Getting It Out

As resident über nerd and all-round Gettingitout geek I try and leave as much of the spoddy chat out of general conversation as much as possible in fear of losing the 2 friends I have left. However today is an exception as I seem to even out nerded myself.

One of the nice things on a Mac is the ability to sync your mobile or iPod with the Address Book and iCal applications via iSync and. However if you run OS 10.3.9 or later Apple have ommited to update iSync for a while and so any new phone releases are not compatible which includes my Sony Ericsson W810i. So that’s were the geek in me steps in.

After searching google for a while I stumbled upon a hack and with the correct SE approval code for my W810i I can now sync again with the Mac.

Hooray, job done! I hear you cry.

Well no actually, you see, the bit I was really interested in was the ability to Dial and send SMS direct from Address Book using bluetooth, without needing to get my fat fingers all confused on my phone keypad and the hack doesn’t fix that problem.

So I went about trying to figure it out and with some lateral thinking a bit of guess work I think I cracked it, non-geek readers are advised to leave now.

My method is not entirely proven but the SMS and Dial functions do seem to work okay so here’s how I did it;

Firstly make sure you have followed the instructions to enable isync with your phone then with Address Book closed locate to;

Applications >> Address book >> (Ctrl click to 'Show Package Contents' (SPC)) >> resources >> telephony.bundle >> (SPC) >> contents >> resources >> ABDeviceCommandSets.plist

Using TextEdit open ABDeviceCommandSets.plist and search the code to find a similar phone to the one to wish to add, in my case a K700. At this point I duplicated, amended and inserted a line of code. I took a wild stab in the dark and my code now looked like this:

<array>
<string>K700</string>
<string>W810</string>
<array>

Save ABDeviceCommandSets.plist (you may need to alter permissions), then go to;

System >> library >> core services >> syncServer >> (SPC) >> Resources >> SupportedBluetoothDevices >> BTConduit_phones.plist

Again using TextEdit, add in the phone details exactly as per iSync hack, save, close, then launch Address Book.

Hoopla!

As I said, it worked first time for me but may not work for you, if there is anyone else out there that could develop this further let me know.

Besides, with my spod moment now over, I might need to find new friends.