ivan: scribbles: Syncing Palm Vx with iBook

November 12, 2003

syncing palm vx with ibook

I try not to banter on too much about technical jibber-jabber on here, but I'll make an exception this one time because I couldn't find many answers myself with Google.

I have a Palm Vx. I have an iBook. I want them to be roll around in the sack with each other. Unfortunately, the iBook has no serial port. Instead, these cute puppies only have USB ports, which is fine and dandy for newer handhelds but not for my poor Vx.

USB to Serial dongle? Maybe. Instead, I found a USB IrDA adapter from some German company and supplied by MadsOnline. I figured, "Hey, maybe I can use the IR port for something useless like changing channels from my iBook."

I bit the $58 bullet, bought the dongle, plugged it in, and... had no signs of life from OS X saying what was going on. I pointed my handheld at the IR and ran the HotSync on it but no success. I played around with networking on my iBook, making cute icons pop up on my menu, but that was just confusing me.

Finally realizing that maybe downloading Palm Desktop would be a good idea, I did that, installed it, and tried again. Again, failure. At least, it seemed so. So I goofed around, hoping maybe the LIRC site would have some sort of answer. Oh, crap, that'd mean I'd have to compile stuff, which means I'd have to grab that hefty 300MB Development Tools beast from Apple just to run gcc.

That was all yesterday. Today, I finally realized my folly. Instead of following the directions of the Palm Desktop Installer, I foolishly did not reboot like it so kindly told me to. This meant that the Conduit Manager which detects HotSync requests wasn't loaded, which meant that my attempts at poking signals to the IrDA wasn't doing squat. Doh!

So, I run the Conduit Manager, fire up the Palm and run the HotSync, and... lo' and behold, the thing syncs!

In short, do the following:

Install Palm Desktop on the iBook, making sure to either reboot like it tells you to (you poopie) or run the Conduit Manager
Plug-in the MadsOnline USB IrDA adapter
Point the IR of the USB IrDA to the IR on the Palm
On the Palm, run the HotSync program, choose "Local" and "IR to a PC/Handheld," and press the big square button in the middle.
Wait as magic is performed in this beautiful wireless syncing process!

Note! I recommend not installing the iSync Palm Conduit unless you're planning on integrating existing data with the Apple Addressbook and iCal. iSync does a poor job handling categories, and I find that jazz to be essential to my organizational processes, I just bail all of Apple's gadgets and use Palm Desktop.

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