contacts

Multiple 'No Name' contacts showing up in Address Book

Recently some OS X users have experienced problems in which their contact lists end up getting a number of No Name vCard entries. When this problem happens, these entries seem to accumulate over time to the point where thousands will fill the Address Book. In addition, the entries also show up on iOS devices that are being synced to the Mac.

One user on the Apple Discussion Communities suggested the issue may be from a MobileMe server error, as he was informed of by MobileMe support, so if you are experiencing this issue you might try contacting Apple's support … Read more

Merge your Gmail and iPhone contacts

Contacts just naturally accumulate, but smartphones and e-mail systems collect information about the people we interact with in very different ways. It's nearly impossible to maintain a single list of contact information that our primary phone and e-mail services can share.

This hit home the other day when I noticed the entry for a new contact in Google had the person's e-mail addresses but not her phone numbers, and her entry in my iPhone had the phone numbers but not her e-mail addresses. Dozens of these little inconsistencies had appeared in the months since I had last synced … Read more

LinkedIn for Android

LinkedIn for Android is a free front-end app for the popular professional networking site. While the app certainly doesn't offer as much functionality as the full site, it does offer one-touch access to a few of LinkedIn's most frequently used tools.

The interface is clean and should look familiar to current users of the LinkedIn service. The home screen allows you to view and post status updates, access messages, manage connections and invitations, and of course, search through LinkedIn's huge network of professional users. There's also a nifty Reconnect button that lets you sift through users … Read more

Fellowup: The grandma-approved social service you should use

Your grandmother--the one with the birthday book, so she never forgets a family member's special day--would approve of Fellowup. It's a modern-day version of the same thing. It watches your contacts on Facebook and LinkedIn, as well as your Google mail and calendar, and gives you a clear dashboard showing you which of your contacts could benefit from the personal touch today. In addition to grabbing birth dates from social profiles, it also keeps an eye out for things like relationship and job status changes, and news articles that mention your contacts. It will show you an alert when these things come up, so you have an excuse to make personal contact.

The service also lets you create your own dossiers on your contacts, adding private tags for a person's interests, for example. With upcoming Google Calendar integration, Fellowup will also be able to ask you for feedback after a meeting with a contact, so you can enter your impressions or to dos.

Fellowup lets you post directly to your contacts' Facebook walls from within the service, which makes it even easier to pretend you remembered a contact's birthday. It can also send e-mails. … Read more

How to enable Google Sync for a Google Apps account

If you or your employer use Google Apps as your e-mail provider, and you are experiencing issues setting up Google Sync on your mobile device, make sure that the account admin has Google Sync enabled. This short guide will walk you through enabling Google Sync (ActiveSync), which will allow members of the Google Apps account to access their e-mail, contacts, and even calendar as if they were on an Exchange server. … Read more

How to edit photos within the Android gallery

Not every photo taken is a masterpiece; some are upside down, or sideways, or have extra "scenery" that you didn't choose to include. For these issues, the Android gallery app offers a few simple editing tools to help correct image orientation and tidy up photos.

Getting to the editing menu:Open a picture from the gallery and then press the menu button. This menu is only available when previewing a photo by itself. Now, select More from this menu.

Editing choices will appear in the new pop-up menu, such as Details, Set as, Crop, Rotate Left, and … Read more

How to Bridge your PlayBook to a BlackBerry

One of the selling points RIM has taken advantage and capitalized on over the years with its BlackBerry platform is security. RIM has used the same claim when providing reason for leaving out native e-mail, calendar, contacts, and other PIM applications on its tablet, thePlayBook. Accodring to RIM, the secure way to access this information on the PlayBook is through a BlackBerry smartphone using an application called BlackBerry Bridge.

This simple tutorial will cover how to set up BlackBerry Bridge on both the PlayBook and a BlackBerry smartphone. In the tutorial I will be using a BlackBerry Torch, but the … Read more

Liquid Contact Indicators removed from iPad 2

According to French Apple site Hardmac, Apple's infamous (to some) Liquid Contact Indicators--sensors responsible for allowing Apple technicians to determine if your device has had substantial contact with liquids--are not present in the newly released iPad 2.

Many problems have come about because of Apple's liquid sensors, even resulting in lawsuits, and causing Apple to adjust how it handles indicators that have been activated.

As a manager in an Apple Store a couple years ago, when the first Liquid Submersion Indicators, as they were named then, were included on the original iPhone, we were told that the sensors … Read more

Plaxo re-focuses on address book maintenance, faces new competition (updated)

This review has been updated throughout, now that I have had hands-on experience with the Plaxo Personal Assistant product.

Some time after its launch back in 2002, contact list management app Plaxo lost its way. Leadership at the company saw social networking as a bandwagon it had to get on and made Plaxo into a personal social hub--which nobody really needed. It was the second bad mistake Plaxo had made with its service, the first being its habit of sending requests for updated information to users' contacts that were often taken for spam. Nobody liked Plaxo's users, even though … Read more