What am I running:

• MacBookPro running OSX 10.6.4
• Things-for-Mac v1.4.2 (1420)
• iPhone 3G running v4.1 (8B117)
• Things-for-iPhone v1.6.1

Symptoms:

Individually, I could use Things on Mac, and on iPhone, just fine. However, any attempt to synchronize between the two would cause a progress dialog box on Mac saying “Preparing…” which would just hang, until I force-quit it. In case I was being too impatient, I left it running overnight once but it was still just as hung in the morning.

This hang happened 100% of the time. This hang happened regardless of whether I started synchronization on Mac with File->”Sync with … now”, or on iPhone, by starting Things-on-iPhone while on same wifi network as mac. This hang happened on my home wifi network and also on the office wifi network, and even when I had no other applications running on my mac.

This setup has been working without problems for months, and I hadnt installed any new software or updated any existing software, so I’m still baffled what caused this problem.

Here’s some things I tried first, unsuccessfully:

• rebooting mac, rebooting phone, clicking sync. Hang.
• rebooting mac, rebooting phone, removing phone from list of devices, adding phone into list of devices, re-pairing iPhone to mac, clicking sync. Hang.
• removing things from iphone and reinstalling through itunes, rebooting mac, rebooting phone, removing phone from list of devices, adding phone into list of devices, re-pairing iPhone to mac, clicking sync. Hang.
• Repeat all of the above on home wifi, and then again on work wifi.
• At home I also tried all of this after rebooting my home wifi access point.
• All to no success.

At that point, I remembered the idea of taking backups, so backed up the entire Things data directory, which in my case, was in /Users/john/Things:
$ cd /Users/john
$ rsync -av Things Things-2010-10-01

Note: using “rsync” preserved the timestamps, in case that was part of the synchronization logic.

Here’s the steps that fixed it:

• remove Things from iPhone
• exit Things on Mac
• inside the Things directory on Mac, there is a “Backups” directory. This contains daily backups of your Things data. I copied the oldest backup over the current “latest” Things data file, as follows:
  $ cd /Users/john/Things/Backups
$ cp DatabaseBackup\ 2010-09-29\ \(653\).xml ../Database.xml


• reinstall Things on iPhone
• start Things on iPhone
• start Things on Mac
• remove phone from list of devices, add phone into list of devices, re-pair iPhone to Mac
• exit Things on Mac, Things on iPhone
• start Things on Mac, Things on iPhone, and click sync.
• It took several minutes of “Pending…”, but this time the progress bar was moving which gave me hope. After a few minutes of this, success! I could now see all the items on my ToDo on both devices!! OK, it was all from almost a week old backup – but still, encouraging progress.

At this point, my theory was that something happened during the week that corrupted the Things data xml file. The files were all still valid xml files, so something more subtle was wrong. To find when the corruption happened, I repeated these steps for each different backup, each time copying up the next newest backup. In theory, once I found the corrupted xml file, sync should not work again. However, following the process above, each restore attempt worked, all the way to the latest backup! I ended up with the latest contents of my Things-on-Mac finally visible again on my Things-on-iPhone.

Final step was to do a quick test update on Mac, along with another test update on iPhone, then syncing to verify that both changes were handled correctly. This worked fine too – so everything is good!

take care
John.

Adding to the confusion, I’ve had trouble keeping all my various electronic calendars in sync with each other; some calendars were in one timezone, some in another timezone, while some ignored timezone and displayed meetings at mixed times. Having finally figured it out, I’m posting here in case others find this useful, and also so I can remember what exactly to undo when I get back to MountainView.

1. In Zimbra: click on the “Preferences” tab, and select new timezone from the “Default Timezone” popdown list. Click “save”. Logout. Login. Notice the calendar map existing events to the new local time.
2. In OSX 10.5 10.6 on my MacBookPro: click on clock/timer on menu bar,  and select “Open Date & Time…”. Select the “TimeZone” tab, pick your new home timezone and then close that dialog box.
3. In iCal, go to Preferences->Advanced, make sure that “Turn on timezone support” is enabled and close the dialog box. Now, back to the iCal main display of calendar events, in the top right corner, click on whatever timezone is written in gray font above the search box. This will show a popup list which includes all time zones already enabled in iCal, and has “Other…” at the bottom of the list. If your new timezone is not listed, select “Other…”,  add it to the list, and click “ok”. Now back at the iCal main display, make sure your new timezone is selected in the popup list. Notice the calendar now display existing events in the new local time.
4. In iPhone: go to “Settings->Mail,Contacts,Calendars”. At the bottom of the list, select “Time Zone Support”. Make sure “Time Zone Support” is “on”, and set “TimeZone” to your new local city. Notice the calendar now display existing events in the new local time. UPDATE: With iOS4.1, I noticed that the new timezone did not change as expected. I went into “General->Date&Time”, turned off “Set Automatically”, then turned it back on,a and presto the timezone changed as expected. joduinn 13nov2010
5. Add one test calendar entry into the iPhone and another into Zimbra. Force a sync, and confirm you can see both test entries in iPhone, iCal, and Zimbra – and all are at the right time.

