1. Take a picture of your products and serial numbers

Whether you want to inventory your items or need a handy reference when there’s a problem, taking a picture of the product as well as its serial number means you won’t be in the awkward position of trying to talk on the phone while on the floor with a flashlight trying to read those teeny tiny numbers.

Plus, if you should have a theft or disaster, having a visual record of your items makes it easier for your insurance company to settle your claim.

2. Schedule your items with insurance

Speaking of insurance, I suggest contacting your homeowners, renters, or business insurance provider to see about separate insurance for your most expensive technology items. While insurance providers and policies vary, typically scheduling an item provides it extra protection and covers it separate from your regular deductible. If your computer is scheduled, many times it will even cover data recovery should your computer be dropped or damaged.

3. Track key information in your Address Book and iCal

If only you’d contacted tech support before the warranty expired, the broken gadget would have been repaired at no charge! There’s an easy way to make sure you have all your info on hand when you need it.

As you take pictures of your items in step 1, put the serial number and warranty expiration date in your Address Book along with tech support’s phone number (create custom fields for Serial Number and Tech Support if you wish). Attach the picture of the item to the address book entry.

Then put the warranty expiration in your iCal Now you’ve got all the info you need in one place and won’t miss that warranty expiration date.

A bonus outcome of this tip is that if you are at the electronics store and you have questions about compatibility or which model you own, the information will be handy so long as you sync your address book info manually or through iCloud.

While these tips won’t prevent problems from occurring, they’ll help protect you from further cost and inconvenience when they do.

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The program has three major components: Calendar Cleaner, Contacts Cleaner and Sync Tune-Up. If you want just one of the components, you can purchase the first two separately at the Mac App Store. However it’s likely you’ll need all three so I recommend the buying the full package.

Contacts Cleaner looks for issues that could cause errors such as invalid characters, malformed phone numbers as well as duplicate information. What I like about this program is that it not only finds the errors, but tells you why it thinks they represent a problem. For example, I’d often put “husband and wife” in the First Name field, but Contacts Cleaner warns me “This contact has a space in the first name. In some cases these names can become transposed after syncing with Google.” Sure enough when I went into Google, I noticed that problem.

Calendar Cleaner does similar checks for errors that can occur with your various sync destinations. My calendar was fraught with malformed recurring events that wouldn’t sync, and a pass by Calendar Cleaner fixed those in no time.

Both programs give you the option of opening the item within Address Book or iCal in order to make sure you know what kind of change is being made before you authorize it. Apple’s Address Book application looks for merged items itself, but doesn’t give you options to control what is merged. iCal users have no built-in options to search for duplicates and merge events.

Finally, Sync Tune-Up (only available as part of the bundle) gives you a front end for more fine-grained control over fixing your sync-related issues, such as de-registering individual devices and software, or the “nuclear” option which rebuilds the entire sync database. If your sync is taking extra long or you’ve made a bunch of changes with your devices or accounts, a nice reset can do you a world of good. A good indication of problems can be found by looking at your console logs and looking for mentions of the “truth” and too much vacuuming.

The more you sync, the more likely it is that problems will occur. To prevent or repair these problems, Spanning Tools is a great option.

Disclosure: Spanning Tools provided a copy of the software for review purposes.

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Apple Address Book and MobileMe Contacts

Apple’s Address Book application on Mac OS X Snow Leopard has the ability to print directly to address labels.  First create a new group called “Holiday Cards 2010″ in Apple’s Address Book.  Add the contacts you wish to send a card to this season to this new group.  Once this task is complete, simply select the group and perform the following steps:

1. Select File>Print from the Address Book Menu
2. Click the icon next to your Printer choice that looks like an upside-down triangle
3. From the Style drop down menu, choose Mailing Labels
4. Under the Layout tab, set the Page to Avery Standard and 8160 (or whatever type of mailing label you have)

Now you’re all set to print.  I would also recommend saving the results as a PDF file, and printing from there.  That way you’ll always have a record of whom you already mailed cards to this holiday season. If you want to change the font or add an image to the address labels, from that same print dialog box where you choose which type of label you’re using, simply toggle over from Layout to the Label tab and make any changes you want.

