I am not completely satisfied with the fact that Sharp has no intention whatsoever to produce a decent synchronization software suite for the Mac. The again, seeing the good job (ahem!) they did with the PeeCee version, I don't have too many regrets!
So I have decided to take my fate in my hands (wow!), with the help of fellow martyrs, of course! This is Linux, after all, it should be an open world!!!
ZynX is not much yet, but I managed to get a few things done by now, one of which is the synchronization of bookmarks, since I do use the web from my Z!
So here's the plan:
1. Get a way to have the Mac and the Z talk together through the cradle.
This was done through a Mac OS X USB Driver found through James Durbin's web site.
2. Decide what to synchronize with what.
Since the offering on the Z is still limited, it makes our job easier. However, there are enough email, calendar, address book programmes, and browsers! to keep one dilettante programmer very busy. So I hafta make choices. Since Bookmarks are easier to handle than the rest (except Safari's! Confound it! Putting b'marks in a plist! Cretins! NEXTisms Galore!), I decided to check for the 6 browers I had on my Ti (yeah, 6, I know... Who said something 'bout cretins?).
So far, since I am only using 4 of them (OmniWeb and iCab are not real contenders so far...), I decided to focus on the first three ones in the list here. Only if and when I am crazy enough to integrate an XML parser into the programme will I try to do something with Safari's plist...
For the calendar events and address book contacts, I am struggling with the applications to select. Apple's iCal and Address Book are quite nice, but not yet exactly industry standards, now... Entourage/Outlook Express is a de facto standard, although I have never liked it, really. However slow, clunky and buggy, it is still the ClarisWorks of personal productivity (yuck! What a concept!). On the other hand, I like Apple's approach, developping separate apps that do one thing, but do it well. iCal stores events in .ics files (Home.ics and Work.ics as default, perfect to sync with Personal and Business categories on the Z), so the main task is to decode VEVENT records, which is not too difficult.
Translating VEVENTs and the Z's XML format back and forth is a chore though, but can't be helped, can it? That's precisely the point of writing a sync suite...
I wish Apple had stuck with Vthings and used vCards (.vcf files) to store the contacts. Well, you can't expect anybody to be perfect, even Apple, and vCards (in v2.1 and 3.0) are only available through exports, which is not the most practical way to do things when sync'ing is your main objective... But at least they are available, so we shouldn't lose hope.