Finally ported to Google Apps

My j2mac.com email, calendar, and docs are now all managed by Google Apps. I'm pretty impressed. Setup is easy. They even gave specific instructions for GoDaddy's domain manager. And things like syncing calendar (with Calgoo) and address book (with Apple's iPhone-Google sync) make business so much easier. I've also signed a couple of other folks up on it, too. 

So if anyone has been using my j2worldofmac-at-gmail address, please delete it and stick with info-at-j2mac.com. It's official!

vCards from the iPhone

vCard Mailer: Worth every bit of $1.99.

Disable backups to speed iPhone/iPod touch syncing

Anyone who has iPhone 2.0 software is faced with the gi-normously long backups that iTunes performs almost every time the phone is plugged in. I'm grateful for the idea, of course; I spend a lot of time customizing my phone, and I would like all my settings, and logins, and game levels, and data backed up. Problem is, Apple's implementation is terrible. Here's the Ars Technica article about the issue, but in a nutshell: 

~ The backups can take anywhere from 30 minutes to 4 hours.

~ The backups are not "incremental," i.e. they backup all the data on the phone.

~ If someone calls you, the backup is interrupted. 

~ Whenever the backup is cancelled or interrupted — when, y'know, have to use the phone — that backup data set is corrupted.

So here's a solution. I recommend reading the whole post.

From MacOSXHints.com:

I have several (more than 30) applications installed in my iPhone 2.0 (some of them are over 10MB). I've been a bit disappointed with the oh-so-slow syncs in iTunes due to the required backup process. Searching a bit, I found that I could disable the backups by setting a hidden iTunes preference. Quit iTunes, open Terminal, and enter this command:

defaults write com.apple.itunes DeviceBackupsDisabled -bool YES

From the comments:

Also check out the free Backup Disabler, which is probably just a GUI for this hint.

UPDATE: iPhone firmware 2.0.1 dramatically sped up my backups! Yaaaaaaaay! We'll see if it fixes the other stuff. In brief testing, the phone feels less crashy.