Several of us downloaded Jimmy Mooney’s NotesCal as soon as it came out, and I was one of the many seeing the November 28 – 1 bug. We’ve all been waiting patiently for the bug fix to come out, and it has come out in spades. Not only has Jimmy fixed the bug, he’s added mail, contacts and to-do lists to the application.
You still need to install an agent into your mail file, but it is absolutely no problem to do so. Configuring the application was virtually no problem at all. So how does it work?
Calendar – We’ll start with that, since that’s what NotesCal started with. It’s a decent calendar app for showing you what you have coming up. You cannot create calendar entries, nor can you accept calendar entries in your mailbox, but it’s a great view into your calendar entries.
Mail – Not bad, but not great. The 20 message limit is a bit small, but it’s certainly workable. If you don’t need access to everything in your mail file, it’s probably OK. Formatting of the e-mail isn’t great (it looks like it doesn’t properly interpret line breaks yet), but it’s readable.
Contacts – We have far, far too many people in our public address book to support this functionality.
To-do – I rarely use the Notes to-do list, but it imported mine with no problem.
The app has gotten more expensive ($15 now, as opposed to $3 for NotesCal), but to Jimmy’s credit, he gave me my upgrade to NotesPro for free. I truly appreciate that.
I e-mailed Jimmy shortly after downloading the upgrade, and he is promising better formatting for e-mail in an upcoming release. He also told me that some kind soul e-mailed him an agent to access personal contact data that is stored in iNotes / DWA mail files. To me, that is a huge plus (I don’t need to access all 2000 people in our public address book, I’ve copied most of the people I need into my personal contacts).
I also asked him about interacting with the native Contacts application, as the SDK allows access to this. Jimmy replied that he likes keeping his business information separate from his personal information in the native application. Fair enough. I suppose we can agree to disagree on that one.
All-in-all, I rather like this, especially as an early release application. For all you l33t h4×0rs out there, I still recommend IMAP/SMTP for mail and CompanionLink/NuevaSync for calendar and contacts. If you’re on 8.0.2, you’ll want to take a long, hard look at iNotes Ultralite. But if you’re on a server version earlier than 8.0.2 and an executive brings you an iPhone and says support it, this may be the app that saves your bacon.
I look forward to future upgrades.
October 13, 2008 at 2:08 am
The personal contacts agent is up. See my latest blog post or the server setup page.
October 14, 2008 at 3:27 am
@Jimmy — It works, but it looks like the sorting is a bit off. I have contacts all over the place. I’m also seeing both the public address book and my own contacts.
October 27, 2008 at 3:03 pm
I know someone that downloaded this app and when he configured the mail portion of the app, when he receives his mail, it shows his oldest mail and not his newest. On the client side of LN, he is using 6.5.4. How do i configure it so that it shows the newest email?
Thanks
October 28, 2008 at 3:51 am
@latintrpt – Not sure about this, as it works for me. Jimmy is very good about responding to e-mail, so e-mail him at iphone@jimmymooney.com and I’m sure he’ll get you straightened out.