The Practice of Code

In my iPhone First and 20 article, one of the “page two” applications I mentioned and recommended was Ultimake’s SmartSync for FaceBook. Unfortunately, I have to now retract that recommendation due to a few issues.

The first problem is stability. There is nothing that frustrates me more than an unstable application. The app’s process is as follows. On its first launch, it scans your iPhone’s address book (I have around 900 contacts). It then downloads your friend list from Facebook (I have around 350 friends) and tries to find matches (I have around 225 matches). It then presents a list of all the matching contacts, allows you to resolve any conflicts or match any unmatched contacts, and then finally does its sync. If I don’t run the app immediately after a fresh restart while on a WiFi network, I rarely get anywhere near that far. It simply crashes exiting me back to the home screen.

For the sake of comparison, I used to use an app called SplashMoney where I kept my daily financial transactions. It used to also crash frequently if I hadn’t restarted my iPhone in a while. I thought it was simply due to the size of the datasets I was working with. When I switched to the brilliant Jumsoft Money, I quickly learned that was not the case, as Jumsoft Money was as stable as a rock handling the same datasets as SplashMoney. With SmartSync, these are not large datasets. I can’t fathom what excuse there is for this lack of stability.

The next problem arose when using this application to sync my Facebook friends’ birthdays to my iPhone, which would in turn sync them to my Mac, which when combined with my Better Birthday Script, would provide me with daily notifications for any friends’ birthday. There was a few instances where I was informed it was a friend’s birthday, and after going to wish them a happy birthday on Facebook, I noticed that their birthday was one day later then that day. So, I wrote Ultimake to see if they had noticed this themselves. No response.

So I dug a bit deeper and did some testing. I removed SmartSync for Facebook from iPhone so I would be starting from scratch. I then removed the birthday from a known Facebook contact in my iPhone address book. I reinstalled SmartSync for Facebook, and then performed a sync. The contact’s birthday was synced to the iPhone address book correctly. However, after the subsequent sync from my iPhone to my Mac, the Mac reflected the day being one day in advance. Again, I wrote Ultimake, this time with my test results. Again, no response.

I did one final test. I picked a completely different contact, one that was not on Facebook, and entered a birthday for them directly in the iPhone’s address book. I synced my iPhone to my Mac, and the Mac Address Book correctly showed the birthday on the right day. This revealed to me that it was something to do with the way SmartSync was storing that birthday on the iPhone, and not just an iPhone to Mac syncing issue.

My theory is as follows. When SmartSync for Facebook adds a Facebook user’s birthday to the iPhone Address Book, it doesn’t properly handle the time zone of that date object. Whereas it should be storing it as a floating date (no time zone), it seems to be storing it in a time zone that is greatly behind that of my own. Because I live so many time zones away from whatever time zone they’re using, the birthday is pushed to the next day. Alternatively, when I enter a date directly into the iPhone’s address book, the date is stored correctly and does not exhibit this issue.

As a result, I am no longer syncing my birthdays. To the app’s credit, I can disable this, and continue to successfully use it to sync my friend’s latest profile pics to my iPhone (if it doesn’t crash).

Facebook’s recent 3.1 update to their app now includes the ability to sync contact information directly. Unfortunately, it lacks the same level of control as SmartSync. I’m going to back up my data and do some testing to see how it behaves comparatively.

Interestingly enough, at the time of this writing, SmartSync has now disappeared from the app store (I’ve checked Australia and USA). I wonder what’s happened. Did other users complain? Did they cancel the application in favor of their flagship application, MyPhone+, which seems to include the same functionality and then some? Was it the direct competition from Facebook?

Either way, due to the lack of stability and their lack of support, I strongly recommend avoiding SmartSync for Facebook, or any other product, from Ultimake.