address book
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Ask TUAW: how to sync between Address Book and Gmail
Hawk Wings has an interesting roundup post covering a number of individuals who are dumping Apple's Mail in the name of Gmail for various reasons. While I've been experimenting with the same thing over the last couple of weeks, I've run into a hangup that I felt worthy of an Ask TUAW post. Since more and more of us are adopting web services for daily operations, I thought y'all might have some thoughts on my situation: I love web services, especially ones like Gmail, but now that I own a Motorola RAZR that can sync contacts and events with OS X, I'm on the hunt for an easy way to keep my contacts synchronized between Address Book and Gmail. I know there are basic export apps that are handy for that initial dump from Address Book to Gmail, but I don't know if using that same method a second time will simply double-up all my Gmail contacts. A two-way solution would be ideal, allowing Address Book, Gmail and my RAZR to dance in perfect geeky harmony.So what say you, TUAW readers? Have any of you found a way to keep all this software in sync?
BuddyPop makes Address Book useful
Continuing on my quest for apps that make me go "that should've been in OS X," I found BuddyPop at the ever-useful Hawk Wings. BuddyPop makes Address Book a bit more accessable and useful by offering a searchable pop-up window for your contacts. A user-definable keyboard shortcut calls the highly-configurable pop-up window, and various pieces of contact info are linked to actual applications. Clicking on a phone number can call the contact using Vonage or Skype, while clicking an email address opens a message addressed to the contact. This is the kind of super-handy stuff that really should have been built into operating systems years ago, in my humble opinion. BuddyPop costs 10 € (10 euros) which the Unit Converter widget tells me is just under $12 (USD).Like Tim Gaden over at Hawk Wings, however, Quicksilver does all this stuff for me already, and much more. But for a lot of people who simply need quick access to contacts and not all the (sometimes confusing) extras of Quicksilver, I'm sure BuddyPop is a great, functional solution.
