Keeping in Sync, Part 2

Yesterday I talked (in far too much detail and at far too much length) about how I keep my calendar's in sync and available to whenever I need them.

Today I'm going to talk a little (hopefully only a little...) about my current system for keeping my contacts in sync.  Luckily it's pretty simple.

I basically use a feature that's built into OS X (well since 10.5.3), that lets any mac that's had an iPhone or iPod Touch connected to it at some point to sync contacts between address book and Google contacts.  (Why you have to have connected an iPhone or iPod Touch is beyond me, and luckily with a little comandline-fu one can get around that).  The same option exists for yahoo contacts (and I think that's there no matter what, so even if you don't have an iPhone or iPod Touch it's an option).

After doing that, my address book and Google contacts are in sync, and because of my MobileMe subscription, my phone is updated automatically as well (changes made there also migrate back to my computer and from there to Google).

This works mostly pretty well.  There have been some issues though.  Gmail adds anyone you e-mail or have been e-mailed by to your contacts.  Luckily it don't put all those "suggested" contacts into your "my contacts" section without you telling it to.  Unfortunately, at least for the moment, using this feature in OSX doesn't distinguish between "My Contacts" and the suggested contacts.  So after I did this i had to go through and really spend a long time cleaning up my contacts, getting rid of people I didn't know or didn't want to have in my contacts on my phone.  I also had to go through and merge multiple versions of the same people, and make sure I had the most current e-mail address(s) and phone numbers.  But once this was cleaned up it's pretty good, at least for a while.  Unfortunately I have to keep going through every so often and cleaning everything up again, because Google keeps adding contacts (so when my Mom or my Aunt sends me a mass e-mail suddenly all the other people on there are in my contacts).  They really need to fix this. Let me decide which contacts I want to sync.

The other problem is that Google's contacts info doesn't have all the same fields as Address Book, so some things didn't or don't quite sync up properly or simply don't sync.  Mostly it works pretty well but I have had to slowly go through and clean up mailing addresses and such here and there that got mangled in the transition one way or the other.

I also had a weird problem for a while where I kept ending up with multiple versions of myself in my contacts list.  I'd have my main entry, with all my e-mail addresses, and phone numbers etc, and then a new one would keep popping up that just had my primary e-mail address.  It was weird and I had to delete the extra one and add my main e-mail address back to my main entry a few times. It seems to have stopped happening though, so... I'll just chalk it up as a fluke or edge case.

Anyway, yesterday Dave posted about Google's new calendar and contacts sync services, and mentioned some issues he's had with it.  I don't have solutions for most of them, but the set up I have above might be a fix for the issue of not syncing one's address book on the Mac with the phone anymore.  Besides the obvious solution Dave suggested of just turning off over the air contacts syncing, you might be able to use the solution I have above, and still have over the air syncing of your contacts with your iPhone.

I don't know for sure that you can do both at the same time, but it seems like you could have your Mac syncing it's address book with gmail's and then have gmail syncing it's address book (which is not the same (more or less) as the address book on your Mac) with your phone.  The nice thing about this is if you're out somewhere and you add someone to your address book on your phone ("Hey, I haven't seen you in ages, we need to hang out more, let me get your number.") it'd automatically be migrated to your address book at home and to your Gmail contacts.