address book

Here’s how Apple should reinvent the address book

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There's got to be a better way. Photo: Frank Costa
There's got to be a better way. Photo: Frank Costa

The address book is outdated. On the iPhone, while most of my contacts reside in the Contacts app, I rarely go in there. Instead, I connect with people on Facebook, via SnapChat, WhatsApp and more.

Product designer Frank Costa feels the same way, but he went one step further than simply banishing the Contacts app to an unused folder on his Home screen and designed this address book replacement concept, something he calls an Invisible Address Book.

While having a list of phone numbers might be silly, he says, there is benefit to having information about the people we contact frequently in one place.

“Therefore, as a design exercise,” writes Costa on Medium, “I elaborated on a couple of ideas to turn that seemingly static list of people into a slightly more ambitious project.”

Shake To Call And More Comes To Live Address Book App, Addappt

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None of my contacts ever look this happy.
None of my contacts ever look this happy.

The problem with the native Contacts app on your iPhone is that you have to keep the addresses, phone numbers, and emails updated on your own. If your friend moves, or gets a new number, it’s up to you to get the information and enter it correctly into your Contacts app. That’s just so old school.

Addappt is a new app that aims to change all that. You invite others to download and enter their own information in the app, and then every time something changes on their end, the entry in your app changes, too. Better still, the app will push the changes to your native Contacts app, something I’ve not seen before in an app of this type.

19% Of iOS Apps Access Your Address Book Without Your Permission… Until iOS 6 [Report]

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Do you know which apps are accessing your personal data?
Do you know which apps are accessing your personal data?

Antivirus software specialist Bitdefender has found that nearly 19% of iOS apps access your address book without your knowledge — or your consent — when you’re using them, and 41% track your location. What’s most concerning is over 40% of them don’t encrypt your data once it has been collected.

That’s all going to change when iOS 6 makes its debut later this year, however.

WriteThat.Name + HistoRecall Tackle Your Address Book [Last Chance!]

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WriteThatname + HistoRecall - Cult of Mac Deals

I’m betting your address book is a royal mess. It doesn’t take long for it to happen, really. Sync in gmail contacts, then iCloud, then that CSV of leads from your CRM… You get the idea and you feel the pain, so let’s take some of the pain out of it.

Today’s deal is WriteThatName and for $20 (half off) you get a year’s subscription of intelligent, automagic address book management. Thought that might grab you, read on…

Things You May Not Already Know About The New MacBook Pro’s Retina Display

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If your Retina MacBook Pro isn't delivering the battery life you expected, try this simple fix.
If you're the lucky owner of a new MacBook Pro, here are some things you should know.

We’ve been drooling over the next-generation MacBook Pro since Apple unveiled it at WWDC earlier this month, and we thought we knew all there was to know about its gorgeous high-resolution Retina display. However, Apple surprised us with a new FAQ page on its website this morning, which reveals a number of things about the notebooks new screen that we hadn’t heard before, which will help you make the most of your new display.

Here are a few of the things that you may be interested in.

Want To Know Which iOS Apps Are Accessing Your Personal Data? Clueful Tells You Everything

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Clueful helped identify
Clueful promises to identify "misdemeanant apps on your iPhone."

There has recently been a lot of concern into the way in which our iOS apps access our personal data, and then what they do with it once it has been collected. Since the whole Path debacle in particular, users seem to be more concerned by the issue than ever before.

BitDefender is one security firm looking to capitalize upon that concern with a new app called Clueful, which promises reveal what each of your apps is doing with your data and identify the “misdemeanant apps on your iPhone.”

ownCloud Brings Flexible Open Source Cloud Sync To Business

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Open source ownCloud offers private business clouds
Open source ownCloud offers private business and personal clouds

One of the consumerization of IT trends is the use of cloud storage. Most of us already have experience with iCloud and other personal cloud services like Dropbox, Google Docs, and SugarSync. The big advantage to all these solutions is their ubiquity – you can access documents and files in the office, at home, on the road using your iPhone or iPad, and pretty much anyplace else. Though they may raise data security and privacy concerns, personal or public clouds are extremely easy to use and always available.

The popularity of major cloud providers is causing a number of companies to offer easy to configure private cloud options that businesses can physically deploy on their own network or that can be hosted by the developer or a cloud service provider.

