Database Users

Task app? Outlook Sync? Online Sync?

My G1 shipped today and I'm excited to get it tomorrow sometime. But I'm curious about getting tasks to work with my G1.
It looks like Google is thinking the same as Apple in that it doesn't have a built in task app. I think right now it will sync with Google Calendar and Gmail (for contacts), but there is no service to sync with tasks.
So... that said... are there any solutions working from the app store right from the get go or does anyone know of any future plans from any devs?
I'm using Funambol on WinMobile right now to sync contacts, tasks, and calendar data. It works great... and I even found that they have an app created for Android (I'm not sure if it's available yet), but so far it only syncs contacts.
Is there is anything out there I can use right now to get tasks working on the G1?

nothing yet, but should be up over time, outlook sync is one of the big ticket items developers are working on

Hopefully something comes out soon. I've come to depend on tasks and I have also come to depend on a shopping list program (hopefully this comes out soon).
From what I understand, anyone can start publishing apps starting on Monday. However, it won't be till Q1 2009 that apps from the app store can be purchased. I'm all for freeware and there's always great apps out there that are free... but I've had better luck with programs I actually had to buy.
Anyways... I'll eagerly be checking for updates to see what tasks managers come out into the market.
On a side note... is there any RSS feed I can subscribe to showing new or updated additions to the android app store? Or if not, perhaps there's a blog or two I can subscribe to so I can stay on top of all the new apps coming out?

Ayodeji13 said:
nothing yet, but should be up over time, outlook sync is one of the big ticket items developers are working on
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Well I have a few days left of my 14 days, if I cant sync with Outlook, I am done with G1 and its going back/

Just extracting my contact from outlook and importing them correctly in Gmail was a pain in the ass. Despite what is indicated on gmail help's page they absolutely don't support outlook csv format. Unless throwing every number in the "notes" fields is what they consider "supporting".
It took me a whole evening writing my own application that reads the csv and upload it properly into gmail using their contact API. No way I was going to re-input 600 contacts by hand.. I'd share the c# code for the app with whomever asks for it but it is *not* something for end-users just a quick hack that worked for me *once*. If you can't code you don't want it.
I managed to get the funambol app (Market is so slow...) so I will try to open an account there and see if it can sync all of outlook, gmail and the phone properly after all they have plugins for everything. Too bad they don't support appointment right now but it's still the best bet.

Facebook phonebook sync

Not sure if this is possible.
But wouldn't it be great to sync the facebook phonebook with the cellphone . So that the facebook profile picture and number of your friends on facebook got synced with your diamond contacts?

Hi Killbox!
I've just investigated this one...
The FB API is VERY restricted, due to crawling/robot issues (I suppose) it's not possible to fetch the phone number or email address of neither your own profile or your friends' with the API.
Really takes away a lot of the edge with this kinda app.. One could parse the HTML for the phone number and OCR the email-image, but alot of detours for something that could've been soo easy!
If someone choose the HTML-parsing approach I suppose the legal staff at FB will be all over you in a blink, there's examples of similar apps experiencing that...
Pity...

Is it possible to just take just the profile picture to sync with your contacts list. While phone numbers and email addresses would be good you only have to really enter them once(usually) but an up to date picture of my contacts would be really good.

Whilst not exactly what you're looking for:
http://www.melsam.com/outsync/
A program called OutSync develeoped my a MS Windows Mobile guy.
He got bollocked at one point for calling it Facesync due to the word 'Face' so he renamed it OutSync.
Basically it syncs your Facebook friends' photos with that of your Outlook contacts. Then, when you sync your device, voila, new photos.
Other than that, doesn't do much

midastocar said:
Whilst not exactly what you're looking for:
http://www.melsam.com/outsync/
A program called OutSync develeoped my a MS Windows Mobile guy.
He got bollocked at one point for calling it Facesync due to the word 'Face' so he renamed it OutSync.
Basically it syncs your Facebook friends' photos with that of your Outlook contacts. Then, when you sync your device, voila, new photos.
Other than that, doesn't do much
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Awesome thank you very much!

