After spending time playing round with iPhoto ‘09 and trying to work out various features like why my friends that i tagged were’nt being notified when they were tagged which would link my faces in iPhoto to facebook profiles.
I then stumbled accross this video which clears everything up… only thing now is how do i get my friends facebook ID?? which i guess is their email address they use to login.
One app that comes as standard on your mac which, probably gets over looked quite a lot is iSync, its a good little app to get your Contacts and Calendar synced up to your mobile if your mobile supports it. If it doesn’t there probably is a plugin on your mobiles manufactures website to get it working.
It gets rid of the need of having your contacts duplicated everywhere get them all tidied up in address book then sync them across to your mobile device, you can also use the AddressBookSync mentioned in another post to pull down profile pics of your contacts from facebook, so they appear on your mobile when they call you.
If you have a Nokia mobile you may need to install a plugin, just check here
Apple announced the release of iLife ‘09 yesterday which looks to have some cool new features for iPhoto `09, which includes full 1 click interation with facebook and Flikr, face tagging and a world map displaying where your photos were taken.
More details can be found here
AddressBookSync
This is a neat application to easily update all your contacts pictures, so if you have an iPhone or a mobile which supports address book syncing, it will just sync straight across straight to your phone book.
get it from here
The guys at iPhone Dev Team have released the worlds first software unlock (yellowsn0w) so you can use any sim card in your iPhone 3G, previous to this a sim proxy would have to have been used.
http://blog.iphone-dev.org/post/67797811/dont-eat-yellowsn0w
To get the unlock to work youll need a jailbroken iPhone on the latest firmware 2.2 and baseband (modem firmware) 02.28.00. Details to do this can be found on iClarified.
I managed to get yelowsn0w to work with my carrier on my UK iPhone, but it took a few attempts of rebooting and removing and reinserting the sim card, and toggling the airplane mode. Anyway its done now but not 100% perfect in my opinion but its progress, im sure there will be another release from the dev team soon to fix up these issues.
UPDATE
now at version 0.9.6b which is a lot more stable and works how you would expect just doesnt support SIM PIN yet.
I noticed on the weekend that you can now fully sync google calendar with iCal.
Details on how to do it are here
The Mac OS X Address Book is a neat little application that is often under-appreciated. As a seemingly boring application it has loads of features that are overlooked by most users. While useful on its own for organising your contacts, Address Book’s real power is that it works with so many other applications. Here are a few tips to save you time and let you make the most of Address Book.
Add Contacts to your Safari Bookmarks
If lots of your contacts have their own web sites, you might be interested to know that you can automatically add these to your Safari bookmarks bar. Open up Safari go to the Preferences (in the Safari Menu). In here click the Bookmarks tab and check the box that says “Include Address Book” in the Bookmarks Bar. Now a new folder will appear at the far left of your Bookmarks bar. In here will be the web sites of all you contacts who have a home page set in their Address Book entry.
Chat to your Contacts
Address Book integrates quite well into iChat, the Mac OS X instant messenger. If a person in your Address Book is online and using iChat, a little green dot will appear next to their picture. Clicking on the dot will open up iChat, where you can start a new conversation with the person.
Put your Contacts in the Spotlight
In Address Book, select which contact you want to search, and from the Action Menu (looks like a cog, located in the top left) choose “Spotlight [name]“. The spotlight window will pop up, and show documents, photos, iCal events, mail messages and iChats related to this person. This is one of my favourite features of Spotlight - it allows you to use it as a personal organiser and links together Address Book, iCal, Mail and iChat.
If you don’t have Address Book open, you don’t need to bother opening it up to Spotlight search someone. Simply type their name into Spotlight for the same results.
Moreover, Spotlight remembers files that people have sent you. When searching for one of your contacts, Spotlight will list any files they sent as attachments to you, providing you received them in Mail.
Highlight Groups
If you hold down the Option key while you are viewing a contact, all the groups that they are in are highlighted in a lovely yellow.
Get Directions
You can easily get a map of a person’s address using Address Book. Just click on their address and choose “Map Of” from the menu that appears. This will load up Safari (or your default browser) with a MapQuest map which allows you to get directions to and from the address. If you prefer to use Google Maps or Google Earth to view a map (or satellite image) of a person’s address, there is a Google Maps Plugin available.
Merge two contacts
If somehow you end up with two entries in your address book for the same person, you can easily merge the two. Select the two entries by clicking on one in the list and then Command-clicking on the other. Now click on the Card menu and choose “Merge Selected Cards”. If you have a huge contact list and you suspect some duplicate entries, you can also choose “Look for Duplicate entries” from the Card menu.
Large Type
If you want to read a person’s phone number off the screen while dialling it across the room, you can make it display in large numbers across the screen. To do this, click on the number and choose “Large Type” from the pop-up menu.
Address Book Sharing
If you want to share your address book (for example with your family or secretary) you can do so providing you have a .Mac account. Open up Address Book and go to the Preferences (in the Address Book Menu). Click on the Sharing tab and check the box titled “Share your Address Book”. Now click the plus icon to add people from your address book who have a .Mac account. People will only be allowed to view your address book, but if you select the “Allow Editing” option they will be able to make changes too.
Using vCards
In reality, most people don’t have .Mac, so the standard way to share contacts is using vCards. A vCard is a file containing a contact’s information that you can attach to an email and send to whoever you want. Luckily, vCards work really well with Address Book.
To create a vCard for a specific contact, select them from the list and right-click (Control-click) on their name. From the pop-up menu choose “Export vCard…”.
To create a vCard that contains the information for all the people in a certain group, select the group you want from the list, right-click on it and choose “Export Group vCard…”.
If you receive a vCard from someone else as an email attachment, you can add it to your address book in a couple of ways. If you received it in Mac OS X’s Mail application, simply drag it from the email message across to Address Book. If not, save it to your Hard Drive and then choose Import vCards (Command-O) from the File Menu in Address Book.
Make Your Own Card
It can be quite useful to create an entry for yourself in Address Book as it is used for things like Autofilling forms in Safari. To do this, create a card as usual and fill it with all your information. Once you are done, choose “Make This My Card” from the Card menu. You will notice that your icon in the list changes and your photo now has “me” written in the corner. Now you can export your vCard using the method above to send your contact details to everyone in your address book.
Restrict Private Information
If you don’t want to share all of your contact information with everyone you send your vCard to, you can choose to keep certain parts private. Go to the Address Book Preferences and check “Enable Private Me Card”. Now when you edit your own card, you can use the check boxes to choose which information is exported as your vCard.
Printing Envelopes
You can print an envelope addressed to a contact by choosing Print from the File menu with the chosen person selected. In the print dialog choose Envelopes from the Style pop-up menu. As an interesting quirk, Address Book will address the envelope to everyone in the household if you have specified a spouse or child in the person’s entry.
Its worth calibrating your battery once in a while. If you find your macbook not waking from “safe sleep” (when you get the grey screen and progress bar), then try doing this to restore this feauture back on your mac.
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1490
if that doesn’t work try resetting the System Management Controller (SMC)
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1411
Coconut Battery is also a useful app to check on your batterys performance, but remeber you can also see this info under your System Profiler.