Finally: Get the FoxClocks addon. Its accurate. It takes up very little screen space. Its a real gem. And it handled all the Daylight Savings changes this week just perfectly in “real world testing” (ie when I watched the US-times change Sunday and then re-asked someone in each timezone what their new time was!). Because of my calendar woes, I missed a few meetings this week, but things would have been much worse without FoxClocks!

Before starting, you need to do the following:

1. On a MS Windows PC, install palm desktop and iTunes. (If you primarily use iTunes on another computer, its ok to just install iTunes on the windows PC, do this one-off data transfer, and then throw away that iTunes installation).
2. Start Programs->Accessories->AddressBook and make sure that the Microsoft Address book is empty. (Note: this is not to be confused with MS Outlook, which is very different!)
3. On the Palm Pilot/Treo, look through all the contacts for the following gotchas:

• If any contact has two entries of the same type (for example, a person with two mobile numbers, or two work phone numbers), you will need to manually remove/rename one of these numbers before you start. I noticed that any contacts with multiple entries of the same type ended up losing all but one.
• If you have the same person listed multiple times in your Palm Pilot/Treo, this will cause an error later on. I discovered that I accidentally had the same person entered twice, in two different categories. These duplicate names caused errors later on in the export process, so its best to check and fix this before you start. Worst case, if you miss a duplicate, its quick and easy to just throw away all the conversion work and restart from the beginning again….but it sure it annoying!
• Check for any occurrences of  ‘=  (single-quote followed by equals)  in your contacts, or attached notes. If you find this anywhere, you must change them to something else before you can continue. It seems that ‘= (single-quote followed by equals) is used as a delimiter somewhere in the conversion process, so anything after that gets cut from that specific person’s info, and never transferred.
• “Custom fields” are not transferred, so you should either migrate that data to one of the “standard” fields, or make a note of them, and come back later to cleanup by manually copying from palm desktop into MS Address book.

OK, thats it. Now we’re ready to begin:

1. Hotsync your Palm pilot/treo with the Palm Desktop one final time. Remember, backups are your friend!
2. Start Palm Desktop and view the Address page. Select the contacts you want to bring over (ctrl-A on keyboard if you want them all), then choose File->ExportvCard… to save all your contacts into one single file on your desktop.
3. Start Programs->Accessories->AddressBook
4. Drag and drop the newly created file from your desktop into Microsoft AddressBook. You’ll be asked to press “ok” for each entry being imported into AddressBook. Annoying but its very quick.
5. Unplug your Palm Pilot/Treo, and plug in your iPhone.
6. Start iTunes. On the iPhone page, Info tab, choose to sync contacts with Microsoft Address Book and click Apply.
7. Sync your iPhone with iTunes – this will in turn pull the contacts from the Microsoft Address Book.
8. On iPhone, look in Contacts app, and verify that all your contacts transferred over correctly. Specifically, look for long attached notes to make sure nothing was truncated.
9. Undo step (6) in iTunes.

Thats it!

Again, this only transfers Contact info; I’m still investigating exporting Calendaring, ToDo and other types of “legacy data” – any hints?

Big tip-o-the-hat to: http://www.fixya.com/support/t161691-downloading_contacts_from_palm_iphone and also http://www.dba2csv.com. Both were wonderful help!

All this left me wondering why Apple didnt provide an import utility to handle migrating from Palm Pilot to iPhone…or from BlackBerry to iPhone.  That would sure make it easier for business users to migrate over to iPhone. Oh well.

UPDATE: These same instructions worked great tonight when migrating a friend from a Palm Pilot to a new iPhone 4Gs. Added warning about custom fields, which I missed in this first blog. joduinn 04-dec-2011