Tags: MobileMe – Not So Pushy
Like I said in my last piece, I'll reserve final judgement on MobileMe for a few days, but one question has been answered by Apple:
Symptoms
With MobileMe Push, you can choose how often your computer syncs your contacts, calendars, and other sync data via MobileMe. If you select "Automatically", changes made on your computer may not immediately sync to MobileMe.
Resolution
Selecting Automatic in Mac OS X allows your computer to immediately sync and update when there are any changes on the MobileMe servers. Those changes can come from your iPhone, iPod touch, the MobileMe website, or another computer. Changes made on your computer will be synced to the MobileMe "cloud" once every 15 minutes (or every hour in Mac OS X 10.4.11).
And now quoting the MobileMe part of Apple's main site:
Push email. Push contacts. Push calendar.
MobileMe stores all your email, contacts, and calendars in the cloud and pushes them down to your iPhone, iPod touch, Mac, and PC. When you make a change on one device, the cloud updates the others. Push happens automatically, instantly, and continuously. You don’t have to wait for it or remember to do anything — such as docking your iPhone and syncing manually — to stay up to date.
15 minutes is hardly instantly. Now for me, that's not really that big of a deal, but for some of the folks I've told about the service, who have secretaries and busy schedules, 15 minutes might be a big deal. It's just a case of the reality not coming even close to the marketing, which is not typical for Apple.
UPDATE
This hint on MacOSXHints describes how to tweak the auto-interval sync time on your Mac to make sync with MobileMe every minute, making it be instantaneous.
trying to follow Christ, husband of Jamie, father of Anna, a senior designer who does web and print work, an alumnus of the University of Alabama, interested in the emerging church, a Mac fan, a Camp Sumatanga junkie, a program coordinator for high school camps in the United Methodist Church, a music snob, a budding oenophile, too busy to update his resume/portfolio, debt-free*, a geek
Jul 16th 2008
FYI, Push is referring to how information is Pushed to the iPhone, from the way I read that being in the industry they are referring to PUSH for the iPhone, not to your computer which doesn’t have an SMS mechanism. PUSH works by first sending an SMPP message to the phone, the applications in question get this first and check if its related (email, sms or voicemail), and this message in question tells the phone to make an outbound connection to retrieve the particular message. This is true for mail and for voicemail, sms is delivered directly over the SMPP network. A computer doesn’t have this “control” protocol built in, unless you count icmp. But in most cases icmp will not work for this as you are usually nat’ing, or at least have a firewall between you and the net. All of that is to say I think that the 15 minutes is reasonable due to packet storms that would take place otherwise, they are just trying to save themselves from thousands of every minute connections.