Well, as promised, I sprung $40 for The Missing Sync for Palm OS. I’ve installed it, set up sync with iCal and Address Book, and tried out the internet connection sharing feature. My initial impressions are good. Setup was painless. The iCal sync seems to work very well. The initial sync resulted in some duplicate calendar entries, but I think that’s because it was also pulling in my data from Palm Desktop. Once I deleted the duplicate data and got rid of the old Palm Desktop conduits, it worked great. As for the internet connection sharing, I doubt I’ll get much use out of it, but it works without a hitch.
Missing Sync also includes an app that allows you to mount the SD card on the Mac desktop as an external volume. As I don’t yet have an SD card, I haven’t been able to try this out. I’m curious as to how it works. The documentation does not reveal many details. I’m hoping it emulates the USB storage standard, which would let me mount it on my Linux boxes as well. I’d like to be able to use the Palm as sort of a “poor man’s jump drive.” Again, I may not end up using it much, but I can try it out and see if it’s useful to me, or if I’d be better served with a “dedicated” USB jump drive.
If it turns out that it doesn’t emulate USB storage, I can try out a product called Card Export II which advertises this functionality. It’s only $15 and I can download a fully functional trial version. But I’m hoping Missing Sync will do it for me.
Next up.. I think I’m going to rework my Oracle Calendar intergration a bit. I’m going to write a Perl script to take the exported Oracle Calendar data (in vCal format), tweak it a bit for all-day events and holidays, and write it out in iCalendar format. Then I can just post the resulting iCalendar file on my web site, and subscribe to it with iCal. That way I don’t have to import it into iCal, which is a cumbersome process. We’ll see how it goes.