iPhone by Steve

Over the weekend I finally got a chance to give the Spanning Sync 2.0 Beta a try. My main goal, of course, was to check out the Gmail contacts sync feature.

For the most part, things went very smoothly for me. I downloaded the beta and upgraded my version of Spanning Sync without any trouble. I did take the time to back up my Gmail contacts and also my Mac Address Book contacts before upgrading, and I would recommend that everybody take this precaution, but so far, I haven’t had to call on my backups. My installation has been working fine.

Here are a couple observations:

• On the first couple of sync cycles, Spanning Sync told me there were conflicts in my contacts. I got a message something like this (I didn’t write it down so I’m paraphrasing): “Spanning sync found 100 conflicts.” The software then allows you to look at each of these so-called conflicts one-by-one and decide whether you want to keep the Gmail version, or keep the Mac Address Book version. The software also gives you the option to resolve all the conflicts at once using either Address Book or Gmail. This was the option I chose, and it saved oodles of time and worked pretty well.
• I had to go through a few sync cycles to get things the way I wanted them. On the first sync, Spanning Sync gave me a message something like this (again, I’m paraphrasing): “Since Gmail does not allow more than one contact to share the same email, Spanning Sync could not sync some of your contacts.” To fix this, I opened up Mac address book and had it search for duplicates. I fixed the duplicates and then synced again. On the next sync, I got the same message, but the number of duplicates was much lower. After a couple of sync cycles, I had this resolved.

One thing I was worried about, and indeed one worry that I’ve read from other people numerous times in forums around the web, was the worry that my Mac Address Book would become inundated, literally taken over, by the hundreds of what I call “loose” email address stored in Gmail. As you might know, Gmail stores every single address you reply to. So, for example, if one of your friends passes along one of those get rich quick emails to you and everyone else in their address book, and you reply to the email, there’s a chance that all of those addresses will be added to your Gmail contacts, even if you never need them.

Not to worry!

The folks at Spanning Sync seem to have a well thought out solution for the problem. Simply stated, email addresses that do not have names with them in your contacts list do not sync. This is the default setting. This was perfect for me! The contacts I wanted are now syncing to Address Book but the zillions of addresses I want to ignore don’t sync.

After getting things working properly with Spanning Sync, I hooked up my iPhone and synced to iTunes. Now I’ve got all those contacts in my phone as well, which is a godsend for me. If I enter a new contact in my iPhone, it will sync to Address Book when I sync the phone, and then Spanning Sync will automatically sync it into Gmail as well. And, if I add a contact to Gmail, this all works great going the other way, too. Spanning Sync puts the contact in my Mac Address book, where I can get it to my iPhone by syncing to my laptop.

So, my first impressions of the Spanning Sync beta were very favorable. But, that being said, I’m still yearning for a true, over-the-air syncing solution between Gmail and the iPhone. I’ll be watching for one!