Thursday, January 31, 2008

Funambol and Trolltech

Funambol hired another Stefano a few weeks ago (our CTO was worried they could outnumber the Andreas), Stefano Maffulli, as our community manager. He comes from the FSF, so he is a guarantee for keeping our tight-rope walker well balanced on open source.

He has a cool blog at http://maffulli.net/ which I guess will start hosting more mobile stuff than before (welcome to mobile open source ;-)

His last post is about Trolltech and Funambol, an initiative I find quite interesting, in particular after the acquisition of Trolltech by Nokia (which is already a partner and a customer of Funambol, BTW).
Why wait until summer to code and earn $3,000? Funambol has just announced the availability of a $3,000 bounty to develop a plugin to allow Funambol to run on Qtopia devices. Trolltech, the makers of Qtopia, was just acquired this week by Nokia and as a result, Qtopia will become more commonly used.

Trolltech and Funambol would like to make sure that Funambol software works on Qtopia, so we are happy to provide you with a free Trolltech Green Phone or OpenMoko phone, a free Trolltech SDK and, of ourse, Funambol software. This would involve developing a plug-in to sync PIM data (contacts and calendar to start with) and maybe push email later.

If interested, follow the procedure on the code sniper page and submit a proposal.

Developers looking for information on Funambol’s code should look at Funambol’s wiki and at code from other community contributions (like the Android plugin, for example or the simpler Jajah plugin).

It should be fun, do not miss it.

Android on Dell?

Today a news crossed my screen and caught my attention. The rumor that Dell and Google are working together to release an Android-based smartphone, to be announced at the MWC (a.k.a. 3GSM, as it will be called for another five years by us lazy people).

The announcement would be very cool.

Dell is clearly looking to re-invent itself, or at least find some growth somewhere. The mobile market might be it. Having a big device hit would drive a lot of revenues, and create some buzz around the brand (which is stale).

Google is clearly looking for some device manufacturers that can support its operating system. When the incumbents do not support you, you have to find someone else, which is eager to become relevant in a new space. Dell would be a good match.

When I shared the rumor today, someone asked me "with which carrier?".

Great question, but a 2007 one...

I would bet it would be with no carrier. An open phone. Actually two, one CDMA (that would work on the new Verizon open network) and one GSM (that would work on at&t and Tmobile). Just buy a SIM or walk into a Verizon store and you are activated, ready to go. Open phone, open network.

It would be really cool.

The issue is believing that Dell can create a cool phone, but... who knows? It might happen. Santa is a real person which is hiding somewhere, I believe.

Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Funambol Community Showcase #2: Yahoo Plug-in

This is the second showcase of Funambol projects. I started this with SyncEvolution a month ago. Today I am showcasing a contacts and calendar synchronization tool, to sync your Yahoo data with a Funambol server. It is a cool project, because it allows you to get your Yahoo data synched on all the devices we support (north of 800, these days... including iPhone and Android ;-)

The developer is Paulo Sergio Lopes Fernandes of Portugal. With his name, he could certainly be a Brazilian soccer player (maybe with a cool nickname, like Pele' or Kaka' or Zico), but he apparently prefers software....

BTW, we have a very active development community in Portugal. Their schools are extremely good. I have been really pleased with everything that has come out of there. Friendly people, good software, decent food. The future Silicon Valley?

Enough with my stuff, let's talk about the Funambol Yahoo plug-in.

Funambol Yahoo Plug-in

By Paulo Fernandes
pauloslf@gmail.com

Overview

The Funambol Yahoo! PIM Plug-in uses the Funambol API to synchronize PIM data between SyncML servers (such as myFUNAMBOL at my.funambol.com ) an
d Yahoo! The objective was to achieve two-way synchronization between both systems. Yahoo! has both a calendar and a contact manager so the goal was to synchronize the events and contacts in Yahoo! with the Funambol server.

Interesting Aspects, Challenges, etc.

My first big challenge was to find a way to interact with th
e Yahoo! server. My first try was to use html scrapping: first, I downloaded the page, then I analyzed the html. This solution had many problems, the first was the amount of data downloaded from server, the other was to create regular expressions to get the data needed from a huge html string.

I decided to look around for other software using Yahoo! services and I discovered the Yahoo! widgets (yes, I know they are quite popular but I am not a Windows user). I thought that the widgets might have a smarter way to access Yahoo! By looking around, I found out that the communication is done via simple XML. With a little patience, I understood the meaning of each xml tag and the links where it should be posted.


