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Gmail now stores up to 25,000 contacts for the insanely popular
Are you quietly proud of the girth of your social circle? Do you think having 146 Facebook buddies is impressive? Snap out of it, saddo. Some Gmail users have thousands upon thousands of contacts in their list -- so many, in fact, that they've been begging Google to increase its 10,000 limit. The Big G has now obliged these jabbering fiends, yanking the limit up to 25,000 and also boosting available cloud storage to 128KB per contact instead of 32KB. We imagine this could be of some help to business users perhaps, or those nice strangers who send out stock tips. But for the rest of us, the gesture is about as inconsequential as the professionally good-looking.
Sync your address book to Google and back it up
Former TUAW-writer (but forever in our hearts) David Chartier tried using OS X's built-in Address Book sync to Google Contacts and had a very bad experience which ended with him turning it off almost immediately. I had a similar-but-different bad experience. In my case, OS X seemed to simply stop syncing to Google altogether, despite the fact that the setting was still enabled. Some of the difficulty is due to the fact that Google has differences and limitations on contact information compared to OS X, which complicated syncing. I have also not been able to find any reliable way to tell when the last sync took place (it's supposed to happen every hour on 10.6), and no way to manually trigger a sync on demand. Fortunately there's a better solution: SpanningSync. SpanningSync will sync iCal to Google Calendar and your Address Book to Google Contacts. Even better, it has a setting that I adore (shown above), called "Never Change Address Book." This tells SpanningSync to upload changes that I make on my Mac to Google, but don't sync anything back from Google. No, this isn't "true sync" but it suits my purposes fine. If I want to add contact information, I always do it on my Mac or iPhone, not on Google. The only reason I want my contact information on Google is to use with Google Voice. If you prefer to make all of your changes on Google, you can make it a "one-way sync" that way, or make it a two-way sync. Read on for more suggestions...
BusyCal Info Panel Preferences give you more event options
BusyCal is what iCal should have been. It continues to impress me the longer I use it, and recently I found a way to customize it that I did not know about previously. Event details, like the one shown in the image here, can be customized from a much larger list than what BusyCal shows you by default. To access the Info Panel Preferences, click the small white "i" at the top right of the Event Info panel. (See item #1 in the image here. Note that you can only access these when the panel is floating on its own, not from the BusyCal sidebar.) There are 18 different fields that you can use, and most of them are self explanatory (you can see an image in the gallery below), but I want to draw your attention to a few that I find very helpful. The first is "my URL" which gives you an easy way to link an event to a person from your address book. Simply drag the name from the address book to the my URL field and a link will be created (see #2 in image). Clicking that link will open their contact information in the Address Book.app. You can also drag a person (or business) to the Location, Attendees, My Notes, or Notes field. For the latter two, you get more than just a link to their name, you get address and phone number information (see item #3 in image). While you could use "Attendees" for the same purpose (and that field is shown by default), when you do that, BusyCal wants to know if you want to "invite" them or send them changes whenever you edit the event. That isn't a feature I ever use, so I didn't want to use Attendees, but my URL is almost perfect.
Tip: 'Hide' sensitive data in Address Book
Here's an interesting tip from The Apple Blog about hiding sensitive data in plain sight. In this instance, Dave Greenbaum explains how he uses an app like Apple's Address Book to plainly display a credit card number. The catch is that, upon first glance, the record looks like any other collection of contact info. Only Dave knows how to read the data "hidden" inside. It's not uncrackable, of course, but still a clever idea. Perhaps you could use it to obscure less sensitive data if you'd rather not do it with a credit card. Alternatively, apps like Knox and 1Password offer true encryption and are relatively inexpensive. Dave's solution is free and something we hadn't thought of. Head over to read the whole post. Nice thinking, Dave!
