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? entourage, microsoft, office for mac 2008, mail.app, ical, address book, sync services, time machine, email

For reasons best known to itself, Apple removed the SMS functionality from Leopard’s Address Book.

A new widget emitSMS brings back the ability to send text messages from Dashboard, using the Bluetooth connection on many Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, SonyEricsson and other mobile/cell phones.

The back of the widget includes options for searching the mobile phone field of contacts in your Address Book, enabling long messages, including a read receipt and storing the text messages:

For reasons best known to itself, Apple has restricted the Bluetooth functionality of its iPhone to pairing with headsets, so I can’t test this. And I very happily returned my Treo 680 to the IT Department, so I am out of options. But I have a hunch that if I could test this, it would work well.

emitSMS is donation-ware and is available from the developer’s web site

[Via macOSXHints ]Address Book, Leopard, SMS, text messages, mobile phones, cell phones, widget, dashboard

Relationship Completer is a plugin for Address Book that takes the pain out of creating relationships between your contacts.

Normally, in order to create a relationship between two contacts, say Richard Treloar and Leanne Habeeb, you need to go to Leanne’s card, enter “Richard Treloar” as the spouse of Leanne, and then, go to Richard’s card and repeat the procedure, entering Leanne’s name into his spouse field.

It shouldn’t be that hard, and with this plugin it isn’t.

All you need to do is enter the information once, ⌘-click on the field and the plugin creates the reciprocal relationship (assistant/manager, mother/daughter, friend/friend, etc, etc) in the other card:

Relationship Completer is freeware and available from the developer’s web site .

[Thanks, David!]address book, mail.app, apple mail, contacts, doing it smarter, plugins

FacebookSync syncs data between your Address Book and facebook account. It used to sync a lot of data (email addresses, IM details, phone numbers, etc) until facebook pointed out that this was a breach of its terms of use.

It still does a number of useful things though. It can add facebook profile pictures to Address Book contacts who have no photo, also address information.

Fire it up and you are asked to authenticate your facebook account. Then it delivers a list, comparing information about friends in your facebook account with your Address Book contacts, noting the differences:

You can then select sift through the contacts manually to select which Address Book contacts you would like it to update, or use the buttons on the right for a batch job.

It’s very clever. If you are addicted to Mail.app’s ability to display a photo of the author in the top righthand corner of each email, which somehow (for me) turns emails into conversations with real people, you will love it. Finally, I have an Address Book photo for a photo-shy friend! (I could simply have taken it from her facebook profile page but that wouldn’t have been nearly as much fun.)

facebooksync is freeware and and you can get it from the developer’s web site .address book, mail.app, apple mail, contacts, friends, facebook, syncing, social web

Andreas Amann has pushed out two quick updates to his Mail Scripts applescript collection.

Now at version 2.8.2, changes include a fix to make the Schedule Delivery script work in 10.4 and 10.5, a workaround to fix a possible error in the Schedule Delivery and Send all Drafts scripts caused by the way Leopard Mail fails to report the account of draft message, and a smarter Export Addresses script, which is no longer stumped if a contact has no work address.

Mail Scripts is freeware (donations not refused) and is available from Andreas’ web site .mail.app, apple mail, leopard mail, applescript, address book, plugins, scripts

In the past few days, my macOSXHints RSS feed has churned out an astonished number of interesting tips for iCal, Address Book and Mail.app.

Not all of them are equally useful or productivity-boosting, but all of them are interesting, if only because there are sometimes better ways to get these things done.

1. Use Quickview for Mail.app attachments

One tip explains that highlighting an attachment in a Mail message and pressing the spacebar opens Quickview.

Not much more useful than using the Quickview button next to the “Save” button under the headers perhaps, but in the comments, another poster points out that pressing ⌘-Y when viewing a message opens all the message’s attachments in a single Quickview window, with arrows to move from one to the next.

2. Adding notes and to-dos to individual emails

Another post details a way to add notes to an individual email using Leopard Mail’s to-do feature. This is a “hack” for Leopard Mail’s inability to attach notes to individual emails.

I hardly need to tell regular Hawk Wings readers that there is a more excellent way .

3. Apply filters to Address Book contact pictures

This was news to me. If you click the “swirly cube” button next to the camera button in Address Book’s contact image editor, you are rewarded with 35 different filters that you can apply to the picture.

In effect, this brings Photobooth (my kids’ favourite Mac app) to all your Address Book contacts. There is a lot of fun to be had here, especially with the photos of contacts that you don’t much care for.

4. Use Drag ‘n’ Drop to replace icons in an item’s Inspector pane

From time to time I like to chance the icon of my Mail.app. After all there are more than 450 options and changing the icon under Tiger was easy.

Now it is even easier. A macOSXHints tip explains how to change an icon not by opening two Inspectors and cutting and pasting between the icon field in each, but simply by dragging and dropping an icon into the icon field of the target app’s Inspector. That’s much quicker.

5. Unlearn words you learnt by mistake

Mac OS X’s spell checker is a wonderful thing, surpassed only by Spell Checker X, now in the process of private Leopard-friendly beta testing and soon to reappear.

But is is possible to learn a word too quickly, a tipster on macOSXHints points out , adding a misspelt word to your dictionary which the spell checker will never again pick up. Now unlearning it is as simple as right-clicking (or “Command-clicking” in the old language) on the offending word and selecting “Unlearn Spelling” from the contextual menu.mail.app, apple mail, address book, tips, macosxhints, icons, spell checking, contacts, mailtags, notes, to-dos, productivity

Spanning Sync has released a new version (1.1.3) of its iCal-Google Calendar syncing utility, which offers several significant stability improvements.

In particular this release makes large syncing attempts more reliable and less memory-intensive.

Also, in Leopard it now allows the syncing of iCal-Address Book’s Birthday calendar, as well as CalDAV and subscribed calendars.

The developers are quick to point out, however, that Leopard users are still experiencing problems, ranging from data loss to minor annoyances. They offer a short and a lengthy explanation and some tips on how to unstick Leopard iCal when things go wrong.

Spanning Sync casts USD 25 for one year and USD 65 for a life-time licence, although a free trial copy is available from its web site .gmail, google calendar, ical, address book, syncing, leopard, caldav