Tonight, Palm released WebOS 1.3.1 to Sprint customers here in the U.S.  Among it’s many fixes read this line:

• If you set up Contacts to synchronize with a Google account, the account synchronizes only entries in Google’s My Contacts, not all contacts.

My Pre is validating the download as we speak.  I’ll report back if there are any problems.

Hopefully the NuevaSync workaround served many of you well (I was getting a few dozen hits a day on that tutorial).  Of course, you can continue to use it if you want and I’ll leave the article up …. but I’ll be removing it from my phone.

In the comments, I’ve tried to help a couple of people who were having problems.  I decided that a follow up blog entry on troubleshooting would be a worthwile endevor.

As people report new problems, I’ll try to keep this entry updated.

Basic Troubleshooting

Give it some time: After you’ve finished the setup, you’re anxious to instantly see all of your contacts sync.  However, it may take a few minutes before your phone starts to download contacts.   Once it does start syncing, it may take several minutes for it to complete the process … depending on how many contacts you have.  So, before you assuming that the sky is falling, just wait 5-10 minutes to see what’s happening.

Check out the NuevaSync Detailed Status Page (screenshot below)
(https://www.nuevasync.com/PublicSite/user/detail-status.htm)
This page will show you which calendars and how many contacts are setup to sync.  If the numbers look right to you, then you know that NuevaSync is successfully accessing your Google Account.  If they don’t, go into the NuevaSync settings screen and double check your Google Account settings for both contacts and calendar.

Check out the NuevaSync Sync Status Page (screenshot below)
(https://www.nuevasync.com/PublicSite/user/sync-status.htm)
This page will show you whether or not your Pre is successfully syncing.  If there is no information there, then your Pre is not successfully connecting to NuevaSync.  Double check the sync settings in the Pre Contacts app for the NuevaSync Exchange server account.  If you see some weird error message that you can’t figure out, let me know and I’ll try to shed some light (read: guess what it means )

That’s all for now.  Let me know what problems you are having and I’ll see what I can come up with.

I’m excited to see all of the work being done on precentral.net and predev.wikidot.com on Palm Pre hacking/development.  One of my main reasons for Palm Pre excitement was the notion that I’d be able to build apps without learning Objective-C or some other language.

I’m just not THAT into doing web development all day at work and then coming home to learn a new language.  Actually, I prefer not to look at my home computer much at all.

I guess the first “real” homebrew app was released today … a Tip Calculator.  Check it out here: http://www.jwz.org/tipcalculator/.  I downloaded the source code and looked around a little bit.  Looks pretty approachable.  I will probably put my Pre in to Programmer’s mode (or just download the image) and see what other application source code I can look through.

I guess it’s time for me to pick up a Javascript framework  (prototype, mootools, etc) and start messing around with it.  I’ve never done any MVC Javascript programming, but I suppose my Adobe Flex experience will pay off from an architecture standpoint.

That’s fine for limited, but probably not if you need to test dates that span many years or need to run the function 1,000s of times.  Anyway, here’s a SQL Server UDF solution.  It’s late, so hopefully the comments in the code suffice.  It should be straightforward to rewrite this in ColdFusion.

This is an improved version of the solution presented here.  That solution fails when the timespan is less than 7 days long and contains at least one weekend day.

CREATE FUNCTION [dbo].[dateDiffWeekdays] (
@startdaytime DATETIME;
@enddaytime DATETIME;
)
returns int
AS
begin
 
DECLARE @answer int;
SET @answer = 0
 
-- Strip Times
SELECT @start = dateadd(dd,0, datediff(dd,0,@startdaytime))
SELECT @end = dateadd(dd,0, datediff(dd,0,@enddaytime))
 
-- handle end conditions
DECLARE @firstWeekDayInRange datetime, @lastWeekDayInRange datetime;
SELECT @firstWeekDayInRange =
case
-- If Saturday, add two days
when datepart(dw,@start) = 7 then dateadd(day,2,@start)
-- If Sunday, add one day
when datepart(dw,@start) = 1 then dateadd(day,1,@start)
else @start
end
 
SELECT @lastWeekDayInRange =
case
-- If Saturday, substract one day
when datepart(dw,@end) = 7 then dateadd(day,-1,@end)
-- If Sunday, substract two days
when datepart(dw,@end) = 1 then dateadd(day,-2,@end)
else @end
end
 
-- add one day to answer (to count Friday) if enddate was on a weekend
IF @end != @lastWeekDayInRange
SET @answer = 1
 
SELECT @answer = @answer +
case
-- triggered if start and end date are on same weekend
when dateDiff(day,@firstWeekDayInRange,@lastWeekDayInRange) < 0 then (@answer * -1)
-- otherwise count the days and substract 2 days per weekend in between dates
else (DateDiff(day, @firstWeekDayInRange, @lastWeekDayInRange) - DateDiff(week, @firstWeekDayInRange, @lastWeekDayInRange)*2)
end
 
RETURN @answer
end
 
-- Call created function
SELECT dbo.dateDiffWeekdays('6/1/2009','6/13/2009')

This process described below is no longer necessary. As of Web OS 1.3.1 (released mid-November 2009), WebOS devices automatically limit Google contact syncing to records in  ”My Contacts”. I have stopped using the method below, but I will leave this blog entry online for historical purposes.

