Contacts

Apr 27 2009

Corporate Contacts

This week we’ll take a look at freeware that will keep you in touch with your business contacts via Thunderbird, Firefox and free chat networks.

LinkedIn Firefox Companion

Are you LinkedIn? This free webservice can connect you with potential employers and partners. With this extension you have quick access to your account allowing you to search your contacts, recent pages you’ve viewed on LinkedIn and even inside job postings.

BitWise IM

Sure there’s chat, but BitWise cross-platform chat which includes a secure business option and a whiteboard solution.

bitwiseim Corporate Contacts

You can draw, type and upload graphics for chatters to view and edit on Mac, Linux and Windows.

Plaxo Toolbar for Thunderbird

Plaxo gives you web-access to your contacts, calendar and tasks and features an auto-update feature for your contacts that are also members of Plaxo.

plaxotb Corporate Contacts

The toolbar for Thunderbird lets you sync your Thunderbird contacts with your Plaxo account. A word of warning – constant requests of your contacts to update their info can be considered spamming. Use the update feature VERY sparingly (especially if I am on your contacts list).

Peerflix

Take a break from work, and swap DVDs with your peers. This low-cost alternative to NetFlix allows you to list and swap DVDs you already own. DVDs are a buck each to order and the first one’s free.

Thanks for joining me for another episode. I’ll be back next week with more free downloads!

Brian

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Apr 27 2009

Managing those Contacts

Of all the information we keep on our Macs, our contacts may be the most underused and difficult to replace. Manage your contacts with this week’s freeware picks…

mu Managing those ContactsABMenu

We’ve looked at this one before. With new support for groups, this handy menu item gives you a drop-down list of the contacts in your address book. Selecting a person’s name brings up a semi-transparent window with their information.

mu Managing those ContactsOE-vCard Converter

Unfortunately, contact information is a frequent casualty of upgrades. This utility can help. It extracts your old contacts from Outlook Express and converts them to vCards, the native format of your Address Book.

mu Managing those ContactsPodUtil 2

This free utility does many things for your iPod. Among other things, it allows you to manage your iPod contacts and create new ones.

mu Managing those ContactsHTMLize AddressBook

Need a simple way to share contacts? Do you need access to your contacts from other computers? This free AppleScript turns your Address Book into a web page you can upload to a web server.

The only thing better than friends is holding on to them, right? Keep up with your contacts. You never know when you might need that favor…

Brian

mu Managing those ContactsDownloads provided by MacUpdate

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Apr 27 2009

Online Office

Contacts, calendars and tasks lists are great, if you have your Mac handy. But if you’re on the move, and on other computers during the day, how to you keep things in sync?

By moving your information online, you’ll get universal access to your data. With today’s picks you’ll also be able to sync your info back into your Mac applications.

This week’s picks are all PHP/MySQL web-based applications, so to take advantage of them you’ll need hosting that supports these. If you’re looking, consider 1&1, A Small Orange, Dreamhost or Pair.

The Address Book

This online contacts solution offers the speed of MySQL to the convenience of vCard portability. The Address Book easily manages many contacts, and exports easily to many formats including vCard, so you can bring your web-based contacts right back into OS X’s Address Book.

theaddressbook Online Office

Multiple user support and authentication allow you to share your contacts with only the people you want to. Unfortunately there isn’t upload support for vCards, but if you’re interested in a four step conversion (requiring Address Book Exporter, Excel and phpMyAdmin) contact me at brian AT macmerc DOT com and I’ll send you the details.

VTCalendar

This gem comes courtesy of Virginia Tech. With VTCalendar you can manage your calendar on your own server. You can even divide your calendar into sub calendars by category and subscribe to your calendar(s) via iCal.

vcalendar Online Office

A handy JavaScript pop-up calendar (for choosing dates) and internal authentication make this an easy-to-use and powerful calendar system.

Tasks Jr

Tasks Jr is a free version of Alex King’s Tasks web-based task manager. While it doesn’t have the advanced features of Tasks, it is more than robust enough for most of us.

tasksjr Online Office

Tasks Jr manages your task online with priority and % complete tracking. Better still, it provides a calendar of your tasks (both scheduled and unscheduled) which you can subscribe to and view right in iCal. Hierarchal organization and a PDA/Mobile friendly interface don’t hurt either.

That wraps up out quest to move our personal information to the web, while keeping in within the reach of your Address Book and iCal. Now, don’t forget to back up those databases!

For those of you without PHP/MySQL hosting (come on, it’s cheaper than .Mac!) stay tuned for a future episode where we’ll look at similar solutions hosted by 3rd party service providers.

Until then, keep it free…

Brian

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