Avery Designer Pro and Google Contacts

Just as with the Apple Address Book solution above, the first thing to do when you’re dealing with your Google-stored addresses is to create a new group called “Holiday Cards 2010″ in Google’s Contacts.  Add your chosen contacts to the group. Now we’ll export the group to a local file on your Mac, and use Avery’s Designer Pro for Mac application to actually print the labels. Once you’ve installed Avery’s software, perform the following steps:

1. Export the contact group in Google Contacts as a “Google CSV” file (google.csv)
2. Launch Avery Designer Pro and choose 8160 – Easy Peel Mailing Labels (or whatever type of mailing label you have) from the list of all Avery Products
3. Click on the Use Blank button in the bottom right hand corner of Avery Designer Pro
4. From the toolbar located on the top left, click on the Text Box button to add a text box to the label
5. Now click on the Mail Merge button located just below the toolbar, this will prompt you to load the exported CSV file (google.csv)
6. Select the exported CSV file from the file system, and insert the columns you want to show up on the label

Now you can print from Avery Designer Pro’s File menu.  I would again recommend saving the results as a PDF file, and printing from there.

This technique is a little more flexible considering you have the option to choose one of Avery’s design styles. It’s also a little more powerful since you are actually designing the address labels in a designer that even supports layers, and of course a little more complex, as you need to export data and install and use a third-party application.

You can also mix and match the above two solutions, as you could certainly export your Google Contacts as a vCard and import them into Apple’s Address Book. The Avery Designer Pro application can also import Apple Address Book Contacts.  Either way, hopefully you find printing mailing labels on a Mac one of the easier one of the easier things to cross of your list this holiday.

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This is especially important if you, like many people, store information like credit card numbers and passwords in the address book. Ideally this private information is stored in a separate app on your iPhone such as one of these Weldon reviewed. However, not everyone is going to do that, and I have a possible compromise for those who want to store sensitive information in their address book.

The basic technique is to hide the sensitive data in plain sight, as part of what looks like just another ordinary contact. While it sure makes life easier to store your American Express card number under “American Express,” it also makes it easier for a criminal. If you absolutely need to store a credit card number, don’t be so obvious about it!

For credit cards, I suggest filing under a false name that only you know such as “Dave AX Smith.” Then use your own scheme of hiding the number as a combination of the street address and phone number, possibly across multiple contacts. I’m not going to tell you my exact strategy for storing this information, but it’s something I know and use for multiple credit cards. In this example, it’s an American express card with a number of 123456789012345 with an expiration of 09/12.

Here’s the way the card looks. It would be very unlikely someone browsing the address book could figure out it is a credit card.

A variation of this scheme can be used for passwords to websites or other sensitive information. If you think your address book is private, it’s time to get over that fallacy and take steps to protect the data within. While you may not choose my exact method, please be aware of the risks your address book is subject to and come up with some way of obscuring the data. If you don’t want to use a separate app for storing sensitive information, that’s fine, but I’d suggest you consider this middle ground.

Apple’s original implementation of “smart” file management isn’t just limited to the Finder, and in fact, you’ve probably seen it more often in other applications like Address Book and Mail.

Here are some ideas of how you can harness the power of these two applications using the same idea as Smart Folders.

Smart Groups

Address Book provides support for smart groups which allow for dynamic content, just like a smart folder. As new content is added that meet your guidelines, the group will automatically update.

Creating a Smart Group is as simple as going to File and selecting “New Smart Group…” or by clicking the plus icon (+) in the lower left corner of the Address Book window. Then give your group a name and set of criteria. As you add your second criterion, you’ll have the choice for your group to consist of any of your rules or all of your rules.

Here’s some ideas for useful smart groups.

Upcoming Birthdays

Interested in who might have a birthday this month? Set the birthday criterion to include entries that occur within the next month. (This will include all birthdays within a month of the current date or when you click to view the group.)

Missing Email Addresses

To see a list of people who you do not have an email address for, set the email criterion to include entries that are not set.

My Coworkers

Most companies offer their employees an email address that uses the corporate domain. If you created a smart group for “email” that contains “yourdomain.com” then you will have a group that is always updated with all of your coworkers. An extra bonus, these Smart Groups also show up and autocomplete in Mail.

