Recently I have moved from Thunderbird 2 on Mac OS X 10.5 towards Mail.app 3, included in Leopard, due to the need for a better search function and smarter integration with Time Machine; after finally migrating around 98 000 email messages I decided to go ahead and use the accompanying tools: Address Book and iCal for my daily work.

During the last 4 years, since I got my first Pocket PC, I have been constantly switching back and forth between applications meant to educate me to live a more organized life. One year ago, after loosing one of my mobile phones, I made the switch to a Smartphone, and bought a Nokia N-Series that I kept in irregular sync with Address Book from my Mac. I was not using the sync feature for anything else but phone numbers, and I used to keep my appointments on my phone and my To-Do list on paper.

After migrating to Mail.app I started using iCal more often, and kept my To-Do list next to my email, but I felt the need to have it with me all day-log whenever I leave the workplace. iSync was the perfect tool to keep everything in sync between my computer and my phone (Apple’s Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard makes good use of N-Series Smartphones), however I had to constantly push the Sync button, something that became very annoying after a short while.

Currently there is no option in iSync to allow automatic sync of your devices, so I turned to Google and found this solution (multiple sources): an AppleScript that runs from a Cron.

Place the script in your home directory: iSyncNow.scpt

tell application "iSync"
  synchronize
  repeat while (syncing is true)
    delay 5
  end repeat
  quit

open your crontab:

nano ~/crontab

and add the following line to enable syncing every two hours (refer to the crontab man-page for alternate run times):

0 */2 * * * osascript /Users/YourUserName/iSyncNow.scpt

Make sure you finish the crontab file with a new empty line and reload cron for your user

crontab ~/crontab

Keep in mind that you must be able to manually sync a device before expecting any outcome from any automatic sync (eg: established sync partnership, bluetooth active all times, etc.)