The address book is outdated.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.”

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.

LinkedIn has launched a new iPhone app today called LinkedIn Contacts, which promises to make it easier to stay in touch with your most important relationships. It brings all of your contacts together in one place, then provides you with alerts for birthdays, job changes, and more.

We liked Cobook first time round, when it appeared on OS X as a clever little contacts database hidden inside a tiny Menu Bar icon. Now it’s on iPhone, and just as clever as before.

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.

Do you hate Apple’s increasing tendency towards skeuomorphic designs? In other words, do you hate how Apple keeps on slathering their beautifully designed apps with a revolting faux wood or leather finish?

You’re not the only one, but luckily, it’s not hard to remove.

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…

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.

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.”

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.