Or Anything You Want

Since the Address Book allows for a “notes” section on each card, you can use this region to “tag” cards and then use a smart group to show results based on that information. (You could also repurpose one of the other standard fields for this use.) For example, throwing the word “family” into the appropriate contacts’ card would allow for you to create a smart group that just showed your family members.

Currently, Smart Groups cannot be synced to iPods or iPhones. While they also cannot be synced through MobileMe to me.com or Windows computers, they can still sync through MobileMe to other Macs.

Smart Mailboxes

Mail has its own flavor of smart file management too with the implementation of smart mailboxes. To create one, use the Mailbox menu or the plus (+) icon in the lower left of the message viewer and select “New Smart Mailbox.”

Give your smart mailbox a name and choose the appropriate criteria for your mailbox. With the ability to create criteria based on recipient, subject, mailbox, date, message, attachment and more, you can create some pretty powerful mailboxes to help organize your workflow. Here’s a few suggestions.

Recently Viewed

Most people process tons of email on a daily basis and frequently people have multiple email addresses for different purposes. With all of these messages, is there an easy way to find that email you were looking at last night?

Sure! Create a new smart mailbox and select “date last viewed” and choose “is in the last” and specify a number of days.

Recently Sent

If I wanted to quickly find an email that I had sent recently, I could create a Smart Group that showed me messages in the mailbox “Sent” that were “date received” in the past 2 days. Also make sure you tick the “Include messages from Sent” checkbox.

Emails from My Family

Remember the family smart group we made in our Address Book earlier? We can create a smart mailbox to show us all the messages from those family members.

Select “Sender is Member of Group” and then choose the appropriate group from the drop down menu.

Similar to Smart Groups, Smart Mailboxes do not sync to iPods or iPhones nor to me.com or Windows computers through MobileMe. They will only sync via MobileMe to other Macs.

Do you use Smart Groups or Smart Mailboxes? Have any tips you’d like to share? Share them in the comments.

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There are comprehensive third party desktop syncing programs available such as Missing Sync, but realize that with a “Google-based” phone, over-the-air syncing is automatic and built in. When you purchase your Android-based phone, you’ll link it with your Google account (a free Google account is required to use the phone’s over-the-air syncing). Your phone will generally auto-sync with your Google account allowing you to possibly ditch your MobileMe subscription. The task then is to get your Mac to sync with the Google account.

1) Foreplay

While using a Droid isn’t as easy as using an iPhone, it’s not that much harder. Here’s a tip, do NOT allow your mobile phone company to import your contacts from your old phone. This has caused problems with synchronization for some. It’s best to start with a clean list of contacts in your Google account. If you haven’t synced your previous phone with your Mac, go ahead and do it before switching phones. If you can’t, you might consider typing the phone numbers into your Mac Address Book beforehand.

2) Safe Syncing

Syncing is only one step above the SCSI voodoo of previous generations. It’s always best to start with a core data set and push it to other devices. Trying to merge two data sets can result in duplication and corruption.

If your Google account already has contacts, export them from Google as a vCard file and import them into your Mac Address Book.
Once imported, delete the contacts from Google so the initial sync pushes all your Mac info into Gmail. As always, it’s a good idea to back up your data before any sync endeavor. From the Mac Address Book, go to the File menu, then choose Export, and then Address Book Archive.

For your calendar, the safe sync concept is similar but you actually want to start with a populated Google calendar and a clear iCal. From experience, if you push too much into Google at once, it can choke. If you already have a Google calendar, back it up by clicking “Settings” under the “My calendars” Then choose “Export Calendars”.

They’ll download as a zip file that you can double click and get the individual .ICS files. Similarly, backup your iCal by visiting the File Menu and choose “Backup iCal.”

Syncing can be buggy under the best of circumstances, which is why I recommend backups throughout the whole process.

Now that both your Google Calendar and your iCal calender are backed up, you’ll then want to export your existing iCal calendars and import then into your Google calendar. This isn’t the same as backing them up. Click on a calendar, and then go to the File menu and choose “Export This” which will create individual .iCal files for each calender you use. Note that Google doesn’t like To Dos so go ahead and remove those beforehand.

