Hawk Wings » cell phones

Restore Leopard Address Book’s power to dial and text

Tim Gaden — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 11:01:22 +0000

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.address book, dialing, phone numbers, text, sms, contacts, mobile phones, cell phones, leopard, appleSimilar Posts:

Replace Leopard Address Book’s missing SMS feature

Tim Gaden — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 10:51:55 +0000

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, dashboardSimilar Posts:

Emoticon patent application :-(

Tim Gaden — Fri, 27 Jan 2006 02:10:40 +0000

US mobile phone operator Cingular Wireless has lodged a application to patent emoticons on cell phones.

According to Cellular News :

The USA based mobile operator, Cingular Wireless has managed to get a patent on the concept of using emoticon on mobile phones. While the aim of the patent is to enable the displaying of MSN style graphics on handsets, they also managed to patent the delivery of text based emoticon – so presumably sending :) via an SMS – if selected via a dedicated or softkey, would be a breach of the patent in future.

There is a division of opinion on news sites about whether the application is pending or has been granted.

I presume sending emoticons in emails remains patent-free. For the moment.

See further:
Engadget
Consumeraffairs.com
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