Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Something is Amis in Denmark - NOTE SYNCING iPhone and iPad

Shakespeare once wrote that "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark."  I believe this quote best describes the problem I am having with NOTE SYNCING, two different devices (under two different iOS systems) with my Macintosh.

After the last blog about note syncing, I further realized that my new notes that I added in my Mail app on my Mac were not being synced to my iPhone and there also seemed to be a problem going from my iPhone back to the computer consistently. 

My notes in the Mail App on my Mac were residing in a folder called 'On My Mac'.  I also noticed that there was also a folder called 'myname@me.com', which did not contain any notes.   It seems that in order to SYNC NOTES from your mobile me account to your iPhone and iPad, the notes need to reside in the account that correlates to your mobile me account, i.e. 'myname@me.com'.

When I moved the notes from the folder 'On My Mac' to the folder called 'myname@me.com' then the new notes showed up on my iPhone.   This was a change made by Apple in the way they sync NOTES under iOS4 and I assume for the iPhone 4.  Your notes must reside in the folder of the mobile me account on your Mac as well as on your iPhone.

So after testing this, I now have the NOTES SYNCING both ways from my Mac and iPhone (using iOS4.0.1).

I noticed that my iPad is not working to update notes automatically when syncing.  This now makes sense, as the iPad is running on the old 3.2 system and doesn't allow NOTE syncing via air, but is handled via syncing with USB cable hooked to my Mac running iTunes. 

Testing out this theory, I realized that the only NOTES that were synced to my iPad were done one way, and the only notes that came over to my iPad were the ones made on my Mac and not the additional notes that I also had from my iPhone.   The notes that I had written on my iPad, were not synced back to the Mac indicating that this is a one-way communication.   In fact the notes that were on my iPad disappeared.

So I offer a suggestion of backing up any notes that you might have on your Mac, iPad and/or iPhone before trying to figure out the NOTE SYNCING.  It is probably not a good idea to sync iPad notes until the new iOS 4 becomes available.

7/22/2010 - update to this blog post.  After the latest iTunes 9.2.1(4) update, the notes seem to be syncing from my iPad to my Mac computer under 'On My Mac' account. 

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