You could also try xobni, a plugin for Outlook which will sync your facebbook, skype etc contacts to Outlook.
WWW.xobni.com

You could try using Resco contact Manager. It does precisely what you are describing.

Facebook -> Outlook -> Mobilephone

Hi
I wrote a little app called Fonebook which syncs your facebook friends photos into your outlook contacts - when you then sync with your phone you get the profile image.
Im looking at adding a few more features and possibly creating a "Pro" version to try and recoup the cost of the library Im having to use so I can get full sized images into outlook (the outlook api sucks!)
Im not sure which windows phone allow the caller id to be full screen (I know mine doesnt!) - if you know of anywhere I might be able to get a list of smartphones/pda's which support this could you point me in that direction please!
If you have any ideas for this type of application, or have any suggestions when it comes to creating a "pro" version of something as oppose to relying on donations could you please fill in this short survey: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=xOAJWNgBXsnGAopW7zqDNQ_3d_3d
Thanks for reading this (the current version of the app is here in case you are curious: http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=2442338999
Thanks
Ross

you might wanna take a look at s2u2 it's a iphone slider app which gives us wm touch screen users full screen caller id if there was a way for your app to resize the facebook pictures to the size of the screen wqvga, qvga, vga, wvga

you may also want to look at skybook. I think it has a similar feature where it takes the profile picture from facebook and adds it to your contacts picture. I tried it once with skybook and it worked fairly well until I received errors with logging in, so I uninstalled it.
using the new facebook app from winmo 6.5 and don't have any issue logging in, only problem is that I can't update the photos like in skybook.
I look forward to seeing what you come up with.
good luck

I would also be interested in some way to sync the contact details from Facebook to WM.
people tend to keep facebook up to date with phone numbers email addresses etc, and it would be handy to have this information downloaded automatically.
EDIT: I see you have covered the fact that Facebook block this option on the page above, but I still think its a worthy idea and have joined the petition!

Fosimo was the only thing that I could get to work for syncing facebook data. My only complaint was that it added everyone's birthdays to my calendar...

I like the idea behind this, however, I do not use outlook on my home pc.
Does this work without hooking your phone to your PC? I ask because I rarely ever sync my phone with my home PC, I do sync to my work PC but I don't sync the email, and it's a work pc, so no facebook there....
I know that new SPB mobile shell program does this but I really don't see a point in installing that and keeping it around just to sync outlook pictures. I prefer to use my touchflo that came installed on my phone. I just picked up a Fuze, my old phone was an 8525 and SPB was the best solution for it...
Is there a standalone program that would do the same thing?

You really should put a mirror of that file somewhere else, man. SkyDrive is being broken. I was searching for an app like that, saw Fonebook and OutSync. i don't care which one I get, i just want a link. Hors Skydrive, please.

well to be honest fonebook is the best app i saw so far for syncing facebook contact pics with outlook contacts.
i liked the feature to be able to choose manually which facebook contact corresponds to an outlook contact. (a missing feature to many other apps)
the only problem it has is that at the moment almost everyone use high resolution screen mobile phones with vga and wvga and the pics that sync with your app are very small and blurry when viewed in full screen incoming call apps like s2u2 that most people use. so a great addition to your app would be to add an option to download the contact pics to a chosen resolution that corresponds to vga/wvga/qvga/wqvga and to save the cashe somewhere in the pc even.
please keep this project up and running and update it asap

Got a Topaz, and have TF3D (the touchy interface from HTC), set that up to sync image to facebook.
So My images go Facebook -> phone -> outlook
instead of Facebook -> outlook -> phone
Works for me.
Personally, I don't think there's much money to be made on this (a pro version) when newer phones have this built in, and there's already other good free apps out there, unless you can add some seriously impressive functions, and even then, the free competitors would soon add those same features.
- Anthony

Hope can syncs the high resolution pics in next version.
And is it cannot syncs the birthday if the user didn't type the birthday year?

[APP][REQ] facebook contact pic downloader

hi anyone out there familiar with blackberrys knows that their facebook app is tightly integrated with the device itself and the windows mobile one is.... just a slower way to access the mobile version of the site now the mobile site works fine and if you have the htc album with social networking you pretty much get to upload photos and dont need the app at all but what i love about the facebook for BB app is how it will automatically assign contact pics for people on in your phone book who also have their numbers added to facebook is their anyone who can write an app that can do this?

