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.Address Book, quick entry, contacts, productivitySimilar Posts:

• AddressBookQuickEntry: Faster contact entry
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It is one thing to read the range of complaints in the MobileMe Apple Discussion Group . It’s another thing to get a sense of big problems from the horse’s mouth itself.

Apple’s new Support offerings for MobileMe are listed at the end of this post.

All MobileMe services get a look in, but there is a concentration on Sync issues and how to deal with them.

Some of the items are more useful than others. For example, I didn’t know what the maximum size of a MobileMe email message was until I read that “you can send and receive email messages up to 20 MB in size with your MobileMe Mail account.”

On the other hand, the technote on “How MobileMe filters spam messages” is less useful.

It tells you that

To minimize the impact of spam on MobileMe members, MobileMe employs several methods of detecting spam before it ever reaches your inbox. Spam prevention requires filtering mechanisms that include dynamic lists, trend analysis and content filtering.

However, it continues, “Filtering spam at the server is only part of the equation. You may find it helpful to use your mail application filtering to complement the server filtering.”

The only way to deal with false-positives is to contact MobileMe support:

If you feel that a friendly message was inadvertently deleted, you may want to ask your friend for a follow up email before you contact support, if you notice that multiple messages are being delayed, bounced, or not delivered, you should contact MobileMe Support directly.

Another cracker comes in the technote on viewing Mail.app’s Notes in MobileMe Mail:

Symptoms
If you create a Note with Mail in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, then view the note with MobileMe Mail, the text of the note will appear but the background color of the note will not be yellow.

Additionally, the notes cannot be edited in MobileMe Mail, and may appear to be from an “unspecified-domain” with no “To” address.

Products Affected
Mac OS X 10.5, MobileMe, MobileMe Mail

Resolution
This is expected behavior. For the best experience with Notes, use Mac OS X Mail only.

This document will be updated as more information becomes available.

Here is the full list of new notes relating to MobileMe:

New and Updated Knowledge Base Documents

Canceling your MobileMe account
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=HT2174

How MobileMe filters spam messages
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=HT1073

iDisk Syncing: Changes made directly to the iDisk may not immediately sync down to local iDisk
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=TS1159

iDisk Syncing: iDisk may not sync if connected via a mobile high-speed connection
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=TS1758

iDisk: iDisk Syncing takes up more hard drive space than expected in Mac OS X 10.5
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=TS1771

iMovie and MobileMe Gallery: Some movie names may not work in MobileMe Gallery
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=TS1038

iWeb: "This entry no longer exists" error when trying to add or remove comments on blogs published to MobileMe
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=TS1763

iWeb: Default page fails to load & browser continuously refreshes
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=TS1727

iWeb: In published site, Add Comment links don’t display or work correctly
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=TS1762

iWeb: Preserving website comments when upgrading from iWeb 1.x to 2.0
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=HT2094

Mac OS X 10.5: About viewing Mail Notes in MobileMe Mail
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=TS1756

Mac OS X 10.5: Address Book Sharing – clicking the sync icon does not start sync with MobileMe
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=TS1757

Mac OS X 10.5: MobileMe Sync menu icon spins constantly
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=TS1182

Mac OS X 10.5: Resetting the SyncServices folder
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=TS1627

Mac OS X 10.5: Syncing preference settings with MobileMe Sync
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=HT2085

Mac OS X: Can’t connect to iDisk, get "Error Code -50"
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=TS1429

Mac OS X: Do not remove or modify SyncServices folder
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=HT1865

Mac OS X: Mail – MobileMe account mailbox is dimmed
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=TS1726

MacBook (Late 2007): iDisk, MobileMe or remote home directory sync unsuccessful
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=TS1759

Maximum MobileMe message size
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=HT2069

MobileMe and Apple ID passwords cannot accept some characters
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=TS1728

MobileMe iDisk: Cannot Check Disk Space in System Preferences
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=TS1737

MobileMe mail messages are missing
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=TS1730

MobileMe scans email for viruses
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=HT2076

MobileMe Sync, Mac OS X 10.5: Calendar syncing issues
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=TS1200

MobileMe Sync: About syncing third-party Dashboard Widgets in Mac OS X 10.5
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=TS1751

MobileMe Sync: Alert after merging contacts
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=TS1178