Now that you have your individual iCals exported, go to that same Settings tab in Google under “My Calendars” and now import your individual iCals into your existing calendars. Note: it won’t give you an option to create a new calendar from the import, so have your Google calendars ready beforehand. Finally, delete your iCal calendars (remember to back up first) so your iCal is clear of info and all your data is now on Google’s servers.

3) Getting Your Sync On

If you skipped step two, proceed at your own risk. You have been warned.

If you have Snow Leopard, Google contact syncing is built-in: go to the Address Book Preferences and check “Synchronize with Google”. Put in your Google name and password and let the syncing begin! For Leopard users, you’ll need to own an iPhone or iPod touch to enable syncing or use third party apps like Gsync.

To sync calendars, you’ll need to be running Leopard or Snow Leopard. Go to your iCal application and then go to Preferences and then Accounts. Click the + icon and put whatever you want for description. For username put your name@gmail.com and your password for Gmail. Then under the disclosure triangle for Server Options, put https://www.google.com/calendar/dav/(followed by your googlemail address) and then user. So for example, https://www.google.com/calendar/dav/myname@gmail.com/user would be what you enter. Your calendars will now start downloading from the cloud. Alternatively, you can use BusySync and avoid these hassles.

For photos, iTunes-like picture sync isn’t available, but you can mount your Droid like any other mass-storage device and have it recognized. You’ll need to enable USB mounting first. Go to the menu at the top of your phone and then click USB Connection to mount the SD card. To move music and other multimedia files easily I recommend DoubleTwist.

Having used a Droid for a while I’m pretty darn impressed and you gotta love the advertising. If Mac syncing is holding you back from buying one, you just removed one reason not to switch!

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Even though Apple builds great products for the consumer, the company often misses the boat with business users. Snow Leopard stands to make serious inroads with Mac users in wingtips and pinstripes with native support for Microsoft Exchange Server. Mail, iCal, and Address Book will all be updated to talk directly with your Exchange account and in some cases, may work better than Entourage.

The Long & Winding Road

It’s taken a long time to get to this point, but the Mac has a long history of working with Microsoft. I think a little history is interesting here to show how we’ve arrived at Snow Leopard.

The Mac has had Microsoft Office almost from the beginning (Word and Excel for Mac were first released in 1985). Jaguar added LDAP access to Address Book. Panther introduced Windows Printer Sharing and Active Directory support so that you could log into a Windows Domain from a Macintosh. Tiger introduced Exchange accounts in Mail (though with IMAP access only) along with much improved support for Samba and Windows file sharing. The move to Intel gave us virtualization of Windows apps.

Leopard brought Boot Camp, of course, but this did nothing to help integrate Mac OS X itself into a Windows environment. But under the hood some exciting things were happening. The Address Book and Calendar stores were updated to offer better programmatic access and the Sync Services framework was updated. The result was that Mail and iCal were better at sharing data with each other and we got to-do items that were shared between those two apps. iCal was updated to access outside CalDAV accounts and Mail got Notes that (eventually) were able to sync with the iPhone.

The iPhone OS 2.0 firmware update pushed Exchange integration to new heights because Apple chose to license the ActiveSync technology from Microsoft. This put the iPhone on a level playing field with Windows Mobile devices and Outlook when accessing information stored in Exchange.

Snow Leopard

Snow Leopard brings all of this together: integrated email, calendar, and address book (with to-do’s and notes) with access to outside accounts and the ActiveSync technology used in the iPhone. In fact, Apple is touting that the Mac will now have out-of-the-box support for “Exchange Server 2007, something that Windows PC’s don’t have.” The requirement to use Exchange Server 2007 might disappoint some that are still on 2003, but it makes good sense when you consider that 2007 has the new Business Logic Layer that provides a consistent view of your mailboxes from any device and takes a lot of work out of writing client software. In fact, Entourage has been testing a beta version that also requires Exchange 2007 in order to take advantage of this technology to make Entourage behave more like Outlook does on a Windows PC.

Entourage?