Another problem was that whenever two different systems are synchronized, you need to decide if a field in the server is equivalent to a field in the client. For example, Funambol stores email as personal email and business email while Yahoo! uses 'email' and 'alternate1' and 'alternate2'. I had to make lots of small decisions to allow safe synchronization.

Using the Funambol Yahoo! PIM Plug-in

The main purpose of Yahoo! PIM Plug-in is to allow users to keep their Yahoo! PIM data (contacts and calendar) in sync with their phone, Outlook, Thunderbird, etc.

The Funambol Yahoo! Plug-in is very easy to use! The first step is to download it from Sourceforge.

This plug-in exists both for Linux and Windows. On Windows, you just need to download the .exe file, install it and you are ready to go. On Linux, you need to download the .zip file, extract it, and run the script ./runYahoo.sh.


The user interface is the same, on your first run, you will see:

The first step is configure your personal data. To do this, use Edit > Communication Settings, then you will see a screen that allow you to configure your login for Funambol and Yahoo!

After this, you can also specify if you want to sync both calendar and contacts, or just one. To do this, go to Edit > Synchronization settings.


Future Plans

I plan to improve the functionality of calendar syncing and to keep an eye on how the interfaces to the Yahoo! PIM service evolves, to see if there is an opportunity for optimization. I would also like to see it get a new user interface, like the Funambol Outlook Plug-in uses, if anyone is interested, feel free to help :) ).

URL / pointers for more info: Firebug.

Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Going for that billion dollar company

A few months back, when Zimbra was acquired, I wrote a post about the (in)famous quest for the billion dollar open source company.

I wrote:
My prediction is that prices will continue to go up, buyers will continue to buy and at the end of this madness, open source will simply be everywhere. But there won't be a billion dollars standalone open source company.
Looking at the last week or so, I guess I am getting this right ;-) MySQL bought for a 20x multiplier. Trolltech for a 60% premium on their stock price... Any more doubts on open source companies able to have an exit?? And what an exit...

If I go back to the time I switched our model to dual licensing, I remember it started meeting Marten in London and then reading an article about MySQL, Trolltech and Sleepycat. They are all gone. Sun, Nokia and Oracle. Not a bad list...

We have been trying to organize a hike for a few months among open source CEOs. It was supposed to be me, Marten (MySQL), Haavard (Trolltech) and Chris (db4o). Every week we are losing a CEO :-) Now we also are adding Mike (Sleepycat), to make sure CEOs are a minority...

What about that billion dollar company?

Well, there are not many options left. To get to that size, you need a category leader in a space, like MySQL (DB), JBoss (app servers) or Zimbra (email). Sugar leads in CRM, Alfresco leads in Document Management (going with Matt's marketing statements...), Funambol leads in mobile. I have a hard time seeing someone leading in ERP (Compiere and OpenBravo are fighting hard), Business Intelligence (lots of players there) or generic enterprise applications. A lot of the players are addressing a niche, and I do not believe that can lead to a billion dollar company. I probably left out someone potentially big, who I know very well and will send me an email complaining tomorrow :-) Sorry in advance, I did not mean it.

If I am right, there are so few companies that can make it... We need to do something... Although reality seems to indicate there won't be a pure open source billion dollar company, what's wrong with trying? I am going for it.

Funambol is going to be the first open source billion dollar company.

P.S. still, if you have a billion dollar check ready today, do not be shy and feel free to give me a call ;-

Friday, January 25, 2008

Unbricking my iPhone - Act 2

So I finally found the time to book the Genius bar for Tuesday at 7 pm, at the Stanford Shopping Center.

Unfortunately, my life is quite busy these days and I was running late. People told me "they will never wait for you". I confidently thought "a Genius will wait for me", hopped in my car, called the Apple store (maybe I was not that confident, after all) and Joe answered with a reassuring "sure, take your time".

I walked into the store, my name was on the screen, the Genius wasn't there. I asked and a nice lady told me "the Genius is in the back of the store, he will be back shortly". Wow, they REALLY call him "The Genius"!!

John the Genius showed up, looked at the phone, rebooted it, virtually touched his lamp (the iPhone was not touchable) and exclaimed "I need to take your iPhone and give you a new one. Is it ok?".

HE IS A GENIUS, AFTER ALL!

