The joys of syncing

For over 4 years now, I've actively been doing development in the sync arena trying to get devices to talk together (I actually did some synchronization stuff in college so my history with sync goes back a bit). This is an area that is under appreciated and people seem to only say things when it doesn't work. Syncing is hard; there are no right ways to sync, just wrong ways. No 2 devices or machines match up there data exactly, so choices have to be made to get things to sync. We do our best, but don't always succeed. My recent experience with syncing has nothing to do with the software I write as I don't use it; I don't use it because I don't like it, I don't use it because I don't use the devices we sync. 2 weeks ago, I bought a Motorola RAZR to replace my Samsung A900 with the idea that I could sync it, or at least sync the contacts. Without much difficulty, I was able to sync the contacts. The calendar was another story, it seemed to die depending on what I was syncing; I suspect it had to do with detached events or some kind of repeating events. So I gave up on the calendars, but was still pleased with the contacts. That was until last week when I started noticing that I was missing email addresses for people. It appears that one of my syncs eat secondary email addresses for people. I think I've rebuilt most of my contacts and it doesn't appear to be happening more. While I was a little annoyed at the iSync team/Sync Services team initially, having worked on sync, I know how hard it is to prevent problems. Probably some minor bug that caused the first sync to nuke the entries. Oh well, at least it wasn't the stuff I wrote that ate my data.

Charging a Motorola RAZR over USB

The Motorola RAZR has a mini USB plug on it for charging and hooking to a computer which is great as I have lots of those cables lying around. Unfortunately it won't charge over USB from a Mac out of the box. Luckily, I know some tricks and someone told me the magic to get it to charge. I whipped up a little program that tells the RAZR (or any other Motorola cell phone) to charge over USB. My app is free to download. If you like it, please take a look at my ReceiptWallet program and consider purchasing it. The app is pretty simple; place it in your applications folder, launch it and set it as a login item. Whenever you plug in your phone, it should start charging. If your machine goes to sleep, it will stop charging. (For those curious, all the program does is open and close the USB interface on the phone.)

If you can't get the program to work, unfortunately there is nothing I can do about it other that to suggest to Motorola to fix their phone so that it charges automatically when plugged in via USB.

Update, there are "sync only" USB cables that allow you to charge Motorola phones without MotoCharger; I have one and it works quite well. I've also decided to post the source code. You can grab it here. There are no restrictions on the source, just please don't claim it for your own. If you like it or use it, please use my Amazon link to buy something.

Overlooking the obvious

In my latest program, ReceiptWallet, you can create and delete receipts. While I was developing it, I always hit the Delete key to remove receipts as I'm pretty keyboard centric and don't like using the mouse if I can help it. The Delete menu item is always dimmed and I have received a number of messages asking how to delete receipts. I can't believe I forgot to hook up the menu item for Delete. Stupid me. So in the next version, I hooked up the menu item and added a big Delete icon on the toolbar.

Stupid users

Up until my latest product, I typically wrote software that was a bit complex and not easy to setup. This is due to my slightly over active brain trying to solve a problem in what may not be the easiest way. So when I sold software, I could understand when people couldn't set it up and wanted a refund (I didn't like it, of course), so I put verbiage into my store that required people to confirm that the software was working before purchasing so I didn't have to deal with refunds. I thought that my latest product was different because my parents have been using it without problems (they're pretty smart, but sometimes have issues with computers), but a user today proved me wrong. Not only did the user not read my no return policy (uhhh, that's why there is a demo), the user never contacted me for support and his problems were quite minor with one being he couldn't delete a receipt (hit the delete key, more on this in another post) and he couldn't put receipts in collections; the mechanism for doing this is the same as iTunes and iPhoto and I don't hear people complaining about them. I gave the user back his money (minus the processing fee) as frankly, I didn't want to deal with him. For a product that is pretty easy to use and has a demo, I shouldn't have to deal with stupid users.