Last month I complained about contact sync between Google and my Mac address book. Finally I purchased a license of Spanning Sync which works pretty fine for me. Now there is a new feature in the zero feature release of Mac OS X aka Snow Leopard:
In May 2008, we told you how iPhone and iPod touch users could sync their Gmail contacts with Address Book in Mac OS X 10.5. Now with Mac OS X 10.6, syncing Gmail contacts is also available to users who do not have an iPhone or iPod touch. If your Mac is running Snow Leopard, you can turn on contact sync in the Address Book preferences.
The syncing is better, too: in Mac OS X 10.6, only contacts in Gmail’s „My Contacts“ group are synced, rather than all of Gmail’s contact suggestions. And photos are now transferred as well, since sometimes you just need to put a face to a name.
Will order Snow Leopard for my Macs now.
Unfortunately, it only works one-way…from Address Book to Google Contacts, and then ONLY when you manually do a sync with iSync. Any changes I’ve made to Google Calendar have never made back to my Mac Address Book.
I take that back…it seems to be working as advertised now.
I’ve had a lot of trouble with this feature. I only got it working in Leopard with a long Terminal command. Now – in Snow Leopard, it seems to be working sometimes with iSync and sometimes with the Terminal command. I need more testing.
Shouldn’t be this difficult. And I get an error when using iSync because I don’t use Mobile Me.
Well, I had LOTS of trouble with this feature. I ended up with doubles/triples/quadruples of the same entries. Google sync spinned some names round, gave them new entries, changed address entries.
Well, good to have time machine to revert the complete address book back to normal.
It will take quite a while for me to give it a second shot. If at all….