May 06, 2005

Tiger - Macintosh 10.4

The Tiger upgrade seems fine and if you are thinking of upgrading you probably can do so safely but please follow this link for an excellent article about this issue http://www.tidbits.com/tb-issues/TidBITS-778.html#lnk2. It is from TidBITS, the excellent Macintosh newsletter. The truly smart ones among us will wait for the 10.4.1 update before they bother however.

A word of caution for Palm users! Read this carefully before upgrading! I for one have gone back to using the Palm Desktop software for now exclusively. That isn't a recommendation. I was actually syncing to both the Palm software and the Mac apps before this upgrade. You can successfully move to Tiger if you follow the directions below.

iSync not properly synchronizing It appears that users will have to re-initialize any iSync-enabled devices from the data saved on their Macs after updating to Mac OS X 10.4. The new version of iSync -- 2.0 -- does not allow devices to automatically sync and retain data stored on said device. Instead, as noted by MacFixIt reader Mark B, users have two options after updating:

• reinitialize the device from the data on the computer (losing any changes made on the device since the last sync) or

• "merge" the two data sets, creating duplicates of nearly everything.

So make sure that your devices are synchronized under Mac OS X 10.3.x first (all data that is on the device is also on the computer) before updating to Mac OS X 10.4.

One reader affected by this issue writes: "Have just updated to Tiger 10.4 and tested out iSync 2.0 and MissingSync 4.0.4 with my Palm T2/SE T68i. Well, it was most annoying that iSync would reset all the past sync data. Meaning that all data will have to either re-merge or overwritten on the peripheral device."

This blurb is from the MacFixit website.

There are some more thoughts on Tiger and iSync from Jeff Gamet at http://homepage.mac.com/digiwizard/iblog/