Personal Collaboration on the Mac

I normally do not complain about my Macs because I love them. I do, however; have a complaint about my recent adventure trying to collaborate my machines.

I have an Intel iMac, a G3 iBook, and Palm Treo. I also have a dot mac account. What I want to be able to do flawlessly is to sync all three without issues and without having to get more software. Unfortunately, this is not possible.

I can easily sync the two Macs together using dot mac and iSync. That's pretty easy. When I add the Treo into the picture, the deal gets a little nuts.

First, let me explain how I use my machines:

My iMac is the machine I do most of the graphic design for my websites and publishing company. It does the job well and is happy most of the time. It runs Tiger (OS X 10.4.x) and handles all the latest applications very well.

My iBook which was developed back in the early 2000s only has a 10 Gig drive so I can't do much with it. I use it mostly for writing and web development work. I can run MySQL and PHP on the machine because it's a UNIX box so it's great for working on the T-Mobile network at Starbucks or Borders. I also do my time management work on my iBook.

My Treo is my cell phone, mp3 player, and eBook reader. It also has a to-do task list, a calendar, and address book.

How do I get all of these to work together? It's not easy. Apple's Sync software doesn't import some of the information to the Treo database properly so I use a software package called The Missing Link by Mark Space Software. The Missing Link copies the events, address book, to do list, and other items from my Mac's dot mac software and transfers them to the Treo and back. Usually it works fine; however, I'm doing this using Bluetooth and often times the port is busy or it times out. I have no idea if it's the software, the Treo, or the iMac. I also sync my dot mac info between the two machines to the dot mac server.

Now, this should be a great solution except for the Treo/iMac timeouts. It's also a pain because I might miss something on the dot mac server between transfers and the Treo won't have the latest information.

Now my biggest gripe: I want a simple way for Apple to add information between the dot mac apps. Why haven't they don't this yet? It is the best reason to use dot mac yet no decent application collaboration exists!

For example, I receive an email through Apple Mail. I'd like to be able to add this email to the to do list or as a calendar item. Why can't I do this yet? I would also like to add my URLs or notes to the calendar or highlight a name and phone number and add it to my address book. Why aren't these working yet with dot mac applications and Safari?

My current solution is to use the Mail2iCal, an opensource AppleScript by Kleinware. This is an AppleScript that is run either manually by the user or as a script run by the filter on Apple Mail. The user creates an email account and when a message is sent to this email then it is filtered and then the script is run where the email is automatically added to iCal as either a to do, an event, or both.

Unfortunately this is not support on Panther so I have to run the application on my iMac. Since I use the iBook primarily for email, I keep all of my accounts open on the iBook. When I receive a message on my iBook that I need to add as an event, I simply send it to the two active accounts on the iMac and the script is run. Then eventually it is added to my Palm Treo.

The missing part is adding Safari bookmarks as to do items. This would make my life much easier, but unfortunately this feature is not supported on the Panther (OS X 10.3.9) version of OSX so I cannot run it on my iBook. I am forced to copy and paste the URL into a message and send it on. Ugh.

Call me lazy, call me what you will, but I want everything to be easy. I don't want to use fifty different applications to sync my dot mac account when it should just be as easy as advertised.