Phone Journal support page

- Updated December 28th, 2007

1. Please make sure you have the following:
- Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) or Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) installed
- Treo 650/680/700p
- HotSync cable
- Missing Sync or Palm Desktop installed

2. Test that HotSync is working, and do a Backup of your Treo. If you're sure that HotSync is working and you have recently done a backup of your Treo, you may skip the following steps.
- Enable the Backup conduit on Missing Sync or Palm Desktop.
- Connect your HotSync cable from your Treo to your Mac's USB port.
- Press the HotSync button on the HotSync cable to do a backup.
- The backup should then complete without any errors. If you do face any problems, please resolve those issues before continuing.

3. Download Phone Journal and open the DMG file.
4. Drag the Phone Journal application icon to the Applications folder.
5. Drag the Phone Journal Conduit to the Conduits folder.
6. Connect your HotSync cable from your Treo to your Mac's USB port.
7. Press the HotSync button to backup the SMS from your Treo to your Mac.
8. Go to your Applications folder and drag the Phone Journal icon to the Dock.
9. Click on the Phone Journal icon at the Dock.
10. All your SMS/MMS from your Treo should now appear in Phone Journal. If you face any problems please contact the FunkeeMonk.

I've purchased Phone Journal, how do I register it?

If you have purchased Phone Journal by using the embedded web store (by clicking on the "Buy Phone Journal" button/menu option from within the application), you do not need to enter any registration information, that has already been done for you during the checkout process.

Otherwise, you should have received an email when you purchased Phone Journal with your serial number in it. If you did not receive this email within 30 minutes, please contact me.

If you have already started Phone Journal, you can enter the license key by clicking on the Phone Journal menu item, then clicking on the "Enter License/Activate" menu option. Otherwise, when Phone Journal starts, click on the "Enter License Key"" button.

In the dialog box that appears, enter your name and serial number using those details indicated from the email. After successful registration, the Phone Journal window title should no longer have the words "UNREGISTERED".

Tips for your Treo

It is much faster to use the HotSync cable that came with your Treo when syncing instead of using Bluetooth. However, that cable can come loose quite easily, so you may need to reattach the cables a few times to get it to work sometimes.
In your Treo's Messaging application, do NOT switch between the threaded Chat view and the "normal" message view using its Preferences. If this is done, all messages already on your Treo will be sync'd to your Mac again causing duplicates (as the Treo will flag all the existing messages on your Treo as "new").
If you *always* delete all the messages on your Treo after you sync using Phone Journal, you may want to change the Phone Journal conduit to "Backup all messages". Due to a bug in the Treo's Messaging application (which i'm trying to workaround), MMS attachments may not be sync to your Mac otherwise. If you don't send or receive MMS messages though, then leave the conduit setting to "Backup new messages".

What does the Decode button do?

You may have received SMS's (text messages) that appear incorrectly on your Treo due to it being in the wrong language. By selecting this gibberish text and using the Decode button, you can make that text readable again.

How do you use the Decode function?

Select the text messages that you wish to decode. Don't worry about having to select the entire message's text. Selecting part of the text will make the entire message's text decoded.
Click on the Decode button.
Select the encoding with the most readable preview text. Don't worry if there is more than one choice that looks correct, any of those will do. If you have used the decode function before, the most frequently used decodings will be placed at the top of the list.
Click on Change Language to have Phone Journal decode all the selected text messages or Cancel to abort the operation.

If you have many messages that you wish to decode all at once, use the following timesaving tip:

Press ⌘-A to select all the messages for the current contact.
Press ⌘-D to bring up the decode panel. If the first preview text in the list is what you want just skip to the next step. Otherwise, choose the most readable text from the list.
Press Enter to decode the messages.

Why can't the encoding be detected automatically?

The message database format on the Treo does not specify its Unicode encoding (sort of like its language type) for its messages, and only stores the messages text in its raw form (basically just a bunch of 1's and 0's). Because of this, the Messaging application on the Treo and Phone Journal cannot decipher its original Unicode encoding without user intervention.

Why can't my message with ??? characters be decoded?

Those ??? characters are placeholders for characters that your Treo could not understand. Unfortunately, there is nothing that can be done to retrieve the original text for such cases. If you're experiencing this problem with Chinese/Japanese/Korean messages, make sure you have CJKOS installed and enabled before you are expecting to receive messages in those languages.

Will Phone Journal keep the messages on my Mac if I delete the same messages on my Treo?

Yes, but only if you sync your Treo to your Mac using the Phone Journal conduit before you delete those messages. After the sync is complete, your messages are safe on your Mac.