The app that I use for this is call FoneBook. The only downside is that it has to run on your desktop Outlook and then when you sync your phone to it, it also syncs any contacts on your phone with those it finds matches for on FaceBook.
N.B. Your post is probably in the wrong section of the forum.

an app like that would be great if it could run on my phone it as i dont use outlook to sync my contacts =(

Yeah, I think the main emphasis on Windows Mobile applications is for productivity/utilities, whereas for the iPhone as an example, it's more 'fun' apps.
Probably easy to do for WinMo but I'm no programmer so will have to just wait and see!

SkyBook (formerly Snap2Face) had this ability... unfortunately, the program went out of development mysteriously, and last week, the program stopped working for me. Check it out, maybe you'll have better luck.
http://www.magnifoca.com/
But yes, please, anyone with the skills would be greatly appreicated if they took this project on!

[double post]

You could try Book sync at http://www.booksync.co.uk/
It's not perfect, but I hope the developer would correct some bug in next versions.
The match between facebook and phone contacts is made manually, so that you could match contacts even if there is no phone number.

Exchange on the Hero, first impressions

I've noticed that not has much been said on the Hero's exchange support in any of the reviews or user reports so I thought I'd let people know what it's like as, for me, this is a must have feature. I should say that I have not had an android phone before and so I have had no experience with Nitrodesk's exchange solution so I can't compare.
Well, I entered my exchange details during initial set-up and after my first attempt was unsuccessful (SSL needed and is off by default) it than worked. Asked me if I wanted to sync Mail, Calender and Contacts all of which I selected. After the rest of the setup had finished the phone told me I had a new e-mail arrive so I could tell it was working straight away.
Mail is fantastic. Downloads everything fine, has at least as many options as WM for choosing which messages to download. E-mails look great on the display and html e-mails show up fine.
Contacts are great, they all appear straight away in the people and the phone application. All the Facebook and Flikr integration works perfectly. Only niggle is that you can't group contacts by company which is something I used to do on WM.
Calender seems to work fine. Appointments showed up ok, including appointments sent by e-mail.
All in all, the exchange sync is way better than expected and in some ways better than WM. The integration seems very deep and integral to the OS rather than a bolt on feature.

I agree with you there Bud, just a shame that there is no task sync support yet - still looking

All was fine for me, but as soon as I've allowed it to connect my contacts to FB contacts, sync fails for conacts with a 'client/server conversion error' message.
I'm using exchange 2003, mail and calendar are syncing fine, and I too would love tasks to be added, along with a fix for contacts and I'm a happy hero user

Strange - I have had no issues with the Fb sync but i use Exchange 07

Just Exchange, or...
...also Outlook?

not tried to sync with outlook yet, whats the best app for that?
I would settle for an outlook connector that I could just set to sync contacts and tasks, as these two arent really changing so frequently I wouldnt mind having to 'plug in' to sync these.

I just use exchange so can't comment on outlook sync. Facebook linking worked fine for me but I also have exchange 2007 so can only assume it's a problem there. Not sure if the exchange functionality is all implemented by HTC or whether they've used part of Nitrodesk's Touchdown but I saw on the Nitrodesk website that they don't support exchange 2003 yet.

gingepaul79 said:
not tried to sync with outlook yet, whats the best app for that?
I would settle for an outlook connector that I could just set to sync contacts and tasks, as these two arent really changing so frequently I wouldnt mind having to 'plug in' to sync these.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The only app is HTC sync which is included along with the hero's manual on the sd card supplied with your phonbe, word of warning i just installed htc sync on my vista pc and it caused windows explorer to continuously crash until i uninstalled it, not impressed

Tried to install the app ealier, drivers failed and the app wont work (win 7 32 bit)

Going to try the long way round for now - sync outlook contacts to my google account and keep the google contacts synced to my phone - would I end up with a duplicate of everyone then though?

