been a late email saying "AT&T has identified a problem with the information you provided". But ut didn't tell me that -- the error message was constantly "needs more time" (it only sent me an email, never gave a good error message).

My recommendation? If you're still in line, jump out of line and don't buy one yet -- wait a few months until Apple and AT&T have worked out the bugs in their system and gotten over the initial rush and issues. For me, the next blog update may either have a full review, or it might say how hard it was to get a refund on my phone.

Parsing Piles of Plain Text Pretty Simple

This is a very interesting research project -- on Monday it saved me hours of writing parsing code or days of copying and pasting by hand. It's a little tricky to learn the first time, but it designs your parsing expression for you!

http://groups.csail.mit.edu/uid/lapis/

Say you have a list of text names and phone numbers and comments:

Aaron Powers 555-123-1234 (he's a wierd one)
John Cleese 01-331-109-091 (he's even wierder)
Bill Clinton 081-101-1010 (no comment)

But they're in this plain text format, without commas or any good delimiters and you want to get them into a spreadsheet. You could try to remember RegExp. Or you could highlight the phone number in Lapis and it'll highlight all the phone numbers. If it gets it wrong, you just tell it which one was wrong and it'll highlight it, and it'll figure out traits of the text that match your needs.
It does much more complicated parsing than this example.

Thanks, Lapis. I just wish it was integrated into more editors.

TicketMaster is easy? Says who?

Ticketmaster has a site that looks like they tried to make it easy to use -- but when you count up the time wasted mostly from timeouts, it weighs back in the other direction. I'm going back to ordering tickets over the phone.

Ticketmaster, along with several other ticketing sites, have put in so many security features to prevent people from holding tickets that it's really hard to buy tickets. So much for being user friendly. I bet it's a vicious cycle -- the more you make it hard for people to buy tickets, the more tickets will be on hold that won't get bought, the more that you need to add security features to make it harder.

This is a pretty funny review: http://www.frogreview.com/m/05/11/ticketmaster/

My Research In The News

http://www.newscientisttech.com/article/mg19325966.500-if-youre-happy-the-robot-knows-it.html
http://www.lse.co.uk/ShowStory.asp?story=ZS2235369M&news_headline=scientists_develop_r2d2_computer

I have even been granted an honorary degree by the 2nd article, I'm now "Dr Aaron Powers". (They didn't get all the facts right on the paper, though. You can read the real thing if you care.)

There's also a good article by the same author on a friend's paper at HRI too:

http://www.newscientisttech.com/article/dn11434-robots-with-rhythm-could-rock-your-world.html