The end of Semester is one week away.
I’m starting to get itchy blogging fingers.
I spent most of today updating WordPress from 2.5 to 2.8.5 (it’s been a while!), plowing through 443 comments in the moderation queue, and cleaning up a few other odds and sods.
I’m on the start line again, and the engine’s humming.
AddressBookQuickEntry is an interface to Address Book that allows for fast entry of contact information.
Hawk Wings has covered it before (three and a half years ago!).
It disappeared for a while. I found myself emailing the app out to readers who asked for it, but now it is back on the Internet, hosted on the Small Steps Forward web site 
.
Nothing has changed. It should still work in Tiger, as it did before, and seems to work fine in Leopard. (UPDATE: Things are not quite as smooth in Leopard as I thought. While it works OK for me, see the comments for some particular quirks.)
You can read about the speed advantages of its interface and its clever tricks in the earlier post. An image of its clean interface gives a hint of the benefits:
AddressBookQuickEntry remains freeware.
UPDATE: Apologies. I jumped the gun here. The article should have been headlined “MobileMe shows random signs of life”. It sputtered into life from time to time last night, but only long enough for me to grab some of the screenshots below.
MobileMe is live. Check it out for yourself at me.com
UPDATED UPDATE: Nope, gone again. This is too much for my nerves!
UPDATE: All good again! Go for it.
Well, it was live for a moment, long enough for me to grab the screenshot from my MobileMe Account page above. Now it’s gone, and the URL redirects to Apple’s MobileMe Promo page again.
In order to use it you will need to fire up Software Update first and download the MobileMe update that’s waiting there.
The update changes the icon in System Preferences to the new MobileMe one. And probably does more important things too. For example, it requires you to quit Mail.app before continuing, so it’s making some changes there as well.
More details if and when it revives itself again.
Hopefully, it was launched a little early, and is not quite ready. It didn’t look like the MobileMe Calendar knew about my CalDAV calendars.
UPDATE: Still doesn’t know about my CalDAV calendars.
And there’s bad news in the MobileMe Address Book Preferences for people who don’t live in the USA, France, Germany or Japan:
In answer to Harry’s question in the comments, it looks like the personal domain option in the Account Preferences only relates to web hosting, not to email:
But I can’t test that.
The recent 10.5.3 update introduced built-in syncing with Gmail Contacts in Address Book.
Despite this, developers of third-party Address Book-Gmail syncing apps are soldiering on. Both SpanningSync and Syncman developers point out that 10.5.3 offers this only for Leopard users and, even then, only for Leopard users with an iPhone or iTouch device.
Jeff Nichols, Syncman developer, has just released a new improved version of his sync app, lending credence to his claim that Wateree (his software firm) is a “small and agile company that can adjust quickly to our customers needs and desires”.
Syncman 1.1 can now be configured to run as a menubar utility and to load automatically when you fire up Mac OS X.
Behind the scenes further tweaks have improved the way Google Talk address are mapped to Jabber addresses in Address Book, and improved treatment of how Address Book’s Last Name field is handled.
But the number one request of users was for scheduled syncing, and Syncman delivers on that too.
The Preferences allow you to set the period of the sync and to customise the level of confirmation you want before it makes any changes:
Confirmation is another nice feature of Syncman, that is lacking in Address Book’s default sync option. As Jeff puts it:
Syncman respects the effort you’ve put into maintaining your Address Book, and therefore gets your confirmation before making any changes that could potentially cause you a whole bunch of headache.
So Syncman offers a confirmation dialog displaying potential changes before it makes them:
SpanningSync has also recently launched a 2.0 beta of its software, which is addition to syncing iCal and Google Calendar, will also sync Address Book data, including photos (Syncman is promised to have this feature soon too). The beta is free (but is a beta, so backup!).
SpanningSync costs either USD 25 for a year’s subscription or USD 65 for a once-off, unlimited licence.
Syncman is shareware and costs USD 15 (€9.95). You can get a 30-day free demo from Wateree’s web site.
Nova Media has released version 2.0 of its Phone plugins software, which restores to Leopard users the lost ability to dial phone numbers and send text messages in Address Book. And not only that, but more widely across a range of apps.
