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TUAW Tip: Address Book offers a lot of handy contact management
Address Book is one of Apple's apps that might seem too basic at first glance to many a user. While this under-appreciation could largely be due to its unassuming name, Address Book offers a surprising amount of useful features, especially in the contact management department. Of course, there are the typical Apple-esque Smart Groups which you can use to automatically and dynamically round up contacts based on any criteria you want (family last names, employers or even notes you add yourself), but check out the Card menu in Address Book and note two options: Merge Selected Cards and (my personal favorite since I play with way too much synching software in the name of TUAW and Download Squad) Look for Duplicate Entries. Those are two great tools for ensuring your contacts only take up one entry each in Address Book (if you only want one entry for each, that is), and I highly recommend using Look for Duplicate Entries if things get out of hand, as it's saved me countless hours after botched synching sessions and wayward synching software had their way with my contacts. Importing new contacts cards (usually .VCF files) is nothing very special, but Address Book is pretty smart when you import a card for someone already in you contacts list. Typically, Address Book will catch the potential duplication and offer you four options for managing both the old and new cards. A window will be presented with four buttons along the bottom: Keep Old, Keep New, Keep Both and Update, allowing you to ensure that you don't blow away old data you want to keep for the contact while importing anything new you might need. Combine some of these tricks and tools with the Mail + Address Book tips Merlin Mann wrote about back in April, and you have some pretty powerful tools for managing your contacts and organizing the correspondence you have with them.
Chronos announces SOHO Organizer 6
The busy bees at Chronos have indeed been... busy. Not to be content with the recent release of SOHO Notes 6, the company has gone ahead and dropped SOHO Organizer 6, their "powerful contact, calendar and note manager" that could be compared to an Entourage on steroids (that doesn't suck), sans the email component, but including SOHO Notes. Adding to a list of roughly a zillion already existing features, SOHO Organizer 6 brings calendar publishing to the web, connecting to CalDAV servers for collaborative editing, calendar import/exporting and - naturally - subscribing to published calendars. As SOHO Organizer 6 brings some features that are really focused on the business user, its $99 price will likely also appeal to the more power and business users in the crowd.For those who are upgrading or need more than one license, a $49.99 price is offered to users of SOHO Organizer 5.x, and family packs are available.
Reminder: Apple keeps an official list of iSync-supported devices
No matter how you identify with the computing aspect of your life being able to take your contacts and calendar on the go can be pretty invaluable, especially if you have more than three friends and your iCal has more colored blocks than a Rubix Cube. But how can you figure out which device(s) on your wishlist will actually work with Mac OS X's built-in syncing app, iSync? Should you dig through the annals of individual manufacturer's support pages? Or perhaps post across multiple forums for someone - anyone - to answer the call of your syncing questions? No I say! Do not go gently into that convoluted mess of neglected support docs and clunky forum systems!Bad literature jokes and drama aside, Apple maintains a pretty up-to-date list of iSync-friendly devices on their own. If you're definitely looking for a phone that syncs, this list should help make the decision pretty black and white. However, I say this with a word of caution: while this list is thorough and updated fairly often (typically listing new phone models before they hit the street), it isn't 100% complete in that Apple doesn't always list related model numbers. For example: Cingular had a Sony Ericsson w600 available for quite some time, and it was listed at Apple's iSync devices page. I picked up an unlocked w800i a while back (killer non-Smartphone with a great camera, by the way) - a similar phone with a near-identical version of the OS that synced perfectly fine with my Mac, but Apple didn't list the w800 line until that phone officially came to US Cingular stores. Why is anybody's guess, but the point is: if you have your eyes on a phone that is related by model number to a phone on Apple's list, chances are that it should work with iSync just fine. That said, if you aren't too familiar with a phone that isn't on this list, you should probably still hit up a couple forums to make sure before you thrown down hundreds of dollars on a device that might not actually shake hands with iSync (in other words: that's a disclaimer so you don't sue me).Lastly, for most Smartphone devices which aren't on this list (outside of Symbian, of course), there are always products like PocketMac and the Missing Sync which can handle syncing BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and Palm OS devices.
