Category Image Bug in Mac OS X Tiger Address Book Syncing with .Mac


One of the selling points of a .Mac subscription is the ability to sync your iCal Calendars, Safari Bookmarks, Address Book Contacts, Keychains, Mail Accounts, and Mail Rules, Signatures, and Smart Mailboxes across several Macs. Although syncing was available in earlier versions of Mac OS X, a few syncing features were introduced in Tiger. For example, keychains, and mail-related items are new. The trouble is that syncing in Mac OS X 10.4.1 (I didn't check 10.4) is a bit buggy, and if you're not careful, you may wind up losing data. For example, if you sync your Address Book contacts from a Mac (say Mac A) to .Mac, the URL fields won't be synced. They'll remain on Mac A, but won't be transferred to your .Mac Address Book. If you subsequently sync your Address Book contacts from .Mac to another Mac (say Mac B), then the original URLs won't wind up in your Address Book on Mac B. It gets even worse. Suppose you've synced your Address Book to .Mac and subsequently reset sync data on Mac A. If you then sync your Address Book contacts to transfer data from .Mac back to Mac A, you'll lose all your contact URLs. (As if you needed it, that's another reason to backup your data, frequently.)

As noted in the Apple Support Document 301230, you can include URLs in the Notes field in Address Book, and these will be synced successfully. Unfortunately, this is not an acceptable workaround. If you have many contacts with occupied URL fields, it's a big hassle to enter each of these into the Notes fields. Moreover, if a URL is not present in a contact's URL field, it won't show up in your Safari (or Omniweb) Address Book Bookmarks.

The Apple Document 301230 referenced above is dated March 30, 2005. I hope this bug doesn't carry over into Mac OS X 10.4.2. I'll post an update on this problem after Mac OS X 10.4.2 is released.

UPDATE: This bug was not fixed in 10.4.2.


Posted: Saturday - July 02, 2005 at 10:34 PM        

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