Hi there!  By way of an introduction, I'm Gabriele Rizzetto, one of the resident IT guys here at our New Kings Road office.  My particular passions include gadgetry, coffee, travel and Macs, and just to quickly plug some of my favourite blogs, I'm an avid Lifehacker, Gizmodo and Engadget fan.

For my first ever post, I'd like to talk about MobileMe.  We have several clients who are very much sold on the simplicity, ease-of-use and promise of services like MobileMe.  Without getting too far into the relative merits of free services versus paid, subscription services, I think MobileMe, if you can afford it, is fantastic.  I’ve tried just about every combination of Google Calendar, Dropbox, Gmail, etc. but I still haven’t dropped my MobileMe subscription for several reasons.

1. Peace of mind.

Most people, admittedly, are just after a way to keep the calendar on their BlackBerry/iPhone in sync with what they have on their Mac.  MobileMe syncs a lot more than that with very little fuss.  If you buy a new Mac and enter your MobileMe credentials in during the setup phase, when you log in it will pull down everything from Dock entries and Dashboard stickies to your Keychains, Preferences, Transmit Favourites and even your Kotoeri User Dictionary!  In other words, it’s been designed specifically to keep some of the most important aspects of your OS X machines on the cloud.  And if your Mac is lost or stolen, if you’ve been wise enough to keep a Time Machine backup and sync to MobileMe, pretty much every last calendar entry, wireless internet password and Dashboard sticky note should all be back with you on your replacement Mac in a very short time.

2. The extras.

Hosting is easy enough to come by for little or no cash.  If you’re a reasonably technical person and are comfortable using an FTP client or a package like Espresso, Coda or Dreamweaver, then great.  iWeb, the MobileMe web gallery and the iDisk seem to fit the bill quite well for the niche semi-technical user or even for the technical user wanting a site up quickly and a WYSIWYG interface where the what you see translates nicely enough into what you get.  The pre-made templates are great, and you can even swap out iWeb for something a little more full-featured and customisable like RapidWeaver (which has an edit source function!)

For those of you who own Time Capsules, Airport Extremes or two Macs, the Back to my Mac feature gives you Finder sidebar access to your machines from wherever you are in the world, with the simplicity of Bonjour networking.  Anyone who's been bailed out in an emergency by this particular function can testify to how helpful it can be.

3. The bread and butter stuff works great.

All the stuff that can be replicated with free services takes about 30 seconds of setup with MobileMe - on an iPhone you just set up a Mail account, tap MobileMe, enter your username and password and switch on all the required services (Mail, Contacts, Calendars and Bookmarks).  On the Mac, the MobileMe preference pane does the job with even less fuss.  Username, password and a few checkboxes later and you’re there.

However...

MobileMe, like most sync services, does occasionally go rogue and misbehave.  I’ve decided to save a little global frustration and traipsing around Apple forums by posting one or two problems I’ve had in the past.

Problem 1: Contacts will not sync between my Mac and MobileMe, whatever I do.

A client came to me with this problem last year.  She had some old MobileMe data on the cloud which had not been synced to her Mac for some time (the MobileMe preference pane was set to sync manually, and the menu item had not been activated for a few weeks).  In the interim, while waiting for her new iPhone to be delivered, she had sat down with her Mac and fastidiously updated her Mac Address Book data - this was not synced to the MobileMe cloud.  When the iPhone came and it came to syncing all her MobileMe data, she said the best thing would be to overwrite whatever was on MobileMe in terms of Address Book data with what was on her computer, which was now the most up-to-date ‘master’ copy.  The obvious answer was to move the data across with a one-way sync from the computer to the cloud.

This process, by the way, is terribly unintuitive.  To perform a one-way sync, you have to go to the MobileMe preference pane, click Sync, Advanced and then rather shockingly, click on ‘Reset Sync Data’:

This brings up a traditional one-way sync panel, the kind that you might recognise if you’ve ever owned a PDA or Handheld in the past 15 years, or used a PC or Mac backup utility.  The idea here was to overwrite the data on the cloud with the master data on her computer.  The reset went through, the sync would complete... and a quick check on MobileMe or on the iPhone would reflect no change to the cloud data.  What was going on?

A little digging around and I came up with a theory which turned out to be on the money.  The data on her address book, which contained around 1,500 entries, was corrupted.  The Address Book app on her Mac was perfectly silent about this, and MobileMe didn’t complain that the sync had failed, but a few internet sources cited similar-ish cases.

The trick was to create a backup of the Address Book data from within the app and save it somewhere, Quit Address Book, delete the current Address Book data (everything inside ~/Library/Application Support/Address Book), re-run Address Book (it then creates a new, blank database) and re-import the data from the backup.  This worked, and the one-way sync then took off on its own.

Problem 2: Duplicate contacts on the iPhone or iPod Touch.

I am surprised this doesn’t happen to more people.  In a rare example of bad software design, it is totally unclear that by syncing your PIM data to your iPhone/Touch with iTunes it will not cleverly merge this with whatever happens on MobileMe.  What it does is create a second group with all the contacts on the computer in addition to the ones on MobileMe and shows them on the all contacts list as duplicates.  This has led to several calls from confused clients who have checked 'Sync contacts' in iTunes, not expecting this kind of slightly cretinous result (i.e. 'syncing' does not interface with the existing data on your device at all, it simply creates a new, separate contacts database).

The simple solution is to turn off Contact and Calendar syncing on iTunes and sync.  The iPhone will then grab all its contacts data from MobileMe.  This might involve a little playing around with the sliders in the Mail, Contacts and Calendars settings pane on the iPhone, making it delete everything that’s on the phone and then turn on MobileMe syncing again so it pulls down all the information.  Type ‘iPhone Duplicate Contacts’ into Google, there is plenty of information about this issue on the Apple forums and other sites.