I’ve been trying to ditch Outlook for quite a while, and, thanks largely to NuevaSync, I finally got there.
To recap, most PIM’s (including Outlook) do four main things:
Mail - I switched to gMail long ago. I now use a Chrome Application Shortcut for regular use and IMAP access on the iPhone with the built-in Mail application for remote access. The recent enhancements to the keyboard shortcuts for labels pretty much cleared up my last PITA WRT the gmail web app. The only thing I miss about Thunderbird is the ability to open/compose more than one message at once, and the new multiple inboxes feature doesn’t really address this.
Tasks - I use Remember The Milk (RTM) and a Chrome Application Shortcut for regular use on the PC. On the iPhone I started out with Appigo’s Todo but recently switched to RTM’s in-house iPhone app, which has over-the-air, real-time (but background) sync.
Calendar - I’ve been using gCal on the PC for a long time now too, also now with a Chrome Application Shortcut. I use these to give my frequently-used apps their own windows (you’ve heard of the OS, still not quite yet defunct), and make it easy to switch betwen them using Alt-Tab. On the iPhone I use the native Calendar app. I had been using NuevaSync for real-time over-the-air sync, but as one would might have expectd, Google recently announced their own iPhone Calendar and Contacts syncronization service, which seems to have duplicated 95% of what NuevaSync offered overnight. The only missing feature that I can detect so far is support for multiple calendars, which is nice, but not a must-have. NuevaSync had also had a number of service hiccups recently which made me start to feel a bit less confident about the stability of the service. While I applaud the team at NuevaSync for keeping the faith, I doubt that they can keep ahead of Google’s developers on such a core feature.
Update: It turns out that GCal-iPhone sync does support up to five calendars, but only your own primary calendar is enabled by default. I had to search around a bit to find out how to enable other calendars, but it’s easy enough:
1. Complete Google’s instructions for setting up iPhone sync
2. Open Safari on your iPhone
3. Navigate to m.google.com
4. Select ‘Sync’
5. Select your device
6. Check the boxes next to the Calendars you want to sync (It will only let you choose 5 total)
7. Click ‘Save’ (you’ll probably have to wait a while for the additional calendars to sync to your phone).
Contacts - This was the last of the core PIM features that was keeping me on Outlook, since Apple built Outlook contacts sync into the iPhone OS from the start. However, there were a couple of major issues with this setup – no real-time OTA sync, and no remote (web) access to my contacts. The clear solution was to move to Google Contacts, but until recently there was no way to sync those to the iPhone without going through Outlook – clearly unacceptable.
Although NuevaSync had offered contacts sync almost from the start, I wan’t ready to trust it right away. However, after a few months of using their calendar sync service, I turned on contact sync, and quickly left Outlook behind. Now that Google has their own iPhone sync service, I’ll probably be using that instead of NuevaSync.
Aside from basic syncronization, I had been stuck on Outlook for two other reasons: getting contacts into and out of the PIM. Neither of these are as easy with Google Contacts as they were with Outlook and Anagram and a few AutoHotKey (AHK) hacks.
Inbound: With OTA sync, iPhone contacts and Google contacts are effectively a single application, single database, so I can add a new contact wherever I happen to be working. Easy enough on the iPhone with “Create new Contact”. On the PC, I use the same sort of feature in gMail — but in both cases the interface for adding further details to a contact is rather lacking. There is an Anagram iGoogle module, but since I don’t use iGoogle, this is sort of an extra step to gain a step, so I rarely use it.
Search/Outbound: I have Google Contacts set up as yet another Chrome Application Shortcut, so I can just flip to it and search relatively easily — but why isn’t there a better Google Contacts app? Why aren’t there any keyboard shortcuts? Why are there no fields for birthday, URL, tags, etc? Why can’t I easily copy and paste contact details into an email message? I don’t have any doubt that Google is working on a more fully-featured Google Contacts app.
Notes – Not a major issue, although it’s still a mystery why there is no simple sync for iPhone Notes. For now, I continue to use that as a standalone. I just tried NotesPro, but it only seems to “sync” from the iPhone to Google Docs, and not back again, which is very confusing. I guess I should look harder at EverNote.
Lastly, to answer my own question, it appears that Microsoft Exchange somehow ended up as the equivalent of IMAP for contacts. Is there no open-source alternative?
