While I applaud Apple’s effort to bring the iPhone notes onto my desktop through Mail sync, the implementation leaves a bit to be desired. Twice now I have lost a significant amount of information due to the way Apple syncs the notes.

If you use your iPhone to take notes on the fly as much as I do, you know how painful it is to think about losing any of those precious bits of data. Mark/Sync used to work pretty well, or just emailing them one by one. Generally Apple’s sync works, with one notable exception:

If you leave a note open (that is, you don’t press “Done” or go back to the main notes menu) and then sync with your computer, for some crazy reason Apple will actually pull the old version of the note from your computer and erase any recent additions you’ve made to the note on your phone. Worse yet, even if you’ve saved the note (pressed “Done”) since your last sync, it will STILL grab the one from the computer rather than even reverting back to your last mobile version, which would be slightly less catastrophic.

Lessons learned here until Apple fixes this: 1) Always press “Done” on your note before syncing with your computer. Always! 2) Generally if you are in the habit of putting new thoughts on new notes instead of updating an old one, you’ll probably be better off.

I love my iPhone, but every once in awhile Apple just really gets it wrong. It’s surprising since I’m so used to everything else working so well. No one should have to close/save anything that seems to do so automatically and worry about losing information. I might look into switching app’s, and have Evernote installed. But Apple’s notes are just quick and easy. The screenshot below is from Apple’s Web site. I only wish “Never leave a note behind” were true in this case.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Gadget, Technology

I recently received an “Unknown error -39” when syncing my iPhone. After futzing for a bit, I noticed that the error occurred when it got to updating the photos. So I unchecked the sync option for photos, told it to remove all the photos from the phone, and pressed, “Apply.” After going in with a fresh photo sync by re-enabling the checkbox, everything seems to be working fine. I thought I would post since nothing came up when searching for the esoteric error number.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Gadget, Technology

So I’ve had this minor issue with my iPhone for the past year and a half. I have never been able to sync music from my music server and everything else (photos, contacts, calendars, applications, etc.) from my laptop. I use a separate music server, partially for storage capacity and backup, partially to have my entire library on a fixed server for streaming music throughout my home and syncing to all portable (iPod/iPhone) devices. This is a minor issue because I have plenty of access to my music on iPods and throughout my office and home. Generally I prefer not to consume my iPhone’s valuable battery with music playing, but I don’t use most of the storage space so I’d like to have some music on there just in case.

Apple baked the functionality for this into iTunes pretty near the launch of the original iPhone. My problem seemed to be that I had synced music from my laptop, then unchecked the box to remove the music in hopes I could mate this function to the music server. Every time I’d tried to do it in the past, I was faced with this message:

The main reason that I was timid about a reset was the large number of Notes on the iPhone that I didn’t want to risk losing. Apple STILL doesn’t sync notes (or tasks for that matter), which is really odd since they now have notes and tasks as parts of Mail in Leopard. Luckily, with solutions like Evernote and Mark/Space Missing Sync for iPhone and Notebook there are easy work-arounds. I’ve used the latter for iPhone note syncing for months and am gradually switching over to the web-based note system that is Evernote.

Since I finally got around to getting an iPhone 3G (was holding out for something new at MacWorld and I’ve recently discovered the bluetooth on my iPhone is not working correctly–I’d always blamed my Prius–sorry Lola), I thought this would be a good time to give it another shot.

After some futzing and re-syncing I was getting the same warning message. Since everything seemed to sync to the new phone (even notes, though applications were in a different order on the phone), I decided just to try the Erase and Sync on the music server as I’d been advised that the music server should be synced first. Rather than erasing the phone, it synced only the music to the iPhone, leaving everything else alone.

So the message was a false alarm and taking the leap of faith paid off. Your mileage may vary and I’m still not exactly sure whey I was caught in this weird music syncing limbo to begin with, but now everything seems fine.

Bottom line, if you are getting this message even after you’ve un-syncing music to the iPhone from your main computer, it MAY work to just go ahead and Erase and Sync. There are so many variables here, though, that you may also end up erasing all the other info on your iPhone. In this case, just sync the music computer first, then check everything OTHER than music on the main computer and it should work fine.

If you are trying to sync music from two different computers to one iPhone (e.g., laptop and music server), you should check out this guide from Andrew Grant at Shiny Things. It involves some light hacking, which I don’t think would be difficult for most users. It’s not necessary for me, so I’ll skip it. The greatest worry here is that some future version of iTunes will make the hack stop working or worse yet corrupt some settings you changed.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Gadget, Technology