Selective syncing is actively in development and will (hopefully soon) give you a much more individual syncing setup. Additionally it allows us to implement new “niche features” (like preferences and keychain syncing) on top of selective syncing.

(Preference syncing is not necessarily included in our next release, the screenshot is from our internal development version)

• open “Terminal.app” (it’s in /Applications/Utilities)
• type: open “/System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras/Sync.menu”
• hit “Enter”

Or even easier (Thanks, Brandon):

• open iSync.app (it’s in /Applications)
• open iSyncs’ Preferences (COMMAND+, or via Menubar)
• enable “Show status in menubar”

The menubar icon

• rotates when any sync client on your system (including fruux) is syncing
• allows you to click “Synchronize Now” (syncs all sync clients on your system, including fruux)

Remove the menubar icon again?

• Just press and hold the Apple/Command key on your keyboard and drag the icon out of the menubar

“Adium is a free instant messaging application for Mac OS X that can connect to AIM, MSN, Jabber, Yahoo, and more.”

Website / Blog / GNU-GPL / Donate to Adium

Why: Killing Time, Annoying the Team

“Design beautiful, innovative and fast-loading web sites… with a beautiful, innovative and fast app. CSSEdit’s intuitive approach to style sheets and powerful previewing features will make you deliver awesome standards-based sites in no time!”

Website / Blog / Shareware (29,95 EUR) / Buy

Why: quick & easy css development

“Cocoa Packet Analyzer is a native Mac OS X implementation of a network protocol analyzer and packet sniffer. It is able to do basic network capturing, filter packets, analyze and display pcap files. CPA uses libPCAP for reading packet trace files and for capturing network traffic (filter expressions from tcpdump may be used).”

Website / Blog / Donationware / Donate

Why: Debugging all those funny packets

“Cyberduck is an open source FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, Mosso Cloud Files and Amazon S3 browser for the Mac.”

Website / Blog / GPL-License / Donate

Why: Best open source FTP client!

“Do you use many social services? Annoyed that you have to run 6 different applications? Enter the new revolutionary social app, EventBox. All your services in one place, integrated.”

Website / Twitter / Shareware (15,00 USD) / Buy (Coupon: FRUUX-20 / 20% off!)

Why: Twitter monitoring

“ExpanDrive gives you perfectly transparent access to open, edit, and save files with your favorite programs, even when those files are on a server half a world away. Transparent means that you won’t even notice you’re operating on remote file server—it will act like it’s an USB drive you plugged directly into your own computer.”

Website / Blog / Shareware (39,95 USD) / Buy

Why: Maintaining the cloud

“Similar to NEXTSTEP’s Merge utility, FileMerge graphically compares and merges two different versions of a file, and is often used to track changes to source code.”

Website / Apple License

Why: Comparing file versions

“fruux is a lightweight and convenient system preference pane, that syncs your Address Book, Calendars, Tasks and Bookmarks between different Macs. fruux supports sync conflict resolution which will help you when you changed a record on more than one machine”

Website / Blog / Support us

Why: Best Tool on Earth

“HTTP Client is a Mac OS X Leopard developer tool for debugging HTTP services by graphically creating & inspecting complex HTTP messages.”

Website / Blog / BSD-License

Why: Great for webservices debugging. Thanks Todd!

“MindNode Pro is an elegant and simple-to-use mindmapping application for the Macintosh. It was created with the user in mind and features a very simple and intuitive user interface that lets the user focus on expressing and developing ideas. Nearly no time is required to learn the interface.”

Website / Blog / Shareware (14,95 USD) / Buy (Coupon: fruuxmindnodepro09 / 20% off!)

Why: Markus’ app rocks!

“Looking for an easy-to-use RSS and Atom reader for your Mac? You’ve found it! The Eddy award-winning NetNewsWire has a familiar three-paned interface and can fetch and display news from thousands of different websites and weblogs.”