This week, ownCloud, which already offers an open source cloud storage and sync, announced new business and enterprise options that offer a great deal of flexibility.

Just Buy Yearly And Stop Forgetting Other People’s Birthdays [Review]

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yearly.jpg

Hands up if you forget birthdays all the damn time. Hey, whoa, slow down. I can’t see all of you at the back. Waaaaay too many hands. Wait. No, OK, hands down. Let’s do this differently.

We’ll forget about the counting bit, and just assume that pretty much everyone forgets birthdays and ends up hating themselves just a tiny bit more each time. Especially when a few months later, the person whose birthday you forgot remembers yours, and sends a perfectly judged gift too. Dammit.

Like Path, Hipster Also Uploads Your Address Book To Its Servers Without Telling Users

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tNOrt

Social networking app Path hit the headlines yesterday after it turned out the company was taking users’ entire address books and uploading them to their servers.

It’s a big privacy violation, but Path’s hardly the only one doing this. In fact, computer engineering professor Mark Chang has just discovered that Hipster, the popular photo-filter postcards app, does the exact same thing as Path: sucks up your contacts and squirts them into their servers.

How To Keep Apps Like Path From Accessing Your Contacts Data [Jailbreak]

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Screen shot 2012-02-08 at 12.47.49 PM

We told you yesterday that Path was secretly uploading your iPhone’s entire address book to its servers. Users of the inclusive social network voiced concern, and many decided to remove the app entirely until Path addresses the issue in an upcoming update.

It’s common practice for third-party apps to access and even store your contacts elsewhere. The problem with Path is that there was no indication that this activity was taking place. Path’s CEO stated that the app would make the activity opt-in when the next update is pushed out.

Thanks to a brand new jailbreak tweak, you’ll never have to worry about an app silently stealing your personal contacts data again.

Path Uploads And Stores Your iPhone’s Entire Address Book On Its Servers

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Screen shot 2012-02-07 at 4.28.03 PM

In what can only be considered the very definition of irony, it has been discovered that Path 2 for iPhone secretly uploads and stores your entire address book to its servers. In case you didn’t know, Path is a hot iOS app that offers an exclusive, confined social network experience with a limited number of people. Unlike Facebook, Path only lets you accept 150 friends, indicating the intimate, safe environment that the app creators want users to feel at home in.

Developer Arun Thampi has uncovered that Path’s current iPhone app sends all of your contacts to its servers without notifying you. Oops.

Apple Seeds Yet Another OS X Lion 10.7.3 Build To Developers

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screen-shot-2012-01-24-at-7-32-53-pm

Developers have already received several pre-release builds of Apple’s OS X Lion 10.7.3 software, and we had expected last week’s release to be the last one before the update goes public. But it seems there’s still some testing to be done. Apple has seeded yet another build to developers through the Mac Dec Center, this time with the build number 11D50.

Quickly Add Missing Contact Info To Your Address Book By Syncing Contacts With Facebook [iOS Tip]

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Adding contact information to your phone can be a tedious task, especially with devices like the iPhone, which allow you to add a whole lot more than just a name and a phone number. But there is one quick and easy way to add missing information to your address book without even touching your device’s virtual keyboard: Syncing your contacts with Facebook.

If you’re a Facebook user — and who isn’t these days? — and you have the official Facebook app installed on your device, you can add birthdays, URLs, and even photos to your address book in just a few taps.

Easily Backup Your Address Book Contacts To External Media And Maintain A Historical Archive [OS X Tips]

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addressbook

I ran into someone the other day and he told me that he had over 700 contacts in the Address Book app on his Mac. He expressed concern about losing those contacts. I asked him, “are you performing backups on your Mac?” He wasn’t. We talked about the various ways he could backup his Mac (i.e. Time Machine, external drive, etc.), but I also shared a tip with him that focuses on his contacts.

How to Give Address Book A Clean and Simple Look in Lion

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Address Book in Lion

In OS X Lion, Apple redesigned Address Book with a new look that resembles a physical hardcover book binding. This type of design choice is called “skeuomorphic,” because it was, “deliberately employed to make the new look comfortably old and familiar.” Lion’s version of Address Book takes the old look and feel of a physical book and ports that to a virtual application.

While some may like the new look of Address Book in Lion, many have raised complaints. If you’d like to make Address Book look clean and simple again, we’ve got just the trick to unbind Address Book from its brown hardcover.