Experiences with Missing Sync & Friends

David Emme - 06:55am Oct 21, 2004 PST

I decided to bite the bullet today, partially on TidBITS recommendation some time ago, and purchase Missing Sync (MS) for Palm OS version 4.0.1 this afternoon. I now have two problems, one serious and one wierd/bogus.

<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=07784>

Serious: MS comes with an app called MemoPad, which is supposed to sync with Palm memos, and thus allow the AddressBook/iCal/iSync user to get rid of Palm Desktop. My first hotsync resulted in Palm Memo categories being duplicated, and Palm memos being moved from specific categories to Unfiled. Making the obvious attempts to correct this on either the Palm or the Mac in the MemoPad app would not "stick" thru hotsyncs.

So on the Palm I deleted all categories, moving all 148 memos to Unfiled. I did a sync with Handheld Overwrites Mac, hoping to straighten MemoPad out. So far, so good. Then I created a new category on Palm, moved 3 memos to it, and synced. Now MemoPad claims I have 151 memos, even though Palm still shows 148.

This MemoPad app has the feeling of the beta of a sharware product called iMemoPad, which I tested and discarded in May of this year. My notes say:

iPalmMemo very promising, but not yet ready for prime time. Spelling correction results in a new, duplicated memo with the spelling fixed. Pasting RTF into a memo appears to work, but results in a blank memo after HotSync. The Categories Drawer gets lost and displays a memo other than the one clicked on.

Now here's where it gets serious: I removed the MemoPad conduit to the Trash and emptied the Trash, moved the Palm Memo conduit back in place (verified with Get Info that it was indeed the conduit from PalmSource Inc), and tried to resync with Palm Desktop, which still showed the correct number of memos in their correct categories. Hotsync reported no errors, but nothing happened. I have created a new memo on Palm, and another new memo in Palm Desktop, and synced. Neither new memo shows up on the other platform. So it appears that my memo syncing is now totally hosed. Not a Good Thing. (Of course, MemoPad is blind to all of this too, as expected).

Wierd/Bogus One of MS's advertized features is that it maintains your Backups folder on the Mac to be a mirror image of what's on the Palm. Specifically, when it notices a file has been removed from the Palm, it moves it to folder Backups/Archive/. This is supposed to result in allowing you to hard reset your Palm, then restore it exactly as it was (with no extra files).

I happen to have TealScript installed, since I don't like Graffiti 2. Syncing results in MS placing TealScript.prc in Backups/Archive/, even though it's alive and well on the Palm. I tried moving TealScript.prc out of Backup/Archives/ into Backup/ "where it belongs", and the next sync moved it back into Archive/. So a Palm hard reset followed by a complete restore from MS would not put the Palm back the way it wuz!

I've reported all of this to markspace/support via their Web site.

Interestingly, the automated response email I received from reporting these problems pointed me to a markspace MS discussion list, wherein I found that others had reported similar MemoPad syncing problems several weeks ago, but no fix has been forthcoming. They still took my $40, though, with no warnings of potential problems...

Caveat Emptor.

-Dave

[ Later: As it turns out, there are two Palm memo conduit files, "Memo.conduit" and "Memos.conduit". Clever naming, huh? My elementary programming class taught me not to do things like that! Anyway, by the time I attempted to re-sync my memos from Palm Desktop (see above), Memo.conduit (singular) was the only obvious choice in my Disabled Conduits folder, and it didn't work. Looking at my previous day's backup, I discovered that there also used to be a Memos.conduit (plural). So I tried syncing with that, and was able to restore my memos and categories from Palm Desktop. I'm guessing that "singular" is from the old 4K memo days, and "plural" is from the new 32K memo (Palm OS 5?). Of course it doesn't help that Finder's Get Info on both "singular" and "plural" show the same date, version, and copyright info. }