What are the known caveats for the Verizon Treo 650?

The Verizon Treo 650 ships with the Messaging application that was bundled with Treo 600's for most other carriers. Because Phone Journal does not currently support Treo 600's (support will be added in a future release of Phone Journal), your Verizon Treo 650 might not work with Phone Journal.

To check whether your Treo is compatible with Phone Journal, inside your Treo's Messaging application, press the Menu button, then go to Options -> About. If the version is Messaging v.2.0 or higher, your Treo is compatible with Phone Journal.

What do the different conduit settings do?

Backup new messages (default) - Downloads only the messages that you've sent/received on your Treo since the last time you've sync'd. If this is the first time you're syncing using Phone Journal, it downloads all the messages from your Treo.
Backup all messages - Downloads ALL the messages on your Treo, regardless of whether they were sync'd to your Mac before. Be careful with this option - it may cause duplicate messages to appear on your Mac! This option exists mainly to allow merging of different Messages Database files that you have backed up. If you've made a mistake using this option, don't worry - i'll be releasing a new function in a future release of Phone Journal to check for (and allow you to delete) duplicate messages. Otherwise, if you have kept all the messages on your Treo, you may delete the smsdata file stored at ~/Library/Application Support/PhoneJournal and do a sync again to re-download all the messages on your Treo.

Why are my messages taking so long to sync?

Try using a USB HotSync cable instead of using Bluetooth if you're not doing so already. Its much, much faster. The first sync and will also take longer as it needs to download and decode all the existing messages on your Treo. Subsequent syncs will be faster as the conduit only downloads the latest messages.

After syncing, no messages appear in the Phone Journal application window or I get this error message "Please synchronize your Treo before running Phone Journal".

Please first make sure you are running the latest version of Phone Journal and you have updated both the conduit and the application. If you have purchased Missing Sync 6.0, be sure to disable the "Mark/Space SMS Log" conduit. If the problem still persists, please send a message using the contact form with the model of your Treo, whether you're using Missing Sync or Palm Desktop together with its version number.

How do I get the contact's photo to appear in Phone Journal?

Phone Journal automatically retrieves photos for your contacts from the Mac OS X Address Book. If a photo for a contact is not appearing in Phone Journal, ensure that the contact exists in your Address Book with the same phone number as the one on your Treo and also has a photo set for the contact.

I have this really cool idea for Phone Journal! Will you put it in the next release?

The FunkeeMonk welcomes all suggestions and comments! Please send it by going to the contact page. However, the current TODO list for Phone Journal is VERY long, so there's no guarantee on when (and if) your suggestion will make it to the next release. If lots of people keep requesting the same things, those things will definitely take higher priority though, so please send in those suggestions and comments!

How was Phone Journal developed?

Phone Journal is developed on a Macbook Pro using Xcode. Phone Journal makes extensive use of Apple's Cocoa framework, especially Bindings, Core Data and WebKit. The website is created and maintained using TextMate.

Will there be a Windows version of Phone Journal? Or how about supporting other phones?

Maybe. Because FunkeeMonk Technology is a one-man-company right now, its resources are extremely limited. When I started development of Phone Journal, I had to choose between supporting many phones poorly or to support one phone as best as I can. This is because there's no standard way mobile phones store their SMS/MMS databases on their phones, and I do not have the time/resources to investigate and then develop support for the many phones out there.

So out of the thousands of mobile phone models out there, I had to choose one phone to develop for and I made the choice to develop for the best mobile phone out there (at least in my view).

That also goes for the choice of operating system. I could choose to develop for both Windows and Mac OS X and release a product that works on both platforms, but the product would suffer as it would lack the "native-feel" of a product targeted for a specific platform or would suffer performance problems. It would also take longer to develop.

For fellow geeks: Yes, I know I could have also targeted both platforms by using Java/Python/etc or using a cross-platform widget toolkit like Qt or wxWidgets. Believe me, I have investigated this route and spent time creating prototypes. The conclusion I reached was that application startup time for higher-level languages like Java and Python are simply too slow for a mainstream consumer application (that you expect people to pay money for) right now. Qt is prohibitively expensive for independent developers (and i'm not particularly fond of C++). wxWidgets looked interesting at first, but after looking at all the screenshots on their webpage, I knew it wasn't for me or my audience.

And developing using Cocoa is just too much fun to give up. :-)

Phone Journal

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Phone Journal support page

- Updated December 28th, 2007

After syncing, no messages appear in the Phone Journal application window or I get this error message "Please synchronize your Treo before running Phone Journal". - updated