Mac 101: Two things I love about Address Book
More Mac 101, tips and tricks for novice Mac users. It's so easy to take Address Book for granted, and yet that simple utility has two absolutely killer features: big phone numbers and simple envelope printing. These features do exactly what their descriptions suggest: display phone numbers in Very, Large, Type -- and print envelopes, complete with your personal return address. To zoom a phone number, control-click or right-click the number you want to see and choose Large Type from the contextual pop-up. Address Book zooms that number way out, allowing you to see it while dialing, even if you're not standing right next to the computer. I find that it's a lot easier just to show the number to my husband than try to read it out to him. Your spousal success rate may vary. To print a properly formatted envelope, just insert a standard envelope into your printer. Make sure the address side (and not the flap side) faces the toner cartridge. For me, that is flap side down. My printer, which is pretty darn standard, has an envelope feeding clamp in the single sheet feed. I pop open the single sheet access, adjust the clamp inward to match the envelop size and feed in the envelop flap side down. In Address Book all I need to do is select a contact and print it. (File > Print). Make sure you've chosen Envelopes from the Style (it's my default), and that Print my address is selected so the return address is properly added to the envelope. If you're using an envelope that's not a standard business layout, choose the proper layout. Address Book supports most common envelope styles used in North America, Japan, and "International." Address Book can also print out mailing labels, lists, and a pocket address book. See the Style pop-up for details. For the free contact manager that comes with the OS, it's got moxie.
Add Apple's free Backup.app to your backup toolbox
When most people think about Apple and backups they probably think about Time Machine or perhaps even Time Capsule. But Apple has a lesser-known application which you might consider using. The app, simply named Backup, was originally available only to .Mac users, but is now openly available on Apple's website. It lists "MobileMe account" as one of its requirements. If you do not have a MobileMe account, each backup is limited to 100 MB. The good news is that for what I am suggesting, 100 MB will be completely sufficient for most people. Follow along as I use Backup to create a complete and scheduled backup of personal data and settings on my Mac. First, install and launch the application. Choose Plan > New Plan from the menu. If you have a MobileMe account, choose the "Personal Data & Settings" option (second from the top), click the "Choose Plan" button, and then skip the next paragraph.
Ask TUAW: Syncing, custom keyboards, sharing iPhone apps, and more
Welcome back to Ask TUAW, our weekly Mac troubleshooting Q&A column. This week we've got lots of questions about syncing, as well as customized keyboards, sharing iPhone apps, managing iTunes, and more. As always, your suggestions and questions are welcome. Questions for next week should be left in the comments. When asking a question please include which machine you're running and which version of Mac OS X (we'll assume you're running Leopard on an Intel Mac if you don't specify). And now, on to the questions
Snow Leopard and Microsoft Exchange first impressions
One of the things touted in this latest incarnation of Mac OSX was its ability to work with Microsoft Exchange using Apple's Mail, Address Book and iCal applications. Well, I'm happy to report that Snow Leopard does, in fact, work pretty well with Exchange 2007. Granted, this is only after limited testing, and it doesn't, as yet, work as well as Outlook for Windows, but it is a step in the right direction. One thing to consider before we go on is the fact that Snow Leopard will only play nicely with Exchange 2007 so if you don't have it or are not planning on having it, these new Exchange features in Snow Leopard won't work for you. You'll have the same access to Exchange 2003 from Mail (via IMAP) and Address Book that you did under Leopard. That said, these new features of Snow Leopard offer a nice alternative to using the previous version of Entourage or the new Web Services Edition. Fortunately, if you are running Snow Leopard and Exchange 2007, setup could not be easier. All you need to do is launch Apple's Mail and select "Preferences" from the "Mail" menu. Read on for more...