MobileMe Sync: Conflict Resolver states that seemingly-identical contacts have conflicts after Mac OS X 10.5 upgrade
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=TS1174

MobileMe Sync: iCal Group Calendar name may change when syncing in Mac OS X 10.4 or 10.5
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=TS1188

MobileMe Sync: Initial syncing of Dashboard Widgets may result in duplicate widgets
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=TS1750

MobileMe Sync: Non-functioning web clips may be deleted after syncing Dashboard widgets
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=TS1171

MobileMe Sync: Removing third-party items from the MobileMe Sync pane in Mac OS X 10.5, 10.4
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=TS1153

MobileMe Sync: RSS status doesn’t not sync between Mac OS X 10.4 and Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=TS1170

MobileMe Sync: Syncing contact addresses between Mac OS X 10.4 and Mac OS X 10.5 causes sync conflict or alert
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=TS1754

MobileMe Sync: Syncing preferences may "hide" some application windows
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=TS1199

MobileMe Sync: User moved via Migration Assistant does not register computer for syncing
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=TS1183

MobileMe, Address Book Sharing: Contacts or Groups get out of sync
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=TS1744

MobileMe, iDisk: About the invisible ".filler.idsff" file
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=HT1065

MobileMe, Mac OS X 10.5: "An error was returned from the server" alert after changing your MobileMe password
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=TS1748

MobileMe, Mac OS X 10.5: iDisk Sync may not automatically sync changes
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=TS1745

MobileMe, Mail: Copying MobileMe or IMAP email messages to your hard disk
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=HT1063

MobileMe: "iDisk full" error
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=TS1764

MobileMe: "Temporarily unavailable" message when viewing a published calendar
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=TS1658

MobileMe: "The size of the iDisk on your computer needs to be adjusted" alert in Mac OS X 10.4
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=TS1160

MobileMe: About syncing more than one Mac to the same iDisk at the same time in Mac OS X 10.5
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=TS1168

MobileMe: Arabic characters in file names change after iDisk sync in Mac OS X 10.4
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=HT2079

MobileMe: Changes on an iPhone/iPod touch made to your calendars, contacts, or bookmarks while a sync is occuring may not sync to MobileMe
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=TS1794

MobileMe: Computer has less free disk space after turning on iDisk Syncing
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=TS1154

MobileMe: Configuring third-party email applications
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=HT1625

MobileMe: Email message "bounces" back after sending
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=TS1187

MobileMe: Empty browser cache if issues occur after a MobileMe Mail service interruption
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=HT2078

MobileMe: File contributed to a MobileMe Gallery via email doesn’t appear
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=TS1747

MobileMe: Identifying fraudulent "phishing" email
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=HT2080

MobileMe: iDisk Sync – Items in non-synced folders cannot be opened
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=TS1761

MobileMe: Issues sending messages in Mail or other email applications
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=TS1152

MobileMe: MobileMe Gallery maximum photo size
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=HT1071

MobileMe: Prompted for password when opening some folders on your iDisk in Mac OS X 10.5
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=TS1749

MobileMe: Prompted for password when syncing keychains
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=TS1181

MobileMe: Providing MobileMe support with long email headers for troubleshooting
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=HT1066

MobileMe: Published photos or movies may take a long time to appear on your MobileMe Gallery
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=TS1746

MobileMe: Troubleshooting Syncing from Mac OS X
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=TS1679

MobileMe: Using SSL encryption with your email
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=HT2082

Publishing a password-protected iCal calendar to iDisk
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=HT2071

Some items in Outlook may cause calendars to not sync
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306757

Why was I "spammed" at my MobileMe Mail address?
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=HT2073 mobileme, technotes, apple, ical, idisk, sync, contacts, iweb, mail.app, apple mail, gallery, dotmac, the week from hell

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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. address book, gmail, google calendar, syncing, menubar, contacts, scheduling, nimble agile developersSimilar Posts:

• Spanning Sync gets more reliable
• BusySync now syncs iCal over the Net, Google Calendar syncing not far away
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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:

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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, pluginsSimilar Posts:

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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 webSimilar Posts:

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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, productivitySimilar Posts:

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Formerly a member of the development team for Flock (“The Social Browser”), he once toyed with idea himself.

