One of the most frequent questions we hear from readers on our Ask TUAW posts (and for our doting Aunt TUAW) is a simple one, with no simple answer: "How can I replace the synchronization features of MobileMe with a free service or a software package that doesn't cost me $99 a year?" We feel your pain.

For anyone looking to cut their cash outlay and maintain multi-Mac data sync, there are options for calendaring (BusySync, Google's CalDAV support) and some for address books (address-o-sync, or the free Google & Yahoo sync in Leopard's Address Book), and some products that handle both calendars and contacts (SpanningSync, Plaxo) -- but if you're in the mood for a free all-in-one approach, you may want to check out a promising beta service from a team of European developers: fruux.

Starting with address book sync in earlier versions, fruux has now progressed to include calendar, task and bookmark sync via Apple's built-in apps (Address Book, iCal & Safari) and a cloud service that stores the synchronized data. The system pref pane interface is no-frills and the product is definitely still a work in progress (there are prominent warnings to back up your data beforehand and frequently thereafter), so it may not suit your needs just yet -- but it's definitely one to watch. Future roadmap plans include an iPhone client and a web interface to your PIM data.

Thanks Dominik, Hagen & everyone who sent this in.

Mac sync software developer Mark/Space has announced the release of The Missing Sync for Symbian. Designed to sync Mac apps to Symbian S60 and UIQ smartphones, the new $39.95 product (electronic download) has a unique feature -- Proximity Syncing. When your Mac and Symbian phone are within Bluetooth range (about 30 feet / 10 meters), they automatically sync to insure that both are up-to-date.

The Missing Sync for Symbian syncs personal information such as contacts, calendar tasks, and events, and also uses proprietary Call Log and SMS applications to move the phone's call log and text messages to the Mac. Video, photo, music, and document files can also be synced.

If you think that the iPhone is the only smartphone on the market, it's important to realize that well over 100 million Symbian-based phones have been sold worldwide, with Nokia, Sony Ericsson, and Motorola being the biggest vendors. As a result, the Missing Sync for Symbian is available in English, French, Italian, German, and Spanish versions.

In the interest of full disclosure, I wrote the help system for this application under contract to Mark/Space.

You got your iPhone. You got your computer. Your emails sync. Your contacts sync. Your calendars sync. Your music, your podcasts, your photos, all your stuff: it just syncs. This is good.

Your notes? They don't sync.

This. Is. Bad.

Not just bad, but actually driving me nuts. It drives me nuts because I can't believe there's a technical challenge to be overcome here. On the iPhone, you have your Notes app in which you write text notes. How hard can it be to sync them up with something on the computer to which the iPhone is attached?

A friend says to me: "Sync them where? With Stickies?" He has a point - there's no obvious, existing place for text notes to go, but again, that doesn't sound to me like something that need be a problem. Let's have a simple desktop app called, um, Notes, with which the iPhone version syncs. OK, even Stickies if we have to. All I want to do is easily reach my iPhone-jotted notes when I'm working on the Mac.

Yes, I know about the work-arounds. I could use a Drafts folder in an IMAP account. I could add notes to a contact. I could just email stuff back and forth to myself. But none of these fits in with the way I work already, all of them are work-arounds. We're talking about text notes here: there shouldn't be any need for work-arounds. I look forward to a simple solution appearing in the App Store soon.

That said, despite the horrible Marker Felt font, I quite like the Notes app. I just wish it would sync. Is that too much to ask?

Many commenters and bloggers hither and yon have noticed that MobileMe lacks "true push" capabilities, even though Apple uses the "push" buzzword extensively to describe MobileMe services.

A commenter in a MacRumors thread about the subject took screenshots from Apple's site, showing they had removed the phrase "Push happens automatically, instantly, and continuously." In its place, Apple clarifies that changes from the iPhone and web apps are updated instantly on connected computers, but not vice versa.

Apple also notes in a Knowledge Base article that changes "made on your computer will be synced to the MobileMe 'cloud' once every 15 minutes (or every hour in Mac OS X 10.4.11)."

That, to me, doesn't sound like "push," it sounds like "sync." The term "push" still applies, however, to me.com email, as that shows up immediately (in my experience, at least.) Calendars and contacts, though, not so much, apparently.

[Via BetaNews.]

I know it's practically heresy to say so, but I don't have an iPhone, as much as I'd like one. Verizon service is just a better option for me right now. Synchronizing data between my Samsung SCH-u740 and my computer, though, is right up there with "getting a root canal" in terms of painlessness.

