OT: contact-management hell (iPhone how-to)

[abreauj-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org (John Abreau)]

There's an article in Linux Journal about Funambol, which is
apparently a server
for maintaining your contacts, calendars, tasks and notes, and syncing them
with a variety of desktop and mobile clients.  Supported clients
include Thunderbird,
Outlook, Blackberry, iPhone, and more.

    https://www.forge.funambol.org/



On Sun, Jul 5, 2009 at 1:56 PM, Rich Braun<richb-RBmg6HWzfGThzJAekONQAQ at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> I have an iPhone languishing on my desk. ?Why? ?Because I've got my phone-book
> with my friends' details sitting on a Linux box in a MySQL table, and a
> separate out-of-sync listing embedded in my ancient Motorola V180.
>
> At some point last year I wiped my PC's hard drive and more or less fully
> converted to a Linux desktop, so I no longer have a working installation of
> Outlook 98 which used to give me a very limited mechanism for updating the
> contact list.
>
> The iPhone and pretty much every other vendor's notion of a contact manager
> (be it a PDA, cell phone, webmail account, sales-automation tool, whathaveyou)
> seems to be proprietary and patented to the hilt.
>
> Having just seen "Food Inc." I'm of a mind to write my Congressman to stop the
> monopolistic madness of all these Fortune 500 companies which wield their
> lawyers and intellectual-property nonsense over the rest of us.
>
> *However*, stepping back from the brink: ?how do y'all manage *your* contact
> info? ?Is there a sane way to keep your address book (defined as names, phone
> numbers and email addresses, maybe a few other fields) regularly copied
> (sync'ed may be too strong of a word) in either direction between a Linux box
> and an iPhone?
>
> I would have solved this myself with Google but the best I could come up with
> was a VirtualBox "solution" involving special kernel hacks and a stock install
> of XP with iTunes, and probably a pirate copy of Outlook--if I go down that
> path I'll find myself in the same hell I did when I tried to run MythTV on an
> ATI-based motherboard. ?It'd be simpler to program a robot's fingers to just
> retype my address list into the iPhone's native UI.
>
> -rich
>
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-- 
John Abreau / Executive Director, Boston Linux & Unix
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