contacts

MacFixIt site news: Changed contacts section

To all our MacFixIt readers, we have made a slight alteration to the site. There has been a contact link to the side of the main article list for a while now, and many people have been using it to send us emails, feedback, and questions. We have recently changed this slightly, so people can ask us questions and send us comments, as well as submit any fixes they have found.… Read more

Intuitive vehicle database

The average car owner often has trouble keeping up with basic maintenance, so it goes without saying that managing an entire fleet of vehicles is no easy task. Vehicle Manager Fleet Network Edition is a simple way to track vehicle and fuel use, maintenance and repairs, expenses, and more. Best of all, this version of the program makes it easy to set up a network so that the same database can be shared between multiple computers.

Vehicle Manager Fleet has a well-designed, intuitive interface, with large graphic buttons that represent its main features. We found it quite easy to add … Read more

Backups beckon

Backups are essential, and the ready availability of easy-to-use software means no more excuses will be accepted. Static Becky Backup is a case in point. It's an all-in-one tool for backing up your e-mail messages and accounts, contacts, digital signatures, personalized stationery, and other settings that are a royal pain in the apps to re-enter, if you're lucky enough to recover them when they're deleted, damaged, or otherwise lost.

Becky Backup's setup wizard walks you through the process of setting up a destination folder as well as configuring optional FTP and disk-burning options. Becky uses this … Read more

Contact's photo not editable in Address Book

When you open a contact's vCard in Address Book and click the "Edit" button, you should be able to edit the user's photo by double-clicking on it and either use the computer's webcam to snap a shot or choose a picture file and then perform some simple zooming and cropping on the photo. Some people are having problems where this behavior will not work, either on some or all of their cards.… Read more

Outlook add-in

Microsoft's Outlook does so much that few users need more, but there's always room for improvement, especially when it comes to productivity enhancements. Software Solutions' Aladdins Office Documents Pro is an Outlook add-in that makes it easy to create specialized Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and customized, predefined Outlook emails that save time and increase accuracy over individually prepared Office documents.

Office Documents is an Outlook add-in, so its "main interface" is two small buttons the program adds to the Outlook toolbar, one for the main menu and another for the Aladdins Contacts List. Right-clicking the main … Read more

Mozilla Contacts makes Firefox socially aware

Most people develop acne when they become socially aware. Firefox just gets an add-on. Mozilla Contacts is an experimental new add-on for the browser that provides one-click access to your address books, provided that you've synchronized them.

Right now, the add-on has fairly limited features and functionality. It can sync contacts from Gmail, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Plaxo. Mac users can also sync with with local address books, and there are plans to incorporate Thunderbird, locally stored contacts in Windows and other social-networking systems.

Once installed, Contacts can be accessed only from your Tools menu. It opens up a new … Read more

Got glaucoma? Put a little vitamin E in your lens

The eye condition glaucoma, which afflicts some 67 million people and is second only to cataracts as the world's leading cause of blindness, is often treated with eye drops that relieve the unusually high pressure inside the eye.

Contact lenses with vitamin E, however, just might deliver more medication to treat glaucoma almost 100 times longer than current lenses, says Anuj Chauhan, a chemical engineering professor at the University of Florida in Gainesville who helmed the research team investigating this new treatment:

"The problem is within about 2 to 5 minutes of putting drops in the eye, tears … Read more

Gwabbit's handy contact slurper gets cloud sync

PALM DESERT, Calif.--Gwabbit, the contact-slurping tool that launched at last year's Demo conference has made the much-needed shift to the cloud.

The new tool offering, which the company is calling the "gwab-o-sphere," takes the contact information gathered from incoming e-mails and syncs it with updated information from places like Twitter, Facebook, and Salesforce.com. If changes are made by these users in any of these locations, the updated information is ferried back over to Gwabbit, where it's synced back out to all the clients with the Gwabbit plug-in installed.

The need for services like … Read more

Three online contact managers compared

In a perfect world, the addresses, telephone numbers, and other contact information of your family members, friends, and associates would be entered in your various address books automatically. I'll settle for an online service that lets me transfer the information from my phone and e-mail contact lists simply and accurately.

Last July, I described how to sync calendars and contacts between an iPhone, Gmail, and Outlook. The contact info on my iPhone is always the more current than my Gmail and Outlook contacts, but I access the three contact lists about equally.

Neither the iPhone nor Gmail contacts can … Read more