Phone Plugins installs itself as a System Preference pane.
After installation, you need to hook up a mobile phone to your Mac via Bluetooth by following the simple instructions onscreen. It recognised my old Nokia E60 without a problem:
Then, when the connection is established, right-clicking on a contact’s phone number in Address Book produces two new entries in the contextual menu:
The text/SMS interface is nice and simple and gets the job done. It offers a running total of remaining characters and a spell-check option:
Clicking “Dial number with E60″ initiates a call on your mobile/cell (unsurprisingly!).
Both options are available outside Address Book, system-wide in the Services menu. Just highlight the number and select the option you want from Services (or, if you do this a lot, bind it to a keyboard shortcut with an app like Service Scrubber ).
Phone Plugins works with a list of supported phones which Nova Media provides so check that yours is on the list before you try to install it.
Phone Plugins is shareware and features a very robust nag screen.
It costs €9,95 (c. USD 15.50) and a demo version is available from Nova Media’s web site .
For a donation-ware option, take a look at the emitSMS Widget in an earlier Hawk Wings post.
The Hawk Wings plugin and add-on list contains over 140 plug-ins, add-ons, scripts and utilities to make working with Mail.app, iCal and Address Book smarter, faster and better.
Today it gains a new section for Leopard Mail templates.
I’ve managed to round up 122 templates, including the 111 contained in Equinux’s shareware bundle. The others are all freeware and are themed for Christmas, sober business use, New Year’s and the birth of a baby girl (oddly missing from Apple’s default list).
If I have missed any, let me know.
Of course you can always “roll your own” which is more satisfying. Tutorials abound. See The Apple Blog , The Graphic Mac and the tutorial and templates at Technosanity .
I’ve also added Eaglefiler to the section on Archiving.
The plug-in list itself is sadly in need of revision.
Some plug-ins have disappeared, the development of some like the notification utility iNotify has been stopped so that they are not compatible with Leopard and others have moved around due to web site changes. And there are many more new utilities that I still haven’t added.
I’ll work through it slowly. Promise.
Tom Negrino at MacWorldhas written a review of Entourage 2008, part of the newly released Microsoft Office for Mac 2008.
Although it has its fans, the shortcomings of Entourage 2004 were well-known and many were hoping for greater things from Entourage 2008.
MacWorld’s verdict?
There are several other new or improved features relating to e-mail or calendaring, but they apply only to users in corporate environments that connect to a Microsoft Exchange server. Given that it’s been four long years in the making, it’s a missed opportunity that Entourage 2008 hasn’t also added some of the best new features found in Mail, such as automatic detection of physical addresses and dates, or e-mail stationery templates.
Entourage gets points for more complete AppleScript-ability, for compatibility with Mac OS X’s Services and for looking nicer, but when you get down to business — backing up your email and working with other apps — things look less rosy.
Negrino notes Microsoft’s advice that Entourage’s monolithic database be excluded from Time Machine backups and that users employ “alternative backup methods” instead. This is not only a pain in the butt, but cuts across the comprehensive design of Time Machine as a “set and forget”, everything-that-matters-to-you backup system.
Working with iCal is also fraught in Negrino’s view:
When you first synchronize Entourage with Sync Services, it creates an Entourage calendar in iCal, replicating your Entourage events in iCal. If you add or change events in that Entourage calendar in iCal or on a mobile device, those events will be synchronized back to Entourage’s internal calendar. But there’s no way to bring events from other iCal calendars (such as the default Home, Work, or Birthdays calendars) into Entourage’s internal calendar. Put another way, Entourage can publish data to iCal, but can’t subscribe to any of iCal’s other calendars. In effect, Entourage uses iCal as a convenient conduit to synchronize its data to other devices, but doesn’t treat iCal as a full calendaring partner.
After getting to the end of the review, I was surprised by the final sentence:
“Finally, if you’re outside of the corporate realm, and need a mail, calendar, and contact manager with lots of headroom and solid integration with the rest of the Office suite, Entourage provides a wealth of features that are deeper than Apple’s trio.”
Are you?
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