S60 and Mac - from first principles - part 1
Published by Steve Litchfield at 18:24 BST, August 2nd 2008
In the first of a series, Steve Litchfield looks at connecting up a S60 smartphone to an Apple Mac, from the point of view of a new user to Leopard (OS X)
I have to confess to being a Mac virgin - aside from a few well intentioned prods on borrowed computers on various occasions, I've never seriously used OS X and have to confess that I've been more than a little nervous about how well a Mac would handle my phone, in which rests a lot of my digital life.
With this in mind and armed with my trusty Nokia N95 8GB I've borrowed a MacBook from Apple PR and am going to report on the good and bad that I find over the next few weeks. I have to confess that my ultimate goal was to try and handle the MP4 video produced by modern Nseries phones in a manner that was less clumsy than the 'jumping through hoops' system I currently use on my PC, but before I got to that there were a number of even more critical computer-phone interactions that I needed to try and report on. Is a Mac a viable desktop alternative for someone using a S60 smartphone, despite the lack of PC Suite? I intended to find out.
So. One shiny white and new MacBook. First up, it only seems to have two USB ports. Gulp. Let's hope it has Bluetooth. No mention of Bluetooth in the packaging whatsoever, I was getting worried. Power the MacBook up. Phew - there's a Bluetooth icon on the top menu bar, so I think I'm going to be OK without having to keep my phone USB cable plugged into the hardware.
Clicking on the icon shows that Bluetooth is 'on' by default and that the MacBook is 'Discoverable', which is a good start. 'Set up Bluetooth device' looks like the one to go for, so I click it. Up pops a 'Select device type' wizard and I choose 'Mobile phone'. The MacBook then goes off and finds two of my phones, initially shown with their Bluetooth address but then quickly replaced by the devices' declared Bluetooth names.
Continuing with the wizard, I'm led through the pairing process and all goes well, although I wasn't prompted on MacBook or phone to 'Set as authorised' the MacBook (in S60's Bluetooth|Paired devices list) in order not to have to keep acknowledging every connection in the future - this trick is down to my own experience(!)
Finally, I'm asked whether I want to 'access the Internet with my phone's data connection'. Impressive. I'm only 2 minutes into the Mac experience, I've not downloaded anything yet and there's no PC Suite CD and already I'm on track for 'tethering'! I didn't check the box for now though - I was a little worried about it being connected automatically and 1GB of OS X system updates being routed through my SIM card - [tip for those on Windows laptops - disable Windows Update before starting a tethered connection - you have been warned!]
Wizard completed, there's now a new entry in the MacBook's Bluetooth menu, "N95 8GB", with options 'Send file' and 'Browse device'. Both of these appear to work fine, with the latter opening a file explorer window onto my phone's C and E disks. Copying a file from my phone or sending one to it (via the main send option, with the file ending up in Messaging, or via the explorer window send option, with the file ending up in the folder being pointed to) worked seamlessly and without complaint.
The next basic was syncing of my Contacts and Calendar (and other PIM info), for which I turned to the MacBook's built-in iSync. There's no application icon for this in the dock, but I remembered that I'd seen it in the Windows 95-like hierarchical 'Applications' list within the Finder utility.
Kicking it off, it appeared not to spot my smartphone, rather disappointingly considering the time that the N95 has been out and the number of updates Leopard has had in the meantime. Still, I know what to do - it's time for my first download.
Heading over to Nokia's Mac support site, it's apparent that something's not quite right with either Safari or Nokia's CSS code:
I wouldn't want to aportion blame yet though - still, I see that iSync plug-ins are prominent, with all the latest Nokia phones listed.
Downloading the right file for the N95 8GB, I have to say that found the convoluted installation system for Mac items rather confusing - between virtual disks, folders, downloads and docked items, I was a little at sea - but I'll give the MacBook the benefit of the doubt here - the whole interface is a bit of a culture shock for a hardened Windows user. Still, a few well-intentioned clicks later, a Nokia wizard popped up and I soon had the plug-in installed OK.
Starting iSync again, 'Sync devices' found my phone and double-clicking its icon brought up a sensible dialog with basic sync options.
Clicking on 'Sync' got things going for real, with the Sync application popping into the foreground on my N95 8GB, so presumably SyncML is used as the syncing protocol here.
A minute later, the sync had finished and I started up the MacBook's Calendar. No appointments. And Day and Month were both greyed out.
Hmmm... I fiddled around for a bit - maybe a background task on the Mac was processing the new info? - and all of a sudden there was my data, seemingly intact! To-do items were also synced across, it seems, which is good, but my Notes hadn't been. OS X/Leopard does have a basic 'Stickies' note app, but no other obvious receptacle for S60 notes. Not a showstopper, but a little disappointing.
My Contacts were all in place within the MacBook's Address Book application too, so I'm pronouncing this part of my Mac experiment a success. I know this is only scratching the surface of what I (or you) need to accomplish in terms of desktop-phone connectivity, but I was impressed by how quickly and easily the basics were set in place, without any big hitches.