gingepaul79 said:
Going to try the long way round for now - sync outlook contacts to my google account and keep the google contacts synced to my phone - would I end up with a duplicate of everyone then though?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I, like you (not I like you!), have synced up this way. I too cannot get HTC sync to work. I am sure Orange have bundled the wrong version.
So, I export Outlook to a file, then import contact file to google cal, then sync gcalendar to hero. Job done.
No duplicates, google calendar seems intelligent enough to recognise the dups

I would like to share my experience
Booted up.... would you like to set up exchange?
HELL YES!!!!
enter the details..... (internet accessible exchange server)
<entered>
What you wanna sync my boy?
EVERY GOD DAMN THING
oooooook here we go.......
<done.>
Sweet!

Thinking about an Adriod as my next phone, since I think WM is really falling behind everyone else! I use it mostly for work so a couple of questions if you don't mind....
No tasks syncing so far?
How does the calander work, are the views easy to see, day and week stuff?
Meeting requests work?
Can you flag email messages? This is a must for me and I hate that WM 6.5 can't even do it!
How do you find the keyboard replying to emails?
Can you open Word, Excel, PDF files?
Any other features it has for work that WM doesn't?
Thanks

Exchange
I'm having probs with exchange.
It will only sync my main inbox, not any of the subfolders I have, and will only sync via mobile network - fails on wifi ? ?
Then again can't get ANY web stuff on wifi ? ?

Word and excel fully creatable and editable with Docs to Go, and Open Office I think does let you read different docs though not sure which. Best PDF Reader seems to be RepliGo Reader which is good for books as well.
I'm only just getting to grips with Google Calendar but seems to have a great deal of flexibility for appts and stuff.
Widgets really just getting going, so I'm not sure of all those available...
Daisy - Magic owner, so Hero may be slightly different xx

herman3101 said:
I've noticed that not has much been said on the Hero's exchange support in any of the reviews or user reports so I thought I'd let people know what it's like as, for me, this is a must have feature. I should say that I have not had an android phone before and so I have had no experience with Nitrodesk's exchange solution so I can't compare.
Well, I entered my exchange details during initial set-up and after my first attempt was unsuccessful (SSL needed and is off by default) it than worked. Asked me if I wanted to sync Mail, Calender and Contacts all of which I selected. After the rest of the setup had finished the phone told me I had a new e-mail arrive so I could tell it was working straight away.
Mail is fantastic. Downloads everything fine, has at least as many options as WM for choosing which messages to download. E-mails look great on the display and html e-mails show up fine.
Contacts are great, they all appear straight away in the people and the phone application. All the Facebook and Flikr integration works perfectly. Only niggle is that you can't group contacts by company which is something I used to do on WM.
Calender seems to work fine. Appointments showed up ok, including appointments sent by e-mail.
All in all, the exchange sync is way better than expected and in some ways better than WM. The integration seems very deep and integral to the OS rather than a bolt on feature.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I have reiceved my G2 touch and havn't been able to setup exchange sync over the air. It goes past first option i.e. to show me what i want to synch mail, contacts, calendar and than when I click on finish setup it fails with message unable to create account try later! Any idea what is going wrong. How can I fix it?
Sachin

Anyone have any experience with exchange sync where the server requires you to set a password/pincode for the phone?
Heard some people saying that this was not supported by the Hero. A pity if true, as I need this to work in order to be able to use the Hero as a work phone (in other words, if I am to buy a Hero).

The out of the box exchange support is really very good. It just needs the ability to authenticate via password or client certificate.
I much prefer it to WM, but only because its completely finger friendly.
Yes you can flag emails, and they show up under the flagged emails tab at the bottom.

I really really hope the update within 10 days or September will affect this thing? Need to be able to sync more than one folder at the time.

cbailey said:
I, like you (not I like you!), have synced up this way. I too cannot get HTC sync to work. I am sure Orange have bundled the wrong version.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
works for me on vista 64 with orange branded HTC Touch. I believe there is an update on the HTC website, not sure if that enables win7 support
I certainly didn't notice explorer crashing after I installed it, chances are it's another explorer extension interfering (either a media codec that is failing at showing thumbnails, or a right-click extension or similar)