Yes, it was ok for me. I signed a piece of paper, I received a probably refurbished iPhone 4GB (where did they get one is a mystery), which has the latest version of the OS and baseband 4.6
(unlockable, as of today). I went home, jailbroke it, put Funambol on it and the next morning I gave my first demo.

Impressions of Act 2:
  1. The genius waited for me, even if I was late. +3 Apple
  2. The genius swapped my phone with no questions. +10 Apple
Impressions of Act 1 + Act 2: not that bad (-2 Apple). Overall, the experience was very good, once I had the appointment set up. I agree with the idea of having a smart dude check the device before giving you a new one (sound business idea from Apple). However, they should not force you to wait the entire weekend for that. With a bit more people at the Genius bar (or a preference for iPhone issues, since you are paying them a monthly fee anyway), they would get a big round of applause from me.

Now I would recommend them to build more robust devices, but this is a different story...

Saturday, January 19, 2008

Unbricking my iPhone - Act 1

Today I walked into the Apple store in Palo Alto with my bricked iPhone.

I looked around, trying to find the smiling dude (they have plenty of those in the Apple stores) and I walked towards him. I showed him my bricked iPhone. He looked at me with sad eyes, tried to unlock it, reboot it and finally agreed the touchscreen was dead.

I asked him if he has seen any other iPhone with a dead touchscreen and he answered: "many, the touchscreen simply stops working". Nice to feel I am not alone.

Then I asked him: "so, what's next?".

He said: "you need to go to the Genius bar" (I was less than a yard from the Genius bar). "They will look at it and give you a new one, since this one needs to be repaired". I asked if they had spare 4G iPhones (I believe I am the only one in the world left with a 4G iPhone). He said "sure".

Then he added: "unfortunately, the Genius bar is all booked today and probably also tomorrow".

He walked me to a laptop in the store where I could see when I could book my slot. The next slot was Monday at 1 pm.

Now, I told him I actually did not think I needed a genius to take my iPhone and give me a new one, any idiot could do it. He stopped smiling and told me "unfortunately, sir, you need to go to the Genius bar".

On a Saturday morning, to get an iPhone swapped, I have to wait until Monday. Sadly, I am working on Monday (actually, I am speaking at the .mobile Internet Forum in San Francisco, so I am not really working...). Therefore, I can't go and talk to the genius. I will have to wait.

And while I wait, I am paying at&t (and Apple) for a monthly subscription I can't use.

First impressions of Act 1:
  1. The smiling dude was very nice with me. +1 Apple
  2. The idea of needing a genius to swap an iPhone, when an idiot would be more than enough, is just dumb. In any other store, I could return the damn thing in two minutes. -5 Apple
  3. The fact that the Genius bar is overbooked makes the wait even more upsetting. -10 Apple
  4. Waiting from the beginning of the weekend to the beginning of the business week is really bad. -11 Apple
  5. Thinking that I am paying over the weekend while I am waiting for the Genius makes all this worse. -12 Apple
In a few days, I will report back on Act 2, "the visit to the Genius". Maybe he will just touch my iPhone and it will start walking again.

Tuesday, January 15, 2008

MacWorld: blink

So, today is the big day of MacWorld. Jobs keynote. The magician at work.

Few things announced:
  1. an ultraportable laptop called MacBook Air, very cool looking
  2. an upgrade to the iPhone, called 1.1.3, that adds few new feature to maps (same we already have on other devices), web pages as mobile widgets on a customizable home page (features already available in the jailbroken iPhone, since months), group SMS (yawn)
  3. an upgrade to the iPod Touch, adding all the apps that iPhone has always had and iPod Touch was missing (that makes it now equal to the iPhone) at $20
  4. online movie rental (made easy)
  5. an upgrade to Apple TV (a device I was not too enthusiastic about, when it was released...)
  6. a wireless backup unit (boring but quite useful)
Blink:
  1. Apple is leaking like a sieve. This is the first MacWorld ever with no surprises. The iPhone 1.1.3 was announced on blogs, with video, three weeks ago. Totally accurate
  2. The MacBook Air looks awesome. I want one. They solved my issue of the right click of the mouse (the trackpad multitouch is a very cool thing), but added yet-another-dongle to carry on: the damn thing is missing the Ethernet port... I mean, go give a presentation and pray they have free wireless. No chance. I will need two VGA dongles and two Ethernet dongles. Mmhh, maybe I won't buy it after all. We'll see
  3. The wiggling of the iPhone icons on the customizable home page is absolute genius. I want to hug the Apple designer who thought about it
  4. The 20 bucks for the software upgrade of the iPod Touch is a very bad sign for all of us that are getting used to free firmware updates. Say good bye to it. The iPhone 2.0 software upgrade is going to cost dollars. Like I could install it on my brick...