Website / Free

Why: Blogosphere monitoring

“Quicksilver is a unified, extensible interface for working with applications, contacts, music, and other data.”

Website / Apache-License 2.0 / Source

Why: Every Mac without Quicksilver is broken

“Spotify is a Sweden-based proprietary music streaming program, which allows listening to specific music without delay via browsing artists, albums or created playlists.”

Website / Blog / Freemium

Why: iTunes in the Cloud

“Syncrospector is a debugging tool that you can use to inspect clients, the truth database, and the call history of sync sessions.”

Website / Apple License

Why: Debugging SyncServices

“TextMate brings Apple’s approach to operating systems into the world of text editors. By bridging UNIX underpinnings and GUI, TextMate cherry-picks the best of both worlds to the benefit of expert scripters and novice users alike.”

Website / Blog / Shareware (48,75 USD) / Buy (15% off for students)

Why: Best text editor on the planet!

“Versions provides a pleasant way to work with Subversion on your Mac. Whether you’re a hardcore Subversion user or new to version control systems, Versions will help streamline your workflow. Versions 1.0 is out now, so say hello to the fresh new look of your repository and start saying less to that command-line interface.”

Website / Shareware (39,00 EUR) / Buy

Why: Wonderful UI, pleasure to use SVN (hopefully soon with GIT support)

“Xcode is Apple’s premiere development environment for Mac OS X. At the heart of the Xcode tools package is the Xcode IDE, a graphical workbench that tightly integrates a professional text editor, a robust build system, a debugger, and the powerful GCC compiler capable of targeting Intel and PowerPC regardless of host platform.”

Website / Apple License

Why: developing fruux! (hopefully soon with GIT support!)

Of course there are a lot more great everyday apps, depending on the actual use-case, but if you’d look over our shoulder there is a very good chance that one of the apps mentioned above is active.

Hi,

fruux’s feature-set is too similar to Apple’s MobileMe (http://www.me.com).

Regards,

Apple Downloads

http://www.apple.com/downloads/

That kind of raises the question if it makes sense to put more work into our iPhone client. They even rejected our desktop app, so probably they will also reject our iPhone client. So allocating resources (time, money, sleepless nights, …) to our iPhone client is kind of a gamble if they reject it. Apple really has to fix this random rejection policy – especially because there are several sync applications both on the Apple Downloads Page and in the AppStore.

UPDATE 2008-12-17:

We just recieved another Email from Cupertino (we asked, why they rejected our listing, but listed several other sync applications):

Hi,

Those applications are restricted to syncing calendars (including Google calendars, which MobileMe does not do). fruux’s feature set has more parity with MobileMe in that it also syncs addresses and bookmarks.

Regards,

Apple Downloads
 http://www.apple.com/downloads/

It looks like this is “not entirely appropiate”.

• It’s wrong that those apps only sync iCal, some of them also sync contacts

Some random thoughts:

• fruux is all about social syncing (that kind of differenciates fruux from MobileMe!?!)
• Will Apple also ban Microsoft Messenger for similarities with iChat?
• Or Firefox for similarities with Safari?
• Should we continue working on our iPhone client?

Additionally we’d like to add some thoughts to an excellent write-up (AppStore, crappy ringtone apps, serious development, …) by Craig Hockenberry:

• Developing a product (including software) means investing (time, money, resources)
• Apples “rejection policy” is “not entirely” clear, sometimes they even reject apps for using private apis, which in fact don’t use private apis
• Developing a product which is undistributable (because it’s rejected from the AppStore) is like investing your (time/money/resources) at a roulette desk in a casino and betting on the wrong number. 
• There must be many great apps that are not even developed, because the developers can’t afford this rejection lottery!?

UPDATE 2008-12-18:
We just recieved another email from Cupertino, which sounds like good news.

Hi,

Once distinguishing features (such as Social Syncing) are implemented and out of beta in fruux, we can certainly take another look.