I was eager, thus, to try FoneLink from Nova Media, which promised a much more Mac-like user experience than the venerable (but ugly) BitPim.

FoneLink allows you to synchronize saved data between your phone and your Mac, including photos, video, music, contacts, and SMS messages. You can also create ringtones from unprotected audio files, and (with this new version) dial a number or send a text message from the Mac.

My hopes were dashed, sadly, as it doesn't support my phone. It does support many others, however, from Nokia, Samsung, Motorola, and SonyEricsson.

FoneLink 2.1.1 is available in English, French and German, is universal binary, and works with Mac OS X 10.4.9 or higher. It's $33.57 for a single license, and multiple license discounts are available. Finally, you can download a free demo and give it a try.

Did last night's news of 10.5.3 boasting Google contact syncing with iPhone and iPod touch owners get you down? Well, LifeHacker hopes to lift your spirits as they tell you how to enable Google syncing in Address Book.app without ever syncing an iPhone or iPod touch.

The process requires you to edit some .plist files within Address Book.app. LifeHacker notes that the .plist entry only occurs when you sync some type of iPod first. So, you will need to do at least one sync for the entry to show up. Some of the comments seem to suggest that the .plist entry will change back to the original value once you sync an iPod a couple times. Even still, this is a cool hack.


[via LifeHacker]

If you love Things, you just got a whole lot more to love. The folks at Cultured Code have finally added iCal sync, and they've done a spectacular job with it (outdoing, in my opinion, OmniFocus' sync). In the preferences, you can sync just your "Today" tasks, or just your "Next Actions," or you can get crazy with it and assign calendars to different tags, projects or areas of responsibility. This allows for utterly amazing flexibility and an array of possibilities.

The major benefits of having Things synced with iCal all revolve around the tight integration that iCal and Leopard's To Dos have with the rest of OS X. Being able to refine what is actually synced means you have complete control over what you see on an iCal printout or even what you put on a public or shared calendar. To Dos can be delegated, emailed, linked, prioritized and more, and Things is picking up every external change I throw at it.

You can have a calendar that functions as an inbox and use whatever input method you like to get tasks there. The "@" symbol can be used to add tags as well. Moving a task from the inbox calendar to another calendar synchronized with Things will do exactly what you think it will ... move the task to the project or area of responsibility assigned to that calendar.

This also solves my other major problem with Things, no easy way to turn Mail.app messages into tasks. Now, with a right click to make a new To Do you can create a new task in Things that contains a link to the original message. Unfortunately, Mail.app's handling of To Dos is a little buggy in some cases, but that problem is easily taken care of by using MailTags to create the tasks.

The final reason I'm so excited about this new release is that Leopard To Dos are part of an API that all kinds of third-party programs can access, and can therefore integrate with Things now. Anxiety, Out of Mind, Today, MailTags and other little applications we've mentioned can all work in two directions with your task manager.

I'm a little obsessed with Charilaos Skiadas' GTDAlt bundle for TextMate right now (along with piles of Ruby code to extend it), but the new sync feature in Things made it extremely easy to pull my tasks in and take it for another spin. Having sworn off the "pretty" task managers and pledged my allegiance once again to all things plain text, I don't have the heart to change my system again quite yet ... but it's becoming obvious that when Things comes to fruition, it will be a force to be reckoned with. If this was holding you back (like it was me), it might be time to take a look. Things is going to be $49 after release, but you can still get in on it for $39 right now.

You'll have to jailbreak your iPhone using ZiPhone, and the actual steps involved seem fairly involved...but hey, if you're a Linux user, you're probably cool with both fairly involved technical tweaking and voiding warranties.

Go forth, brave adventurer.

SyncMan is a simple application for syncing your Mac's Address Book with your Gmail contacts, a feature long desired by Gmail and Google Calendar users who may have other sync tools already in place. While we have noted that a similar feature is forthcoming in the more broad-based iCal syncing tool Spanning Sync 2, SyncMan concentrates just on contacts and is available now.

SyncMan is €9.95 (~$15.32) and a demo is available.

[via Macintouch / Daring Fireball]

Just last week we noted that BusySync 2, which adds Google calendar syncing to the iCal sync app, is now shipping. Another 2.0 would seem to be around the corner, as a post on the SpanningSync blog shows a video demo of Address Book -> Google contact synchronization coming in the next version of the utility.

While Plaxo and other tools are lining up to take on the contact sync challenge -- most sync only in one direction right now, although with the Google contacts API in play that's going to change -- it's nice to see SpanningSync picking up the torch on contacts as the competition on calendaring heats up.

