[missing-sync-hiptop-talk] A couple of bugs/workarounds for a new user

[Brian M. Criscuolo]

Rod,

I'm sorry you're having problems getting the sync to work correctly.  
Hopefully we can get it to work correctly, or at least address the  
issues you have in a productive way.

A couple notes, from your report:

> Problem: Address Book record sync failure caused by a contact  
> without a firstname or a lastname will cause a sync error. This  
> includes "company" contacts.
>
> Workaround: Copy the company name into the last name field.
>

You're right, that does happen, and I regret that it wasn't noticed  
during testing.

It seems that the hiptop API doesn't like records with no first or  
last name.

>
> Problem: iCal record sync failure caused by less common timezones  
> in calendar events. The uncommon time zone often occur in iCal  
> (ics) files exported from Outlook and later subscribed/imported  
> into iCal.
>
> Workaround: Replace with some more common timezones in .ics file.
>
>    Examples (original which caused failure -> replacement):
>
>        America/Dawson ->US/Pacific
>
>        Africa/Abidjan -> GMT
>

I looked at the time zone settings in the hiptop desktop interface.  
They most definitely do not support a full set of time zone names,  
nor do they use standard naming conventions for time zones. This is  
likely the problem. The sync code simply sets the time zone to what  
is coming out of the desktop event data, which *should* match up to  
danger's. Evidently it does not.

I suspect that when the data was exported from Outlook, it never had  
a true time zone set - only GMT-# - just saving the offset from GMT.  
When it was imported into iCal, the first match, alphabetically, was  
chosen. I know for sure that on OS X, America/Dawson is the first  
time zone at GMT-7 (or -8, if PDT). That's a big problem in  
applications that I'm seeing - they just don't do time zones well (or  
at all).

b

********************
Brian M. Criscuolo
Senior Software Engineer
Mark/Space, Inc.
bcriscuolo at markspace.com
<http://www.markspace.com>