so i am a recent BB 7130c convert and quite addicted

i am also a mac user and rely heavily on Apple Address Book and iCal, along with Apple Mail - all of my mail is IMAP and i use .mac to keep everything else in sync across several machines- work, home, laptop, etc.

i have fiddled with pocket mac, and basically my rule in the past with other phones (RAZR, Treo, etc.) is to never let the phone sync back into the computer, since limitations in the phone's address book and calendar inevitably mess up my Address Book entries, which often have several address, nicknames, multiple emails and phone numbers etc...

so i just sync one way, and usually do a wipe out- and try and keep up Address Book manually

obviously this is no the ideal way, but for now i don't know of a better solution unless you only use Address Book in a limited way.

having said that, the Mac->BB sync leaves a lot to be desired as well- for example it appears the BB only allows a certain number of entries for phone numbers, emails, addresses and so on, and it certainly seems to re-arrange what you have designated as work, home, mobile, etc.

so i was thinking of a part one solution to this side of things:

- back up address book
- dump/convert the address book to a parseable format (xml or whatever)
- parse through it (perl seems easiest), and compare each entry with a set of BB rules- if an entry has two many phone numbers, for example, create a new entry (NAME 2) from the original- keep doing this until you are sure you are not losing any information that is being copied over- you could probably do some intelligent splitting here too- create (NAME HOME) and (NAME WORK) entries, or put faxes and pagers and stuff in the secondary entry- this at least would make sure you had all of the contents of your address book synced into the BB
- import the edited xml/whatever back into address book, wiping existing data (which we backed up)
- sync to BB
- restore backup

so that is half the equation

the other half involves some more intelligent decision making on the other way - where for example the BB->Mac sync recognises that this editing took place and can recognise that NAME HOME is really a subset of entry NAME

anyway just some thoughts- any other software engineers out there want to discuss this a bit?

It's sad that RIM just won't help a brotha out.

LOL it is sad- a pair of 4th year CS students at Stanford (or *insert your school here*) could easily build a whole intelligent syncing system in probably about 4 weeks

rebelmix Excellent thread! I totally agree that a more elegant, far more effective data sync shouldn't be impossible and that a smart, motivated programmer could offer something better than PM or anything else out there. Unfortunately, I'm a creative-brain type so "code" boggles my mind, but I could help with the marketing and package design

Anyway, in addition to my bit--ing in this Forum for the past year about PM's shortcomings and the lack of an effective Mac/BB sync, I've also regularly sent suggestions to RIM, IAA (maker of PM) and Apple, noting the specific problems I've encountered - most of which involve improper mapping of data fields between the Mac and BB - as well as features I want to see (app loader, BB backup, an OSX-native desktop program as opposed to PM's cheesy extension-type program, etc.) Naturally, all of this should integrate perfectly with Apple's standard iApps...

Obviously, no one's listened so far, but I'm hoping that all the rumours I hear about the impending release of PM 4.0 will address these things. If not, then I hope someone far smarter than me will start working on an alternative!