[missing-sync-palmos-talk] Erratic iCal & Treo 650 Sync Accuracy

[Aaron Mahler]

   Well, after accidentally sending an out of context reply from a  
partially related support discussion to the list, I should probably  
try to wrap up my original thread with some real information.

   The issue I posted about initially was ToDo alarms in iCal not  
ending up on my Treo and vice-versa. I use DateBk5 (http:// 
www.pimlicosoftware.com) which -greatly- enhances the traditional  
calendar and task apps on a Palm device while, more or less,  
retaining full compatibility with the databases. That keeps apps that  
sync from usually having any compatibility issues.

   As it turns out, though, alarms on ToDo items are a more recent  
development within Palm apps and DateBk5 (in its own way) had been  
providing the functionality since long before things like the Treo  
650 were doing it natively.

   I've talked to the folks at Mark/Space as well as the author at  
Pimlico and it all makes sense now. DateBk5 needs to maintain the  
functionality it has always had across the whole range of Palm  
products. They are aware of the fact that newer devices can natively  
do this, but there is no real room left in the 64K space that apps  
have to reside in on the architecture to implement the exceptions.  
Once a method they are working on for getting around that is  
functional, they'll have the headroom needed to write work such  
intelligent exceptions in the application and the problem I'm  
describing will go away. In addition to this, apparently the methods  
used inside the Palm OS for handling ToDo alarms are more than a big  
kludgy, so it's not a quick fix in any case.

   From Pimlico's very informative email to me today:

"Correct - there is a technical reason why this has not been done yet  
- any such code would have to reside in the first 64k segment which  
is completely, COMPLETELY full - only 100 bytes left at present - not  
enough to support the thousand+ lines of code needed.

The problem is that DateBk has to support the existing alarm format  
which works with the standard Palm OS ToDo database (which does not  
support alarms) so that all users with standard Palm OS devices have  
access to ToDo alarms."

"IN any event, I'm well aware of this and am working now on some type  
of overlay structure to get around the 64k limit. When that is done  
and code space becomes available, it will be fairly trivial to  
address this issue. DateBk DOES already use the proprietary Calendar/ 
Contacts/Memos databases, it's just the Tasks database which presents  
the problem."

   So... for the meantime, I'll continue to enjoy the DateBk5  
enhancements on my Treo 650 and the super nice functionality of  
Missing Sync on my Intel-based Mac. Eventually, it'll all come  
together with iCal in the middle.

  Thanks to both parties for helping give me the inside scoop. :)

  - Aaron


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