Tsaiberspace

I was recently tasked with migrating a long-time Palm user’s data into a iPod Touch, using a Windows PC. The important Palm apps/data:

• Address
• Date
• To Do
• Memo

These would be rather simple to do, except that Palm has done a great job integrating the “Categories” feature into all their apps. The use case is simple:

• Each app’s data can be tagged with a “category”. For example, each Address entry can be categorized as “Personal”, “Work”, etc. (just one category, this is not web-2.0 “tagging”).
• To look up an entry on the Palm, simply click on the desired category, and browse/scroll to find the desired entry. On a PDA, click/browse is much faster than search/type, because data entry is just pitiful, whether it is a touch-screen keyboard, graffiti, or anything other than a full-sized keyboard.

Unfortunately, it is not trivially simple to preserve this “category” information when exporting this data out of Palm Desktop and into something else.

The first step is to export all of the Palm Desktop data:

• Go to “Address”
• Select a Category
• Select All
• File… Export vCard…
• Save to a file named something like “address-personal.vcf”
• Repeat for each category, with a different filename like “address-work.vcf”, etc.

The next trick is to import all these vCard files into the iPod while preserving the category information (known on an iPod as “Groups”).

The things I tried that didn’t work:

• Import into Yahoo! Address Book, then use iTunes to “Sync Contacts with Yahoo! Addres Book”. The import was mostly painless. The “find duplicate entries” feature mostly worked, but it missed some, which is forgivable, and then does not offer a way to manually merge contacts, which is not forgivable. Furthermore, when using iTunes to sync this information for the first time, the groups information is lost; all you get is a big “All Contacts” list.
• Import into Google Contacts, then use iTunes to “Sync Contacts with Google Contacts”. Importing all the data into Google Contacts was breeze. Duplicate removal works better, and there is a manual fallback for things that are missed. However, again, the groups information is not preserved during an iTunes sync.
• Uploading VCF files into Yahoo! Address Book and Google Contacts in the hopes of seeding them with groups information also didn’t help.
• Use Palm Desktop to export to CSV … this was just a disaster.

What worked was the final option in iTunes, “Sync Contacts with Windows Address Book”. The humble Windows Address Book came to the rescue!

• Open Windows Explorer and navigate to the folder containing all the exported Palm Address VCF files.
• Start up Windows Address Book. It lives in the Start Menu via Programs … Accessories.
• Select “New Group…” to create a new group. Repeat for each category.
• Expand “Main Identity’s Contacts” to reveal all the groups.
• Click on a group.
• Drag the appropriate VCF file from Windows Explorer into the Address Book window.
• Click the next group, and repeat, for each VCF file.

Finally, in iTunes, go to the Info tab and check “Sync Contacts with Windows Address Book”, and click “Sync”. Your iPod “Contacts” app should have full groups information.

Unfortunately, there is no good way to truly synchronize group information with Yahoo! or Google. Syncing iTunes to either service loses the group information; everything appears in Yahoo! or Google as “Unfiled”. And the real problem is that there is no interface on the iPod for editing group information for a contact. So over time, all contact organization is doomed to eventually flatten to “Unfiled”.

Without buying an app from the iTunes app store, the only way to really maintain group information is to use a desktop program (Windows Address Book, or some equivalent on the Mac) as the primary means of adding new contacts.

Date, To Do, and Memo promise to be equally fun and exciting …