Help: I am on the TIM black list

Yesterday I was told I am on the TIM black list. If I go to TIM and try to buy a SIM card, they won't give it to me. Strange, I did not do anything bad to TIM. Why do they hate me? Maybe because my personal phone number in Italy is on Wind and I write on a blog?

Well, I found out the problem is that I am too good of a customer. I bought too many SIMs from them, since the Funambol engineering team uses my name as the CEO of the company in Italy, when buying SIMs. I reached the TIM SIM limit.

They won't give me more. I had enough. I must go to the competition.

It make sense, I would blacklist my best customers as well if I could ;-)

Saturday, January 12, 2008

Time for a laptop change?

Now that my iPhone is a brick because the touch screen gave up on me, I should start saying that Apple hardware sucks and that nobody should buy anything from Apple. This is actually true, I have heard it from many sources (laptop crashing, iPod unusable after few months and so on), including Dave and Matt (who is an hard-core Apple fan). However, since I am still in Europe, I am dumbly hopeful that next week I will be back in the Palo Alto store and the smiling dude will give me a new iPhone. I am probably dreaming, but I will report about it later...

My laptop is suffering of Windows aging. It is a well-know phenomenon: you leave Windows to run for a few months and it slows down inevitably, day after day. The time for boot becomes longer. The time after you login becomes infinite. Usually, when I reach this state I re-install Windows from scratch. I keep a backup on a separate PC, with all my data and applications. In a couple of hours, I have a rejuvenated laptop.

This time I am tempted (again) by what Steve Jobs will announce next week. I always thought I could not use a Mac because it lacks the right button of the mouse (but I was told you can still make it, clicking one of the special keys) and the damn dongle for the VGA: if you do presentations all the time, you will lose the dongle one day between presentations and you will be dead (but I was told I could buy two dongles and store one in a secret compartment of my bag, just for emergencies).

What is compelling is that every laptop I bought recently for Funambol has been a Mac. Everyone got one. Parallels works really great and people are running Windows XP applications happily. Including Outlook, a tool I can't really live without (today, but I am sure it won't last).

Actually, because of Parallels and the Intel inside, the upgrade from Windows XP to Vista is more difficult than the upgrade from Windows XP to Apple Leopard... XP applications run smoothly in Leopard and you do not have to learn a new paradigm for applications. In part, this is because the upgrade from Office 2007 to Office XP is more difficult than the upgrade from Office 2007 to OpenOffice... I find all this quite bizarre but a great opportunity for the non-Microsoft camp. If they hurt themselves, we should not stop ;-)

However, I can't get an Apple laptop today. Their laptops are just too heavy. I am what computer magazines would call "a road warrior" and wifes "an idiot". I travel a bit too much to put a heavy laptop in my bag. I need it light. My HP Compaq nc4010 does it well as an ultraportable at 3.5 lbs.

Now, it appears Steve will announce an ultraportable laptop at MacWorld... With a flash disk. Thin and light. One that will break in six months... If the former happens and the smiling dude will give me back a new iPhone next week (maybe with 3G, Steve go for it), I might actually go for it as well.

Stay tuned.

Wednesday, January 09, 2008

Time to say goodbye to texting

What are the advantages of SMS, also known as texting, that drove it to worldwide unbelievable success?
  1. It is easy and immediate, although it is asynchronous
  2. It is dirty cheap, much less than a voice call
Now, nothing seems to be taking away #1. However, the limitations are clear. Try sending out a picture with an SMS... It is a technology of the past.

What kills me is that the mobile operators are taking away #2!! Today Verizon raised the price of a single text to 20 cents, following Sprint (mind you foolish Europeans, it is both for sending and receiving message ;-) Just a bit more than a year ago, the price was 10 cents, then they raised to 15 cents, now it is 20 cents. A 100% increase in a year...

Are they insane??

Maybe. They are simply pushing everybody to buy a bundle. If you are a bundle user, you are going to send a lot more text messages (who cares, they use zero bandwidth), which will be sent to a lot of people. Some of them (most?) will be receivers without a bundle: THEY will pay double (a bundle...). Evil.