TUAW Tip: Smart Groups in Address Book
Let's face it, contact management is a pain. Address Book in OS X is a good tool, but one often overlooked feature is the "Smart Group" -- a way of quickly organizing your contacts together. If you're familiar with Smart Playlists in iTunes, it's the same but with contact info. To start a Smart Group, go to File > New Smart Group. A dialog will drop down in Address Book for you to start entering criteria for filtering. For example, you could create a group of everyone whose birthday you have in your contacts by choosing the item Birthday from the first drop-down menu item, then adding the menu item "is set." Note that you can't create a list of people with birthdays in June, which is a bummer. But the Smart Groups have a variety of ways to filter, some more useful than others and several are dependent on the data (dates vs. text, for example). To delete a group you'll have to make a trip to the menus, as no amount of right-clicking or key pressing will do it. Delete is in the Edit menu, under Delete Group. One more thing: the notes field in Address Book extends the power of Smart Groups just a bit. After returning from WWDC I added the business cards of people I met and added the note "wwdc" to each one. I then made a Smart Group where the Note contains 'wwdc' and now I've got an easy way to see the group of people I met at WWDC. Think of the Notes field as a loose tag field, if you like. I've also set up my Address Book to add family members based on a list of surnames, but that may only work if you have an oddball last name like mine!
Vlingo adds voice control to older iPhones
Pity the poor iPhone 3G owner who now has to grapple with reality; yes, what was until Friday the world's coolest smartphone is now simply a piece of yesterday's tech, as current as a punchcard and as enduring as a wax cylinder recording on a hot afternoon. No, not really -- the iPhone 3G is just as cool as it was a week ago, and for $99 it's a relative bargain. Still, there's some envy on the wind. Some of our readers have apparently been so dazzled by Apple's enthusiastic promotion of the new iPhone 3G S that they were fooled into believing that the hardware-linked features of the 3G S (the compass and the voice controls, specifically) would be made available on the 3G with the delivery of the 3.0 software update. They have written to us, irate and frustrated, wanting to know what happened to their promised features. We sympathize, and we want to help. There is, as it happens, a way to get one of the marquee features of the 3G S -- voice control -- onto your iPhone 3G or original iPhone. The vlingo app, available free in the App Store since December of last year and also available for Blackberry & Windows Mobile, gives you voice command dialing from your address book, map search, Yahoo web searches, Twitter/Facebook updating, and more. The recognition quality is quite good; it's worked as well as Google Voice Search for me in most cases. Vlingo is quite a bit slower to recognize audio on the 3G than the built-in Voice Control is on the 3G S (unsurprisingly, considering the horsepower boost on the new phone); it also does not allow iTunes control, while Apple's tool does. Despite these drawbacks, it's fun to use and very slick. Update: As Eitan points out in the comments, vlingo's speed is not necessarily limited by the local processing power, since it depends on the remote server for audio analysis. One of the major points of contention regarding vlingo, and a cause of many negative reviews on the App Store, is that the app does have to do something a little bit touchy in order to enable voice dialing: it asks if it can upload your contact names to vlingo. While this is a necessary step if you want to use voice dialing, and while the company says it does not include phone numbers with that upload nor does it use the information for any purpose other than creating spoken profiles to recognize the names of your contacts when you speak them, there are plenty of users who aren't comfortable with this step. If you're not OK with it, you can still use vlingo without the voice dialing feature; at that point, however, it's not dramatically better than Google's Voice Search. You can watch a video demo of vlingo in the 2nd half of this post. If you've got other workarounds or third-party apps that help 3G owners level up with their happy 3G S comrades, please let us know.
