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.

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Apple’s iCal Team is looking to hire a software engineer.

The job description on Apple’s web site says that Cupertino is “looking for someone eager to take iCal to the next level and increase it’s integration with other applications in Mac OS X.”

It goes on: “iCal is a calendar and scheduling tool for Mac OS X that is one of the premiere applications in OS X, and we have great plans.”

I wonder if those plans include unwinding some of the changes made to the interface in Leopard.

Dennis Sellers at MacsimumNews is not the only person who believes that Leopard iCal is a “a downgrade of the product” because of “the extra clicks needed to enter an event or to, for example, correct an entry”.

MacNN takes it further:

Some are saying that this “downgrade” is the sole reason that they can not upgrade to Leopard, and that Apple should ask its users what they need to change instead of doing what it thinks is best for everyone. The largest complaint is that the information ‘bubble’ is too inconvenient to call up – requiring a double-click – in contrast to the old pane that would update as a new event is selected. Almost all are imploring Apple to either modify the current method or to re-instate the drawer, giving users a choice of how they want to use iCal.

If you were King (or Queen) of the iCal Team for a day, what would you ask the new employee to fix first?

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Love it or hate it, it’s clear that the unveiling of MobileMe in yesterday’s keynote signals big changes ahead for .Mac.

It needs some kind of change. Regular Hawk Wings readers will have seen .Mac come in for a lot of stick (and the occasional bouquet).

I spent this morning (while supervising a Greek exam) reading coverage of the announcement from the big-hitting Apple news sites. Most of them just rehashed the press release from Apple. Fair enough, and a sign perhaps of how little there is to know. It’s hard to have an informed opinion in the absence of any real evidence beyond the hyper-polished demonstration in the keynote, the very attractive screenshots on Apple’s MobileMe teaster page and the Apple MobileMe Screen cast .

Still, a lack of real experience with the yet-to-be-launched service didn’t stop some people speculating.

The tin-foil hat brigade were out in force. I read somewhere that MobileMe is a branding rip-off of the ill-fated and much-despised Windows ME. You be the judge:

Further, it was suggested elsewhere that the move from mac.com to me.com is an part of an intentional “de-mac-ifying” of Apple, an attempt to pitch the service to Windows users. Some fear a loss of tribal identity will follow.

Myself, I am inclined to be cautious. I am going to wait until users get a chance to experience the service for themselves before venturing a view on whether (or not) this will be .Mac’s much-needed shot in the arm.

Amidst the frenzied speculation, two articles stand out from the rest of the pack. First, Dan Moren’s article on MacWorld is a very fine piece.

He provides a history of Apple’s online services, including its early life as iTools. I was still hacking away on a PC in those days, so I read it with interest and profit. You might find it interesting too.

We won’t know the future until July, but we can at least bone up on the past, and so get a better sense of where we are going. Nice one, Dan.

Productivity Bodhisattva (wikipedia ) Merlin Mann also does a fine job of carefully balancing up the pros and cons of the move in his post today. There are things he likes, but he is also willing to put (IMHO) the key question: Great that it looks nice (it does), but “Will stability and reliability of MobileMe greatly improve over .Mac?”

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I love Apple as much as the next guy. Probably more than the next guy. But today has been another day on which — as the .Mac outage report clinically put it — “100% of members were unable to access mail using an IMAP client.”

You can read some less clincal reactions from .Mac users on Apple Discussions.

Apple are very good at sending nicely produced, well-polished emails about new Apple hardware and software products and new items in the iTunes Store. It obviously spends money and effort in producing them. It cares about these things.

How hard would it be to send an email to .Mac users warning that “scheduled maintenance” is about to take place over an eight or twelve (or whatever) hour window, and that connectivity to .Mac services may be affected?

Fastmail can do it. Joyent can do it. The IT Department at my work can do it.

Of course, it is possible that Apple didn’t know everything would go pear-shaped. Someone tripped over a power cord and all the lights went out.

So, I am stuck in the horns of a dilemma. Is it more troubling that Apple doesn’t care enough to warn users beforehand, or that its mail engineers don’t know what they are doing?

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The shell script security exploit exposed and then fixed in Tiger Mail has been reintroduced into Leopard Mail.

The loophole allows a sender to disguise an executable file (say, a shell script) as an image or some other harmless file. When clicked on, the executable file runs. Don’t remember? See the Hawk Wings post at the time (Feb, 2006).

Now, it’s back. You can test for yourself. The Heise Security web site offers to send you a test email. Give them an email address and after a confirmation, the email arrives:

CLick on the “jpg” to open it, and it runs a shell script, listing your current directory and exiting harmelessly:

Last time, the news prompted a range of responses, some of them rather hysterical. One writer even claimed that it made Mail.app too dangerous to use.

I am happy to follow John Gruber’s lead (again). As he said last time:

“It boils down to this: you can’t safely double-click files from untrusted sources, and you never could. This is no different today on Mac OS X 10.4 than it was a decade ago on Mac OS 8 and 9.”

Puzzling that it’s back, yes. But dangerous? No more than usual.

UPDATE: “FatYank” provides a quick fix in the comments for those who are really worried about this:

The workaround for this is to rename Terminal. When you rename Terminal and double click on the JPG, you get a message stating that Preview cannot open the file.

Or, as Rob points out, you could use Quickview to view attachments first, in which these “fake” file show up as empty.

Thanks!

[Via The Register ]

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10.5.1 is out! You can find it in Software Update and on the Apple web site .

It brings - as it needs to - a raft of fixes and patches for everything from Disk Utility to the Finder “data loss bug” to Time Machine. You can read the full list in the Apple tech note that accompanies the update.

What interests us most, perhaps, are the changes to Mail.app and iCal:

It promises more reliable iCal email alarms, that is, they should work now.

UPDATE: And they do! Excellent. Am I becoming hard to please, or is it a little annoying how the alert brings up a new message window and fills it in front of your eyes, interrupting whatever you happen to be doing? I seem to remember in Tiger that these email alerts were created “behind the scenes”.

Let me know how it goes for you.

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