Hi there,

I have written a small utility to sync some parts of the iPhone without iTunes. As a Linux user, I needed this to get rid of iTunes. It is not yet finished, just in alpha stage, without any interface (use the terminal !), but you can already:
- import a .ics calendar over the WIFI in your iPhone
- add/remove .mp3 songs (put on your iPhone using scp) to the ipod database
- Import/export the address book (added in 2.02)
- add/modify/delete playlist (added in 2.04)

If you are interested, here is the URL:
http://iphone.lefessant.net/

If you know of any tool already doing this, I'm also interested, as it can spare me some work ;-)

- Treb

Nice !
Keep it up !

Hi,

The site had some problems last night, but it is back online. I released a new version (2.02), that supports importing/exporting an address book in LDIF format (as used by thunderbird) into the phone.

- Treb

Hi Treb,

This news made my day!

I am very keen to getting started with syncing Thunderbird contacts with iPhone.

Unfortunately I am not familiar with -ab_import/export - and neither Google nor a forum search return anything. Forgive my ignorance. Can you give a little more detail?

Thanks,
Valdemar

I'm currently working on a small interface for isync, but in the meantime, you have to be a little familiar with the terminal to use isync.

If you are not familiar: use your favorite iPhone file manager to copy isync as /usr/bin/isync on your iPhone, and then

To import a ldif address book,
1) with the file manager on your desktop, copy the ldif file on your iPhone in /private/var/root/, for example as "ab.ldif"
2) open a terminal on your iPhone (you must have installed it...)
3) type "isync -ab_import ab.ldif", and enter, see if there is any error messsage
4) if it went ok, restart your iPhone (killing the MobilePhone application is enough, so you can use "kill_phone.sh" if installed)

To export a ldif address book,
1) open a terminal (as above)
2) type "isync -ab_export ab.ldif", and enter, see if there is some error messages (you can report them here for help or debugging)
3) with your desktop iPhone file manager, download the file from your iPhone, it should be in /private/var/root/ab.ldif

The application is far from finished, but it worked for me...

- Treb

This is really fantastic, Treb. It worked! Where is the donate button?

I was sooo close to dumping my iPhone. There must be thousands out there looking for this. Keep up the work!

- Valdemar

Great, dude!

Thanks so much, you saved my day!!
I'm gonna try it out asap, will give you feedback on this!
In case you need some help, could you maybe tell us which aspects need more work, so we maybe can coordinate the efforts and create a nice app eventually?

Cheers

Clownkiller

It looks like the field "mobile" in the LDIF file is not syncronized (does not show up in iPhone)

- Valdemar

You are right, I released version 2.03 solving this issue !

For the help, well, I've started learning objective-C this afternoon to write an interface, but I'm pretty sure there are many people here who would do it much better than I would.

The idea of the interface would be to have simple buttons to call the isync command with the different arguments, a "preference" button to change the content of the "isync.ini" file, and to restart the MobilePhone or MobileMusicPlayer after calling "isync".

Finally, all this could be gathered together within a pxl package.

I can probably do it all, but if somebody could come with something faster or better, I'm not against... ;-)

Finally, if you have ideas of other cool features...

I know this is to avoid the use of itunes, but any chance you could support wireless sync with itunes ? :p