Kerio MailServer 6.7
Yesterday, amidst the SlingMobile débâcle and an OS update, Kerio Technologies released Kerio Mail MailServer 6.7. The mail and collaboration server, often used as a replacement for Exchange, has added several new features, including a few geared toward Mac users. The Kerio Global Address List (GAL) is a new feature that provides a simple way to get address and contact info from clients like Outlook or Entourage. It syncs and authenticates with both Microsoft Active Directory and Apple Open Directory, as well as Kerio's own user directory. In any company, people join and leave the group, and users are often required to manually update their address books to add and remove entries. With GAL, it's a single directory in a single place, and changes are transparent for users. It supports Entourage, works with the iPhone and functions offline. Kerio MailServer 6.7 also comes with an auto-configuration script for Entourage 2008, downloadable within the Kerio client, providing pre-configured account setup. There's support for private events in iCal, allowing users to maintain personal schedules without requiring a separate calendar application. AddressBook gets some additional love with support for synchronizing groups (which become Categories in Entourage). Kerio has had good support for iPhone users for a while now. For non-iPhone mobile users, there's new support for viewing HTML emails on Nokia devices, as well as DataViz RoadSync compatibility. The MailServer itself is now a certified VMWare appliance, and promotes compatibility with two new Linux distributions: Ubuntu 8 and Debian 5. CentOS is the preferred platform for running on VMWare. IT admins and users alike will appreciate the dramatically improved anti-spam engine, which has been optimized for multi-CPU use, parallel processing of email messages for large queues, improved heuristics and 13 layers of spam protection. In addition to some of the previously available migration tools provided by Kerio, a new IMAP migration tool relieves what is undoubtedly one of the biggest headaches in switching mail servers: keeping your old mail. It's a cross-platform utility which moves messages, folders, accounts and domains from the old system to Kerio MailServer. The IMAP migration tool has been fully tested with OS X. Kerio's pricing has remained the same with this release. Starting at $499 for 10 users, there's a range of options available for different configurations and add-ons, as well as subscription pricing. See Kerio's pricing page for more details.
Twitter and Skype and FileMaker, oh my! FMWebSchool integrates them
FileMaker Pro fans can now tweet and make Skype calls directly from databases, thanks to a pair of free files from FMWebSchool. There are a couple of movies that demonstrate how these files work, which you can view by clicking the links below. The FMSkype file allows you to import your Skype address book into a FileMaker Pro database (Windows only; Mac FileMaker users must manually import their Skype info), and then click to call a contact using their Skype name or phone number.FMTweet lets you send messages to Twitter from a FileMaker Pro database. This is not a plug-in; it's a database with associated scripting that can be customized by the user. FMTweet could be useful if you want a database to provide notification of a specific situation through Twitter -- for instance, send a tweet when someone enters information into a web-enabled Filemaker database.To get the two files and other FileMaker goodies that may come out in the future, you do need to subscribe to the free FMWebSchool newsletter.
Ask TUAW: Bypass the registration screen, install Leopard Server on the new Mac Mini, iPhone 2G AppleCare options and more
Once again, it's time for another edition of Ask TUAW: the place where we try to answer all of your Mac and Apple-related questions. This week we're taking questions about bypassing the Apple registration screen, installing Leopard Server on the latest Mac Mini, AppleCare for iPhone version 1.0 and more.As always, we welcome your suggestions for this week and questions for next time. Please leave your contributions in the comments for this post. When asking questions, please include which Mac and which version of OS X you're running. If you don't specify, we'll assume you're running Leopard on an Intel Mac.Tom asks:When I do an install of OSX or after bringing home a new Mac I get to a screen that asks me to register. If I don't want to fill out that information in is there any way to bypass it?Sure. Once you get to the registration screen simply press the Command and Q keys and you will see a new dialog box come up. On it, one of your choices will be to "Skip" the registration process. Simply click it and you'll move on to the next screen to create your user account and finish the setup of OSX.John asks:I have a Leopard Server installer DVD from last year and I'm having trouble installing the software on one of the new Mac Minis. It won't even boot the Mini nor will it work when I try upgrading OSX client to server. Once it installs I get endless restarts, etc. What's the best way to accomplish this?
Ask TUAW: Preventing automounting, Exchange support, printing selections, and more
For this edition of Ask TUAW we've got questions about preventing an external partition from automounting, printing text selections, getting email from an Exchange server, syncing the Address Book with Google contacts, and more. As always, your suggestions are welcome. Questions for next week should be left in the comments. When asking a question please include which machine you're running and which version of Mac OS X (we'll assume you're running Leopard on an Intel Mac if you don't specify). And now, on to the questions!
