Apple recently re-branded their .Mac program to MobileMe. MobileMe provides a lot of updates to .Mac, not the least of which is a newly enhanced web interface. But what caught my attention was that you can now sync your contacts and calendar to “the cloud” and then keep your PC, MAC, web and iPhone in seemless synced up harmony. If only if were that easy…
Despite my love for Mac, I am still cross-platform. I use my Sony Vaio (with Vista Business) quite often and appreciated this new feature to keep Vista up to date with the latest contact info. In order to get the Windows “Sync” client, you need to updates to iTunes 7.7, which wasn’t readily apparent to me. I enabled the Sync on my mac and confirmed that the website did indeed have all of my contact info. iTunes 7.7 adds a new control panel applet called MobileMe and I immediately told it to sync down (and overwrite my local) contacts in the Vista Contacts shell. Much like the Mac, Windows Vista has a default handler for contacts and keeps a system-wide address book. Since I already use the default Windows Live Mail client, I should be all set. Now, we are talking about Vista after all.
I go to Windows Live Mail and create a new mail message. Humm, the contact info looks stale, let me try and search. Nothing, lets expand the contact list in Live Mail…. Windows Live Mail seems to be using my contact info from Hotmail (which i use as an alternative to .mac from time to time). I’m sure there’s a setting to choose my default contact directory. Nope, can’t find it. It appears as though Windows Live Mail by default does NOT use the local Windows Vista contacts. It gets everything from your “Live Contacts” managed on the web. So, now’ Apple has helped me sync my contacts down to my PC, but I have no way to use it. This is most likely to different departments of Microsoft once again NOT working together. The OS team and the Windows Live Mail people just never synced up to see how they would handle this.
And this is just another reason why Apple rules the roost…
This link over at Microsoft confirms this ridiculous anomaly and offers a hack to work around it. I wont be messing with my contacts and adding subfolders. I’ll turn off the Windows portion of sync until Microsoft gets their act together.