Slight caveat: I synced with the default options and all my Calendar appointments more than one month in the future got zapped from my phone (though not from Calendar on the MacBook). I'm not sure if this is intended behaviour or not but I'd suggest that you go into the 'More options' part of the sync dialog and uncheck the bit about 'a month in the future' - just to be safe! - I don't know about you but I prefer to be able schedule things further in the future than a month on the phone itself!
In the next part of this series, I'm going to look at investigating USB connection modes and handling multimedia, i.e. archiving my N95-created photos and videos, opening them for viewing and creating content to be viewed specifically on the phone.
Steve Litchfield, All About Symbian, 2 Aug 2008
Categories: How To, Comment
Platforms: S60 3rd Edition
Feature Discussion
As a test visit the same page using your (safari based) S60 web browser, you will find it has the same display issues, Nokia don't even test their sites in the browser on their phones, very poor on Nokia's part.
This icon then allows you to connect/disconnect to the internet via bluetooth using your phone as you see fit.
Just thought I'd pick up on your intention to see how the Mac can handle editing the video files from your N95 8Gb. I've been using iMovie (the Mac's own video editing suite) for this purpose since we got our iMac. iMovie imports N95 video files with no problems whatsoever (that I have seen), and I found the suite intuitive and easy to use, as long as you have a reasonable idea of the 'layout' of your intended movie (as with any video editor).
If you're interested, here is an example of a video I produced in iMovie, of a Korean festival in London. Most of the video and stills were taken on the N95, with the exception of the 'to camera' pieces at each end (the iMac's own camera) and the lower-quality video of me being interviewed by the Korean camera crew (our old digicam). I'm not properly trained in video-editing or production, but I hope this clip shows that iMovie is well worth considering for editing footage from the N95 and its siblings.
Thanks again, and I look forward to the next instalment(s)!
Get VisualHub from http://www.techspansion.com/visualhub/ to convert your movie into whatever format you require, it's simply the best converter I've ever used, very fast, simple and a reasonable price (approx £12)
Thanks,
And the screens are grabbed on the MacBook, cropped on the MacBook, uploaded on the MacBook (using Yummy FTP) and inserted on the MacBook (in Safari etc) - the screens look fine to me, but if you think they're missing something then blame the Mac itself 8-)
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Originally Posted by Unregistered
Can you sync all day events properly?? I have been trying but they always sync as a timed event from 0:00 to 23:59! Any idea how I can manage to sync them so they are saved on the phone as an all-day event??
Thanks, |
I also use the Nokia Multimedia sync for Mac, but until now, I only got it working via Bluetooth, not via USB.
Second, I already bought licenses for FoneLink and Missing Sync. I could post a comparision, as soon as my new E71 will be delivered and I am back from my holiday travel.
I would really like to get into discussion about Mac & Symbian. If there is enough interest, maybe we could get an own forum board in the AAS forums?
@Steve: You definitely should get VisualHub. The quality and speed is by far better than QuickTime Pro.
I am also new to Mac and was looking for a good calendar/contacts synch solution for a Mac.
iSync did not suite me because it forced deletion of older entries from my S60 Nokia e90 (you cannot switch off the option "do not synch events older than"; you can only set up a time interval, the longest being one month, which is not enough for me as I like storing older events on my S60 calendar). Besides, there were not to many options to set up...
Now I use the Missing Sync (http://www.markspace.com/; thanks to AAS where I first read about the soft) and I find it by far excelling the iSync - there are more options to configure synching and, most importantly, you can synch all events without a time limit (if you want).
One think I do not like is that for Apple/Mac the data on the mobile device (S60) is rather worthless - in Nokia PC Suite you have an option to choose which entry should prevail in case of conflict (in the mobile device or in the PC); Mac will briliantly warn you that even a few entries may be changed on it during synching, but it will show no sign/warning even if synching will result in the deletion of all events on the mobile device. For me this is very disappointing, because I treat my S60 mobile device as the primary PIM...
All the best
Borys
I am also increasingly unimpressed with Nokia Multimedia Transfer. Odd overall design (differently odd than PC Suite), odd in the details (non-standard key commands) and then there's the part where it deleted (permanently, recovery did not find them) all my photos without a command from me. While I watch. No escape function worked. And over BT it's hard to yank the cable out of the device in a panic. That's pretty untrustworthy software to me.
The built in OSX stuff works great. Quick send files over BT, either way, browse device from the desktop. I hadn't really had a useful BT device before, so this was better than I expected it to be.
That's a good article and, as someone has already said, refreshingly free of fanboyism.
Davidmaxwaterma,
I'm a bit puzzled about your comment about the screenshots, though. What is it that you see as awful? Mac is not Windows and it doesn't have to look like it! I find OS X's font rendering much easier on the eye than XP's and you can change it anyway.
For anyone interested in the differences between the 2 platforms I suggest the site xvsxp.com .
For anyone wanting to discuss the Mac and OS X, feel free to join us at tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/macosx-support. :D
If you download and test Missing Sync for Symbian, can you create some colour coded catergories in iCal and then sync to you phone with Papyrus installed on phone. Do the catergories sync correctly?
The reason I ask is I'm tempted to get a s60 v3 phone but want to have a colour coded calendar I can sync seemlessly with my Mac
Thanks