A few weeks back I wrote about Google Sync going head to head with some of the functionality of Apple’s MobileMe and pledged to try both and see how I felt (Original Article). Today I’m here to tell you that I’ve been happily using Google Sync for two weeks now and it’s pretty damn amazing. The whole process, for me, went off without a hitch because I backed everything up multiple times before getting the ball rolling, but here are a few things to watch out for:
- Before starting, open Address Book Preferences and uncheck the “Synchronize With Google” box. If you don’t, just about everyone you’ve ever emailed will start showing up in your address book. Not good.
- It’s a wise idea to clean up your Gmail contacts before you get started because, again, everyone you’ve ever emailed will show up as a contact on your phone.
- If you want iCal to sync with your Google Calendar and thus with your phone (since your iPhone no longer directly communicates with either Address Book or iCal for syncing), your best course of action would be picking up a copy of BusySync. It’s seamless, works like a charm, and is completely unobtrusive in your menu bar.
- Every now and then after adding a few contacts I’ll export them from Google as VCards and import them into Address Book just to keep things nice and tidy.
- Be mindful that “My Contacts” is the only group that gets synced from your Google contacts list.
- Push Email through your Gmail account isn’t currently supported, but we can hope!
A lot of interesting new features are being promised for future releases including a robust plugin system, contextual search and more. If the plugin system is well documented, I’m sure developers will flock to this search utility as they did to Quicksilver before it.