Mailboxer : Generate Smart Mailboxes for your contacts
Mailboxer is a simple little program (it doesn't even have a proper icon) that automatically generates a Smart Mailbox within Mail.app for each contact in your Address Book (or you can set it only to generate Smart Mailboxes for the contacts which appear in a Group you've named "Mailboxer"). The idea is to give "you convenient access to all conversations you had with each of your contacts." As you can see here it has made a folder "AB" within which is a separate Mailbox for each of the contacts I put in the "Mailboxer" Group in my Address Book. This looks like it could be a very convenient way of keeping on top of email conversations with specific people without always having to go to the search field. And of course this should be combined with our Mail new window tip from yesterday, thus taking you to ever higher flights of email productivity![Via Hawk Wings]
Do It
Do It is quite possibly the most feature-packed mini-todo widget app ever written. For a birds-eye view, it features integration with Quicksilver, Address Book and iCal, as well as .Mac syncing and AppleScript-ability. As Tim Gaden puts it: the only thing missing is a kitchen sink. Fundamentally, Do It is (surprise) a todo manager. But thanks to shaking hands with all these other apps, you can import/export todos from iCal, install an Address Book contextual menu item for easy contact reminder creation, add items from the most excellent Quicksilver or simply make it do nearly anything you want with the power of AppleScript. Despite all this impressive functionality, Do It remains freeware and available from Jim McGowan's site.[Update: my bad - Do It is an app, not a widget. I tried this app out a little while ago, and in finally getting around to writing it up, I mixed this up with another todo widget I just found. Sorry guys.]
T-Mobile launches T-Mobile Address Book
One of the many, many perils of cellphone ownership lies locked in the handset's memory: data loss. Nothing ruins an otherwise pleasant day worse than sending that Samsung t629 for a dunk in the pool (at least, that's your story on the insurance report, though we all really know you dropped it in the loo) -- or, even more catastrophically, running it over with a 5,000-pound SUV. Of course, the loss of the phone itself sucks enough, but the real challenge is resurrecting those contacts. T-Mobile's bringing a solid solution to the table with wireless synchronization of contact lists to its server, a la Sidekick. The service is initially launching with the aforementioned t629, along with Nokia's 6600 (how's that for an S60 throwback?) and 3220. Finally we're able to flush our phones down the toilet with wild abandon. [Thanks, The Fish]
Unofficial builds of Thunderbird with Address Book integration
A deal-breaker for many potential Thunderbird users is its lack of integration with Mac OS X's Address Book. While we found a web-based exporting tool back in January that worked for some users, plenty of others have their reasons for sticking with Apple's digital rolodex.We've heard about unofficial Thunderbird builds and plugins that can allow it to use contacts from Address Book, but it seems their developmental progress has been stop and go over the past year. Enter Robert Coleman, a quintessential knight in coding armor who has released an updated build of Thunderbird that traverses the void between Mozilla's and Apple's address books - though it isn't without a little bit of fiddling and a catch. Robert had to post some vital instructions with the build which you must follow before you can get your hands on the goods, so read carefully. The catch? Address Book integration is read-only; you can't add new contacts from Thunderbird, but hey - it's a start.[via Hawk Wings]
Verizon Wireless customers to get automatic contact list updates
There's nothing like keying 300+ contacts to your cellphone, only to have something catastrophic happen and lose them all. Sure, providers offer certain forms of backup, but a new service from Plaxo will make all your worries over losing that oh-so-precious contact list disappear. The firm is hooking up with Verizon Wireless (with Alltel and US Cellular to follow suit) to offer automatic list updates from "commonly used e-mail systems" (such as Outlook, Yahoo Mail, OS X Mail, Mozilla Thunderbird, etc.) wirelessly via its Plaxo Mobile Plus system. Customers will still have to choose which names receive the honor of being placed in their always-available contact roster, but the service "eliminates the need for manual reentry or copying directly from a computer." While specifics weren't given, this convenience is slated to work with "30 Verizon Wireless handsets" initially, and run customers $4.49 per month, which seems like a lot to ask unless you're notorious for destroying phones.[Via DigitalTrends]
Pod2Go becomes Life2Go, adds WeatherBug, other improvements
Pod2Go, the versatile information manager for your iPod, has updated to v1.6.4 with various improvements and a name change to Life2Go (Did Kevin get a call from Apple about his choice in application names?). A v1.0 is also available for Windows (traitor!), though I don't know if that is a recent development with this name change.Updates to the application itself including switching to WeatherBug for all weather information, significant changes to the Notes output and Mail storage, more specific syncing progress and more.A demo of Life2Go is available, while a full license runs for $12.99.