Original Post:

As most early adopters of the Palm Pre know, Synergy with GMail pulls in records from “All Contacts” instead of “My Contacts.” The result for heavy GMail users is a contact record for virtually everyone you have ever emailed.

After about an hour of messing around, I was finally able to figure out how to get email and clean contacts from my GMail account.

If anyone is interested in setting this up on their phone, please follow the directions closely. There is a reason for every step. There are a few places that you can get tripped up.

Theory: Use Synergy with Nuevasync’s Exchange server emulation to sync Contacts and Synergy with setup GMail in the Pre for email and calendar.

End Results: Exchange Server Profile on Pre syncing via Nuevasync Google for Contacts and Calendar. Pre getting email directly from GMail and a useless Exchange email account that can’t be deleted. (I suppose everything can’t be perfect.)

References:

Palm Pre Manual: Pre User Guide
page 144 – Stop Sync of Contacts with an Online Account
page 144 – Connect to an online calendar through the Palm Synergy feature
page 155 – Stop Sync of Calendar With an Online Account

Requirements:

• Pre updated to 1.0.2 (may not be required — but it made the error messages in my trial and error process informative)
• GMail account (of course)
• Free nuevasync.com account (let’s you use Active Sync to sync phone with GMail, Google Calendar, and Plaxo) Go set one up after reading the note below.
• Verify that you preferences on nuevasync.com are setup to give it access to your GMail and Google Calendar account. Pretty straightforward setup.

Important Notes:

• In order to get around a Pre Limitation/Safeguard, the email address on your NuevaSync accountMUST not match your GMail address. Since you cannot change your email address, I had to setup a new NuevaSync account.
• Workaround Tip: Most people don’t know that GMail disregards periods in your GMail email address. If you email address is username@gmail.com, then mail sent to user.name@gmail.com also gets delivered to your account. Give it a try with your own address if you like. Knowing this, I created my new Nuevasync account and just put a period in my normal Gmail email address. Before doing that I tried, myusername@googlemail.com … but the Pre knows that gmail.com and googlemail.com are the same thing.
• I’m not sure if the tip above works with Google Apps accounts.

Steps: I don’t think that the order really matters. But I’m going to assume that most of you have your GMail account already setup. So I’ll make that step one.

Step 1: If not already done, setup your Google account on your Pre. Doesn’t matter if you add it from the email, contacts, or calendar app.

Step 2: Go to preferences under the contacts app. Open the Google account and press “Remove Account” …. don’t be scared … it only removes it from the contacts app. It will not affect your mail settings for Google. Refer to page 144 of the User’s Guide for verification. Once you hit “Remove” you’ll be taken back to the preference screen. The Google account will continue to be shown for a couple of minutes while the Pre removes those contacts from your phone.

Step 3: From the preferences panel of the Contacts App, choose “Add an account.” Choose Exchange Server as the type. When you are prompted for your email address and password, choose “Manual Setup” from the menu in the upper left-hand corner.

Use these settings:

Email Address: The email address on your NuevaSync account. Remember, this must not exactly match your GMail account. If it does, you will get an error saying there is already an account for that email address on the phone.

Incoming Mail Server: https://www.nuevasync.com
Domain: LEAVE BLANK (this differs from the nuevasync instructions for Windows Mobile)

Username: Your Nuevasync Username
Password: Your Nuevasync Password

Once that is all entered …. press Sign in and cross your fingers. If it says that your username/password do not match … make sure that you left the domain box empty and verify your username/password.

If you get some other kind of syncing problem. Click the troubleshooting link from within your account on nuevasync.com. There is a link within it that will show you the syncing errors with your account. Make sure that you have authorized Nuevasync to access your Google account.

Step 5: Go to preferences from within the CALENDAR app and remove the Google Calendar account.

Unfortunately, you cannot remove the Exchange account. Unlike other account types, removing an Exchange Account removes it from Calendar, Contacts, and Mail.

For this same reason, you can’t delete the Exchange account from within the mail app. I just removed it’s Inbox as a favorite and sorted my accounts so that mail profile was at the bottom.

IMO, small price to pay to not have an extra 1000 trash contacts from GMail. Maybe a future update will allow us to define what the Exchange account should since with.

Update on 7/20/2008: Does this work for you?

• If so, leave a comment and let me know.  I’d like to think that people find this useful, but I’m not sure.
• If not, check out my troubleshooting post – http://www.aaronterry.com/2009/07/palm-pre-troubleshooting-nuevasync-google-contacts/