Terminal Tips: Enable Address Book debug menu
You may recall that Safari has a debug menu that enables some hidden features, but did you know Address Book also has a debug menu? In Address Book's debug menu, you can get options for logging, controls for metadata, printing selections, and removing orphaned images. You can enable this debug menu by typing the following command into Terminal.app (/Applications/Utilities): defaults write com.apple.addressbook ABShowDebugMenu -bool YESIf you no longer wish to have this menu hanging around, you can remove it by typing the same command above, but replace "YES" with "NO." Want more tips and tricks like this? Visit TUAW's Terminal Tips section!
Mac 101: Address Book A-Z
New to the Mac? Welcome back to our Mac 101 series, which explores the basics of Mac OS X, provides tips and tricks, and dives into key features of Apple's bundled applications. Address Book is the contact management software bundled with every new Mac. It's easy to use and well integrated with Mail and iCal. Let's explore some of its capabilities. Creating a new record There are three ways to do this. The first is to select "New Card" from the "File" menu. The second is to click the "+" icon below the "Name" column. Finally, you can press Command - N on your keyboard. Next, fill in the fields. Some have drop-down titles. For example, you can label a phone number as "work", "home" or "mobile". Finally, you can add a note to the notes field. Adding a photo is fun. Just click the photo box next to a contact's name and a new window appears. From there, you can browse to a photo on your computer or take a snapshot with your iSight camera. You can even apply some filters to the photo by clicking the Filters button on the right hand side of the window. That photo will appear on that person's record, on email messages retreived with Apple's Mail and on a synchronized iPhone or iPod.
Mac 101: Get a Google Map from Address Book contact
How many times have you looked at an Address Book contact address, only to realize that you don't know where they're located? What do you do? Most would copy and paste the address into Google Maps, but there is a better way! In a contact's Address Book card, right-clicking on an address and clicking on "Map Of" will launch your default browser and map out the address in Google Maps. If you are using Tiger, you will need to install a plug-in, however, this tip works beautifully in Mac OS X Leopard. Want more tips and tricks like this? Visit TUAW's Mac 101 section.
Mac 101: Back up Address Book, iCal, iPhone before MobileMe
Being the paranoid person that I am, it occurred to me that it would be a good idea to back up Address Book and iCal before all of the syncing madness begins between Macs, MobileMe, "the cloud", and iPhone/iPod touch. Here's how to do it (Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard only):Backing up Address Book Launch Address Book Select File > Export > Address Book Archive Find a location to save the Address Book archive, then click the Save button. Backing up iCal Launch iCal Select File > Backup iCal Find a location to save the iCal backup, then click the Save button. Backing up iPhone / iPod touch Just sync it Ahhh, don't you feel all safe and happy now? And remember, if you're running Leopard and Time Machine, your backups are going to be backed up, too!
New screenshots of Snow Leopard appear, show desktop web apps
A German site, Apfeltalk.de has posted screenshots of the forthcoming version of Mac OS X, 10.6 (a.k.a "Snow Leopard"). Most of the screenshots show off the Safari 4 developer preview that will include the "Save as Web Application" option in the File menu. The website also shows off the next version of Address Book.app that will bring Microsoft Exchange support to the Mac platform. We do however have to speculate about the System Preferences.app screenshot that shows two Time Machine icons with one labled "Dock" and another labeled "Time Machine" -- this seems out of place and unlike Apple. You can see all of the screenshots (before Apple's legal team gets a hold of them) on the Apfeltalk.de site. [via Engadget]
Get Address Book Bluetooth dialing back with Nova Media Phone plugins
One of the the stranger changes in Leopard was the loss of the ability to dial (and send text messages) from the Address Book to a Bluetooth paired cell phone. Fortunately, however, Nova Media has released its Phone plugins to return this functionality to the Leopard Address Book and other applications through a system-wide Service. When installed it allows you to call a number or send a text message just by right-clicking on the number in the Address Book (or selecting it elsewhere and invoking Phone plugins from the Services menu). It works with a number of phones from Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, and Sony Ericsson; check the compatibility list for details. Annoyingly the iPhone is not compatible.Nova Media Phone plugins is $9.95 and a demo is available.[via Hawk Wings]