But they might be pushing towards the wrong one. In a short time, people won't buy SMS bundles, they will buy a data plan and they will use mobile email instead. They are just accelerating the transition, pushing to make themselves a dumb pipe...

Time to say goodbye to texting, at least in the US.

Tuesday, January 08, 2008

Yahoo Go: because we all love SDKs

If you are a mobile developer, you are already a frustrated individual. You dream of a world with one mobile operating system and one SDK (wait, are you sure, take a look at what you have in front of you...), instead Yahoo at CES has just announced yet-another-mobile-SDK.

Damn, can't life in mobile be easier?

If you want to build a mobile app today, you can choose from:
  • JavaME: great reach but you need to develop one app per phone, so that's about one billion slightly different apps... But just slightly.
  • Symbian: not a bad idea, big reach, stable platform, maybe boring. I could even build a JavaME app and tweak it to become native.
  • Windows Mobile: very small market share and not growing, but easy to build. Tough, who wants to build for a Microsoft operating system? Really uncool... If my boss forced me to do it, I will. But please boss do not force me to do it.
  • iPhone: that would be cool, the thing attracts girls and its market share will boom fast (although the device is not really robust). Wait, I have to hack it and there are no APIs. Even cooler! It might get boring when they announce the SDK in February, though...
  • Android: whooo!! supercool. Too bad there are no devices and it will take a few years for it to have a meaningful marketplace. Hey, but you can get money from Google with the Android Challenge...
  • BREW: what? No, please. I do not want to develop in a box with high walls.
  • PalmOS: is it still alive?
  • Flash: nice, but it is ready for prime time? It could actually be the answer to JavaME portability in the long run. Wait and see.
  • A dozen variations of Linux, lead by OpenMoko (because I like them), including Maemo and many others: go for it, man! We need people that love to dream in this world! Worst case scenario: you'll port it back to Android in a year. It is a mobile Linux variation, after all.
  • Another ten or so I forgot, like Sony PSP and many more
When you think you are done with the list, boom! Yahoo comes up with a mobile platform over a mobile operating system. A sort of a middle layer that allows you to develop your applications on top of that. Not that far, as a concept, from JavaME or Flash. Certainly, more focused in scope.

The issue? Well, a mobile platform over an operating system might be a bit large in size and slow as hell. Hey, you can always hope in Moore's law.

The opportunity? Well, they already ported their platform over the other operating systems. If they make it really consistent (doable), you develop once and it will run everywhere. That's a developer dream.

The risk? Well, for your app to succeed, you need the underlying technology to succeed. If people do not download Yahoo Go on their phone because it is too large and too slow, you are toasted. Uuhhmmm.

Overall, I like Yahoo's move.

They needed to come up with something (anything ;-) to counter Google and Apple. They did it.

I am a fan of the mobile widget concept, as you might remember. In one of my first posts on this blog, I mentioned Yahoo going for WAP but my prediction was they would go back to mobile widgets one day. They did it.

Now they just have to make sure consumers love the platform and developers build the widgets. The problem is that the two are linked. One drives the other. And getting developers mind share in mobile is very very hard these days...

Good! Luck! To! Yahoo!

Monday, January 07, 2008

Death of an iPhone

Close to a year after being unveiled at Macworld and slightly six months after being bought the day it was put on sale, my iPhone died today. Or better, it became untouchable.

I can swipe all my fingers on it, but it does not feel the touch anymore. I cannot even do the "slide to unlock"... Worst, it rings, it beeps, it syncs, but I touch it and she (?) refuses to wake up or giggle a little. I reboot it and nothing changes. It is a sad day in iPhoneland.

Let's hope Apple will have an answer why one day my beautiful touchscreen left me. Unfortunately, I am in Europe and I will need to let the battery go for another ten days...

Thursday, January 03, 2008

Mobile Open Source Monday

As soon as Mike found out I was in Europe, he organized a Mobile Monday Silicon Valley around Open Source... Jokes apart, this looks like a great event and we will have Hal speaking about Mobile Open Source and Funambol. Funny enough, it is held at Microsoft :-)
* What: January 2008 Mobile Monday (Open Source)
* When: January 7th, 2008 7:00pm
* Where: Microsoft SV Campus, 1065 La Avenida St. Building 1, Mountain View, CA
* Who: Anyone interested in mobility
* Cost: Nothing!
Do not miss it.