Regards,

Apple Downloads

http://www.apple.com/downloads/

The iPhone development gamble problem (see above) stays the same, but at least it is not entirely hopeless. We’ll still change our roadmap and focus on Mac development first before we continue working on our iPhone client.

• Box.net recently announced their iPhone application.
• Dropbox: Store, Sync and Share your files online, launched some weeks ago

(fruux is not affiliated with Box.net or Dropbox)

Installer and/or Cydia in AppStore

Your wishes?

UPDATE:
Looks like someone had the same idea:
TechCrunch: Please Fix The iPhone: A To-Do List for Steve Jobs

Here is just a short excerpt of sites featuring fruux:

• http://www.tuaw.com/
• http://lifehacker.com/
• http://www.heise.de/
• http://thenextweb.org/
• http://www.macworld.fr/
• http://www.melablog.it/
• http://www.deepapple.com/
• … and a ton of other sites and blogs

We even found a podcast, mentioning fruux (@ 21:20), besides that many people twittered about fruux and we even heard unrelated people talking about fruux in the streets!

Of course we especially liked the content that was produced by our own users, like:

• http://www.bos89.nl/
• http://justbeyondthebridge.co.uk/
• http://www.moongift.jp/
• http://twitter.com/massive_dz/statuses/963471240

Thank you!

We are still working hard on our next bugfix release and hope to implement many of your feature requests very soon.

If you like our work and want to support the project, please file your bugs (if we don’t know about them, we can’t fix them)! Are there any fruux screencasts out there?

If you want to help even more, have a look at our -support us- site.

We recently added a french localization to our software, which was donated by our user linathael over at HardMac.com/MacBidouille.com, then screwed up by our french inability and luckily corrected with the help of several comments from other french fruux users (Thank you, Emmanuel, Pierre, Virginie, Jean)! If you’d like to see fruux localized in your language and want to donate your free time, please let us know. We’ll provide you with the localizable strings.

We are also working hard on our main site at fruux.com. It’s still work in progress, but you’ll find our changelog and also our roadmap there.

Please always remember, that fruux is still in beta.
Backup your data:

• Addressbook: File -> Export -> Addressbook Archive
• iCal: File -> Backup iCal…

If you are affected by any bugs, please let us know (support @ fruux . com). We are pretty responsive and will do our best to get any bugs you might experience resolved as fast as possible.

Can’t wait for the new version? Here are the update instructions:

• Start “System Preferences”
• Start “fruux”
• Click “Synchronize Now”
• If you don’t already have v0.7.1 installed, the “New version availiable” message will appear
• After a few seconds you’ll be asked if you want to replace the current version. Click “Replace”
• Wait a few seconds, until the new version is installed
• Click “Synchronize Now”
• If the System asks you for permission to use the fruux Keychain item, click “Allow”

However we’re still not entirely satisfied, because some of you are affected by bugs.
There are currently three known issues with iCal syncing:

• if you heavily use recurring events, your sync might break (we’re working on this one)
• Obviously some of our users from russia are affected by an encoding bug (we’re working on this one)
• Some users have problems with duplication and repeating sync conflicts (so far all of them used other sync systems in addition to fruux, we’re working on this one, too)

Only very few users are struck by those bugs, but still we are extremely sorry for any inconvenience caused! Please keep in mind that fruux is still in beta. We’re working really hard fixing those bugs as fast as possible.

If you are affected by bugs or need help, please get in touch with us:
support (at) fruux . com

(Please don’t forget to enter your correct emailaddress, if you use our contact form. If you email directly to our support emailaddress, please include the file ~/Library/Application Support/Fruux/Sync.log).

Some of our users already work with our addressbook syncing in productive enviroments. If you need addressbook syncing e.g. in your office and there is no way you could wait for our bugfix release, please contact us. We might be able to offer you a customized version of fruux, which just syncs your addressbook.

Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any problems concerning fruux! Thank you for your support.