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Nuevasync to sync contacts Print
Wednesday, 03 June 2009

I just discovered that Scheduleworld stopped their free contact syncing service. Although the service worked fine, I didn't think it justified the $30 USD/year subscription service for just my personal addresses.

So it's time to look for alternative solutions. I've looked at several alternatives, that satisfied the following requirements:

  • It should sync my addresses from my iphone 'over the air', without the use of iTunes or another PC solution. My opinion still is that the iPhone is a internet device that should not be connected to a computer to make it work.
  • It should sync my Thunderbird (addressbook) contacts in some way with my iPhone in a 2-way direction.
  • Preferably, the contacts should be stored by a well-known, free or cheap online service, but I'm also willing to set-up a web-application myself if it's not available.

For now I settled for both ZIndus to sync my thunderbird addressbook with Google Contacts, and I use NeuvaSync to sync between the iPhone and Google contacts.

To set it up:

  1. Apply for an account with Nuevasync, and set it up to sync with google contacts. You must do this explicitly. I used NeuvaSync before for syncing my google calendar, but I initially forgot to turn it on for contacts as well. Do this by logging on to the NeuvaSync website, and you can see what you enabled.
  2. Install the Zindus Thunderbird Add On, which can be found on the  ZIndus Webiste.


One of the drawback I've seen with this approach, is that the address given in Thunderbird cannot be synced in a normal way. As an alternative, Zindus makes some embedded XML out of it. The result is that the address is readable from the iPhone, but it is surrounded by some special XML code. This makes entering addresses on the iPhone difficult to impossible, but you still can sync telephone number and other items. So you should use your Thunderbird addressbook to enter the addresses.

On the possible side, the set-up comes close to 'free' as in beer. Zindus is open source (MPL), and use is made of the free Google Contacts service, which will probably continue to be free for quite a while. So as long as the NuevaSync account will also be free, we have a very nice solution.

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iPhone Jailbreak links Print
Tuesday, 09 December 2008

Top iPhone Websites that Apple doesn't want you to know about

In the past half year, since the introduction of the iPhone 3G, I gathered an amount of websites useful for iPhone users. I kind of all bookmarked them in one big iPhone folder, but now I finally managed to put some order in the chaos.

I've divided the bookmarks into Tricks & Tips, News, Development, Shops, and Hacking aka Jailbreak information. Just to make it clear: the last thing isn't illegal, but it's not something endorsed by Apple either. Even co-founder Steve Wozniak jailbroke his iPhone, because he -is- an engineer.

I will come to the other categories as well, but here is my list of top website you should know about using & jailbreaking your iPhone:


Of course, use at your own risk. But jailbreaking does qualify you for extra personal karma points.
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Sync calendar for free Print
Friday, 03 October 2008

Goal of this exercise is to sync the iphone calendar with a calendar application I use on my linux desktop. As I have multiple desktops, all should be synchronized without much effort.

 The path I took was that I used google calendar as there are my sync application that can sync betweeen in and multiple applications. For me, I'm now using the thunderbird Lightning Add-On (or: extension) to show the calendar.

This website describes the iphone <-> google calendar syncing, but you never know how long it will still be there: 

http://www.ianfernando.com/2008/sync-google-calendar-with-iphone-3g/

 And this is the website that describes the thunderbird-lighting and Google Calendar syncing:

 http://www.ianfernando.com/2008/syncing-google-calendar-to-be-more-productive/

So you need:

  • A google account with google calendar enabled.
  • Thunderbird
  • Thunderbird-extension: Lightning (e.g. 0.9, although 0.8 worked as well). Make sure that  for 64-bit, you download a special version
  • Provider for Google Calendar extension (Version 0.5 I now use)
  • Sign-up for an account on www.nuevasync.com. Sync your iphone with it via A Microsoft Exchange Mail account in the "Settings / Mail Contacts Calendar" menu item. Make sure you only enable Calendar syncing, not Contacts and Mail (I use something else for sync-ing your contacts for free).

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