Wednesday, January 02, 2008

Funambol Community Showcase #1: SyncEvolution

The first days of the year, most people commit to doing something. I am not a smoker, so I can't stop doing that. Therefore, I am focusing on something else: showcasing the great projects in our community. There are so many and so diverse, that they risk to get lost. I have decided to pick some for a few weeks (or months) and have the developer(s) talk about it.

The showcase consists of Funambol developers and community members writing about Funambol mobile open source projects, components, apps, services and content. Showcase entries will be published periodically in my blog, to generate awareness of interesting projects in the community and to provide recognition for outstanding achievements by our dedicated developers and community members.


The debut entry in the showcase is SyncEvolution, written by long time Funambol community member Patrick Ohly. As his showcase entry mentions, Patrick has made multiple significant contributions to the Funambol code base. He is a star and I want sincerely to thank him for all of his efforts. I think you will find this entry to be quite interesting. If you would like to learn more about SyncEvolution, check out the links in the entry or contact Patrick for more information.

I plan to publish several more Showcase entries over the coming weeks, covering all aspects of Funambol such as the Java ME client, the Outlook plug-in, the Windows Mobile plug-in, the Device Management framework and much more. If you are interested in generating awareness for your Funambol project, just drop me a note. Thank you and enjoy the first showcase.

SyncEvolution

By Patrick Ohly
patrick.ohly@gmx.de

Overview

SyncEvolution synchronizes personal information management (PIM) data like contacts, calenders, tasks and memos via the SyncML synchronization standard. The version of SyncEvolution compiled for GNOME's Evolution supports all of these data items. The version compiled for Nokia 770/800/810 Internet Tablets, Mac OS X and the iPhone supports synchronizing the system address book. The command line tool 'syncevolution' (that is compiled separately for each of these platforms) performs the synchronization.

Background

In 2006, I became interested in SyncML because I had to replace my mobile phone. I wanted to choose a phone that I could synchronize with my address book, which was in the Evolution email client on Linux. As an open standard, SyncML looked promising and
Funambol already had open sourced a lot of SyncML-related code.

The sync4jevolution project had already been registered atSourceForge, but was empty and unused. So I started from scratch under the name "SyncEvolution", with the initial goal of writing a command line client primarily for contacts, because that was what I personally needed.

Adding more features and helping others to use SyncEvolution was another goal from the start, so in 2006, I also added support for calendar, memo and task sync.

Since the initial releases for Evolution on Linux, I also ported SyncEvolution to the Nokia Internet Tablets. This used the same libraries as Evolution, but with a different underlying technology, requiring quite a few workarounds.

In 2007, SyncEvolution finally left its Evolution roots behind with a port to the iPhone. SyncEvolution is the technology behind Funambol's iPhone plug-in. Since then, "SyncEvolution - the Evolution SyncML client" is dead, long live "SyncEvolution - The Missing Link".

Collateral Damage/Results

The work on SyncEvolution has brought results beyond the tool itself. When I started, the Funambol C++ client library only worked on Windows and Windows-based Smartphones. I ported it to Linux and POSIX-based systems, which provided the basis for several
other projects.

There was also no unit testing or test cases that could be used by developers of SyncML clients. Based on the CPPUnit framework, I implemented automated testing. SyncEvolution has been tested with this system from the initial release. Later, this system was decoupled from SyncEvolution and moved into the Funambol CVS so that now all clients based on the Funambol C++ library can use it.

Using SyncEvolution

SyncEvolution is provided in binary form for different platforms and of course also as source code. After installing a suitable version, the first step is creating the required text configuration files, usually by copying the provided examples and updating a few private fields. After that, the 'syncevolution' command line tool needs to be invoked to perform a synchronization. All of this is documented in detail on the home page.

Future Plans

The 0.7 release is done, with all features originally planned for it completed.

iPhone users are desperately waiting for calendar and memo support. There are no plans to work on that from my side because synchronizing the address book required quite a lot of work and guessing although it was at least similar to the Mac OS X address book.

When Apple releases the native iPhone SDK it might be a lot easier and therefore it makes sense to wait for that.

Further Information

The main home page of SyncEvolution is http://www.estamos.de/projects/SyncML/. It has sections on installation, getting started and compatibility with platforms and different SyncML servers.

My blog is the place to watch for announcements and news around SyncEvolution.