Argh. Well, I lost Internet in the middle of this posting and didn't notice, so TypePad ate it. Ah well, I hadn't said much anyway.
I'm sure I'll get back to a detailed version of what's so hatefully wrong with Apple Sync Services at a later time, but for now I'm going to fast-forward to the end of the story. Partly because I am bored with it, which makes me worry that you might be bored with it too, but also partly because this weekend while having breakfast with the "popcultural kids" the subject of people using Twitter to complain about software (especially email) and travel and report on writing progress came up. The verdict of this conversation was that all of the above are kind of annoying, but I had done all three within the last week. So, I'm succumbing to peer pressure and trying to tweet responsibly. But fear not, I'm sure my tendency to go into "teacher mode" and "critic mode" will bash its way to the fore at some point soon, and I'll write up the whole bloody mess.
The short of it is, I have now 100% switched over to using Microsoft Entourage.
OmniFocus (which indirectly started this whole mess by being so temptingly cool) is deleted, since I've discovered Entourage's "Project Center" has an equally useful and usable organization system: you can assign tasks, calendar items, address book items, notes, and even mail messages and files on your machine to a "project", and then view those items in one easy-to-read dashboard. It doesn't let you look at all your projects at once, really, but you can do "custom views" that present whatever data you want in list format, so you could make something that is, say, all your "personal" tasks, if you use your PDA's categories religiously (I am trying to be better about it, but I often do data entry with one hand while walking and forget to hit the menu item to change categories. This, my life, like everything, is "miscellaneous").
The Calendar view is very nice and flexible, although at least in Entourage 2004 (more on why I'm not using 2008 in another post -- short answer: Sync Services!) you can't change much about the task view that appears with the Calendar. Ideally this would be sort of an "uber dashboard" view in which you could create filters that showed certain calendar items or to-dos... but as with the Project Center, instead any custom views end up being in a list form. What I'd love to see (but haven't seen in ANY program yet) would be a mode in which tasks with start dates and deadlines actually appear IN the calendar, instead of next to it. They should still carry over from day to day to nag you that they haven't been done yet (which most organizer programs do), but to have them start in the right spot on the calendar would be great.
Address Book seems pretty usable, and unlike with Apple Mail, I can edit addresses without opening another program, and there seems to be a better understanding that an "address book" entry should be more than just an email whitelist. My Apple Mail address book was so filled with one-time email address adds (added by the system when a new user was declared "not junk") that I basically planned to chuck it when I moved to Entourage. However, I forgot to uncheck the box to prevent address book imports so now I have a huge zombie address book mess to clean up. Not Entourage's fault, though: it did what it was told, unlike iCal, Mail, and company.
Tasks and old calendar events from my Palm seem to have come in correctly, although the last trip I made through the dark forest Sync Services (when I foolishly briefly tried upgrading to Entourage 2008, which disables direct Palm syncing) gave me a bunch of unfiled duplicates in these categories. There are some nice little Internet scripts to clean these up, although the one I found seems to want confirmation of every deletion. I love "undupe" on the Palm, an ancient little program that hasn't been upgraded in years but that does a great job cleaning databases when dupes happen.
Microsoft really should have built in an "undupe" tool like Now Software did with their product, but then again this is where Microsoft sometimes fails to come through: thinking about what happens when disaster strikes. I am a little wary of having ALL my data in a Microsoft product, given that on any system upgrade, Word is one of the likeliest programs to find a new way to crash (with the Adobe suite following close behind... hey, Apple, these are the two biggest software sellers for you, so why don't you give them a little help instead of focusing on giving us useless UI magic like CoverFlow?), but for now, I will go with it.
Because of this, I debated long and hard about switching to Entourage Mail. I had previously looked at it and for some reason which I can't remember now, I had rejected it in favor of Mac Mail. However, Mac Mail has been flaky, sometimes cutting off ends of messages I am sending, or halves of messages I am receiving. It's the weirdest thing! It's minor, and I've usually caught it, though one time a colleague was very confused by my brief email instructions -- which were in fact two pages, but Mac Mail had only sent a paragraph! This is only my first day using Entourage mail, and I can't give a full report yet, but so far it's actually far more responsive than Apple Mail, both in terms of speed and user interface. There are some lovely little things, like a divider between your daily emails, so you can see what came in today versus what came in last week and prioritize accordingly. There are, of course, also the Microsoft "practical UI" things, like the rather ugly "urgent" flag exclamation point, but it's a great step forward... and my brief time with the other tools in 2008 showed even more potential.
So my conclusion about all of this is: Apple wins for product and operating system design, but Microsoft, much as I hate to admit it, wins for business applications. Apple has been doing some great work with their pro-level music and video applications, and while iLife has had its ups and downs, it is mostly a solid tool (I use GarageBand more than Logic Express stil, just because it's so easy to bang out an idea!). Even iWork is pretty good, though Keynote is the only one to really catch on. Pages and Numbers feel a bit weak compared to Word and Excel, but I'm not even sure Apple needs to compete here But even if Apple does decide to let Microsoft have the office tools market, I stillI hope eventually they will apply the same care that went into Keynote and Garageband to their core organizing products. For now, Apple Mail and Address book and iCal and the rest of the tools that come with the OS come off as too entry-level, not to mention buggy and in places poorly thought out.