[via ars technica]

A recurring question we get on Ask TUAW concerns managing multiple iTunes libraries, particularly keeping them in sync, whether for one user with two computers (e.g. laptop and desktop) or between multiple users with multiple machines (e.g. family members). It was with some interest, then, that I recently ran across Syncopation from Sonzea which promises to automate the process.

It will allow you either to clone a full library on two machines, or selectively sync your files (video as well as audio) via iTunes playlists or within the application itself. This could be very handy, for instance, if you want to keep an automatically updated subset of your music on your Mac portable with limited hard drive space.

Syncopation is $24.95 (for use on two Macs) and a demo is available. If you've had good experiences with Syncopation or other iTunes syncing tools, please let us know below.

One of the biggest questions that I had following the iPhone SDK event was how we non-Enterprise users were going to get the cool new wireless syncing features promised to ActiveSync Exchange users. My first guess was that Apple was planning to fold something like that into .Mac, and now iPhone Alley has unearthed something to suggest this might be right.

In the just released SDK beta 2, iPhone Alley found a string within a preference bundle that reads: "Syncing with this Dot Mac account will turn off syncing for other Dot Mac accounts and delete any existing synced data." This suggests the possibility of wireless syncing for non-Exchange users. Frankly, this would make a lot of sense. It would add considerably to the (presently somewhat questionable) value of .Mac and give us consumer types access to some of iPhone 2.0's neatest features.

The cloud storage and sync offering from Sharpcast, SugarSync, has released a public beta of its OS X client today, complementing the existing Windows, web and mobile (WinMo + Blackberry, iPhone coming soon) clients. The Mac client and the Windows client appear pretty much the same, but once you set up your sync you don't have to look at the client UI very often.

SugarSync is a for-pay service that extends your local files seamlessly to your other computers, to a secure webpage, and pretty much to anywhere you think they ought to go. CEO Gibu Thomas describes SugarSync as "get my stuff everywhere," a supercharged and cross-platform version of .Mac iDisk synchronization. Our colleagues at Download Squad have checked out the service in detail, and there's a good writeup at webware.com as well.

To use SugarSync, you can define a set of folders to sync, photos to share, "Magic Briefcase" files that live in the cloud and sync down on demand, click and go -- then the defined content will be available on all your computers. With both "full sync" and "light sync" modes, you can leave rarely used files on the SugarSync side and only retrieve them as needed (great for those MacBook Air users hungry for storage). You can also selectively share photo galleries or other content via the web UI.

Once you get past the 45-day, 10 GB of storage trial period, you can use the discount available through 4/15 to get a half- off data plan (starts at $25/yr for 10 GB, up to 250 GB for $250/yr).The advantages of SugarSync for backup, specificity of synced items, and a supported client may make you give it a look as an alternative to iDisk, or to cloud solutions like OmniDrive, JungleDisk or other clients for Amazon's S3 that require you to roll your own synchronization plan.

I have an admission to make: I change browsers on a fairly regular basis (normally, I'm found swapping between Camino and Safari in short succession as I struggle to find a nirvana between the two of them). But what to do with my favourites? Some people I know like to keep browser favourites separate, but I can't stand that. If anything, I've yearned to be able to simply use the same bookmarks (and keyboard shortcuts for Bookmark-bar items) on all the browsers I possibly can.

That's where Bookit comes in handy. There's three options: Manage, Migrate or Restore. You can manually edit bookmarks, and compare them to a 'master' set (in my case, Camino); Migrate will allow you to take a browser's bookmarks, and completely over-write existing bookmarks on any other browser (or overwrite a synchronised copy of your Bookit bookmarks on .Mac), while Restore will allow you to retrieve a previous configuration. With only Safari able to synchronise bookmarks via .Mac, the ability to do so with Camino and Firefox is a welcome relief for those of use who don't (always) use the default OS X browser.

I've used Bookit on three of my Macs around the home and office, with the application working perfectly in bringing my bookmarks across to all of them. Given that the application costs just $12, if you're working with multiple browsers, favourites and machines, I'd highly recommend Bookit.

BusyMac had a good thing going with BusySync 1 and 1.5: seamlessly share and edit calendar info across your home or business LAN using iCal. Version 2 (due next month) features sync via the cloud-- so you can sync a work and home computer, even if you don't work at home. There's also Google Calendar support in BusySync 2, which could be the holy grail many of us have been looking for. Mike does a quick run through in the video.