He has mocked up a vision of how this might look in Address Book:

Image shamefacedly nicked without any kind of permission from Chris’ post

The possibilities, he suggests, are enormous:

Imagine this kind of view showing up in Mail.app, Adium, iChat… where your friends, family and the rest get to update their own user pictures on a whim, and set their status and contact preferences in a way that visually makes sense.

This is a terrific idea. One of the best things about Mail is its human face.

Pulling the photos from contacts in Address Book and displaying them in their emails makes my day more personal. It humanises the time I spend emailing and reminds me that I am really dealing with the people behind the emails, not just with text. In fact, this was one of the reasons why I switched from PCs to Macs a few years ago.

For the same reason, I really like the iFaces notification utility, which still worked under Tiger but sadly may not work anymore. It sat on the Desktop and displayed the faces of people who had written newly arrived and unread emails (see screenshot on the right).

It’s another small way to give email a human face.

Of course, Chris is talking about something far more adventurous than that. I’m only imagining how good it would to have that contact information to hand in the results of a “Spotlight: Xxxx Xxxx” search from the Contextual Menu in Mail.app. Chris’ vision is more informed and his horizon wider.

UPDATE: As Aaron Harnly points out in the comments, you can get a rough and ready experience of what this might be like, by browsing your ~/Library/Application Support/Address Book/Metadata folder with Coverflow in Finder:

You can even use it to play the “face recognition game” Aaron describes. Hours of funmail.app, address book, contacts, coverflow, spotlight, apple, leopardSimilar Posts:

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It now comes with options to create smart mailboxes for a particular Address Book Group or for all your contacts, French and German localisations and the ability to enter a customised name for the top-level smart mailbox created in the process.

So, now when I fire it up, I get a dialog that lets me select the Group and name of the smart mailbox:

Because I usually need to find all the emails from only a few of my contacts, I selected my “Favourites” Address Book Group.

Now, I have “persistent” searches for my boss, work colleagues, wife and buddies just a click away.

I know mutt users who have a gazillion physical mail folders, one for each contact, and who file emails religiously (and laboriously, I imagine) away into the appropriate folders.

With Mailboxer they can kiss their folders good-bye, dump everything into one big archive and let the smart mailboxes sort them out.

The app’s Preferences provide further options for sorting the contents of the smart mailboxes:

Mailboxer now also joins the tribe of apps with an auto-update feature.

Of course, if you tire of being so organised, you can just delete the top-level smart mailboxes and you’re back to normal.

It is donation-ware and available from the developer’s web site . mail.app, apple mail, address book, productivity, tips, smart mailboxes, contactsSimilar Posts:

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Developer Sven Porst feels that this is a real gap in Mail’s feature set. He really wanted a “smart mailbox per contact” option rather than the hassle of manual filing or endless rules. Then,

I discovered that Mail simply stores all the settings for its smart mailboxes in a single properly list file. And thus the simple idea to just write a little program which grabs the necessary contact information from the address book and updates that file with a bunch of smart mailboxes based on the contact information was born. Far from perfect and a bit hackish. But doing the job and – most importantly – reasonably easy to do.

Mailboxer is the result.

By default, it really does create a smart mailbox for every Address Book contact. In a nice little touch, it makes a backup of your existing smart mailbox settings at the same time (SmartMailboxes Pre Mailboxer.plist) and stores it away in your Mail folder in case something goes drastically wrong.

Each smart mailbox lists all emails sent from and sent to every email address listed for the contact:

This is a real time-saver. Still, for me, a smart mailbox for every contact is too many smart mailboxes. I would make good use of about a dozen, but not 465.

Luckily, Mailboxer saw me coming. If it finds a group in Address Book called Mailboxer, it will only create smart mailboxes for the contacts in that group.

It’s easily done. In a jiffy I created a group containing people whose emails I do need to find quickly and often — important work colleagues, my boss, my boss’s boss, my wife and so on:

Then I ran Mailboxer.

Now I have a manageable number of smart mailboxes that I will use at least ten or fifteen times a day. That’s a lot of typing into Mail’s search field that I have saved myself.

And if I find that I don’t use them as much as I thought, I can just delete the AB folder that contains them all.

Mailboxer is donation-ware and is available from Sven’s web site .

UPDATE: Sven has updated the app to fix a small bug with Company names. You can get the updated version here .smart mailboxes, productivity, mail.app, apple mail, mailboxes, address book, contacts, pluginsSimilar Posts:

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