Personally, I hope for Entourage to die a slow and horrible death. Having been on the support end of things, I have seen how hard it is to make Entourage work reliably. And when it fails? Look out, because all of your email messages, contact info, tasks, calendar items, etc. are stored in one big database file. Lose that file, and you’ve lost everything. And backing it up with Time Machine means you have copied a multigigabyte file to your backup drive every hour.

Recovering from errors in Mail, where each message is an individual file, is much simpler and it works beautifully with Time Machine and Spotlight because of this file structure. I know there are people that like the consolidated view of all information in one application, but I suspect that this preference comes more from force of habit after using Outlook than any real advantage.

So can Mail, iCal, and Address Book replace Entourage? I think so.

Mail

Mail provides access to your Exchange account right along any other IMAP or POP3 accounts. As a Mac user, you get all the cool Mac features like data detectors, Spotlight, and Quick Look. I’m impressed that Quick Look can display previews of Office documents even if you don’t have Microsoft Office for Mac installed on your machine. This might be a good reason to give iWork another look.

Quick Look

iCal

iCal will seamlessly blend your personal local calendars and your Exchange calendars in one view. I liked how the WWDC Keynote demo showed how iCal could intelligently schedule meetings to avoid conflicts, just like Outlook. And of course it’s still integrated with Mail and Address Book so you can see your to-do’s here or in Mail, and you can auto-fill addresses from Exchange.

Address Book

OK, contacts are not very sexy, but I do like how you can access the Global Address List from within any app that can talk to Address Book. That means Mail will auto-complete addresses as you type messages and iCal will auto-complete names as you create meeting invitations. I suppose it might mean that other apps like Delicious Library that integrate with Address Book will let you keep track of DVDs that you loan to people at work, even if they aren’t in your personal contact list. I also like how smart groups can blend your personal address book with the Exchange contacts. Very slick.

The Future of Microsoft Office

I see a big problem coming for the MacBU at Microsoft. One of the primary reasons to purchase the full version of Microsoft Office (the only reason?) was to get Exchange support. Now that Snow Leopard will include Exchange support natively, I suspect a lot of people will choose to purchase the Home & Student Edition, despite the language in the license that prevents you from using it for work-related activities. A decrease in revenue would naturally lead to a decrease in funding for future development. Despite my feelings about Entourage, Office is pretty useful. I hope that Apple pushes them a little hard (iWork updates will help too), but I hope they don’t push so hard that Office is abandoned. I have felt like Entourage has languished along for a few years now and if I don’t get my wish for it to just curl up and die, then maybe we can get a better, more reliable Entourage for people who want to use it.

The Future of the Mac at Work

I suspect that despite my enthusiasm, the initial support for Exchange in the first release of Snow Leopard is going to blow. I would advise caution about committing to abandoning Entourage, or a large-scale migration from Windows PCs and Outlook in 2009. The bugs, and there will be bugs, will get worked out though, and 2010 could be a very exciting year for the Mac in the business segment.

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My only gripe was the buggy MobileMe web site. Problems were numerous, such as the page randomly refreshing in the middle of adding a calendar event. Obviously this wasn’t disastrous on its own, but annoying tics add up, and eventually push people to look for alternatives.

Recently, I discovered an offering from Google that challenged the PIM synchronization features of MobileMe and competitors like Microsoft Exchange (what you unfortunately probably use at the office). This new service, Google Sync, offers the same seamless integration between your computer and mobile phone. It’s fast, free, and, most importantly, it works.

Setting it up, as you will soon find out, can be tricky, and takes time, patience, and an understanding of two-way syncing. Unless, that is, you’re starting from a blank slate with no contacts or calendars. However, I assume you already have a digital life, so I will attempt to coach you through transferring your information to Google first. I’m not going to retype all of Google’s own instructions. Instead, I’ll outline shortcuts around the sticky issues I encountered while setting up Sync. Google doesn’t organize its instruction processes well, so hopefully this will save you some time and a few headaches.

Requirements:

• Google account
• Contacts organized in Address Book
• Calendars organized in iCal
• You do not use an Exchange account on your iPhone

Exporting your Address Book Contacts to Google

1. I used a Google-recommended application called A to G to export my contacts as a large CSV file, and then import them into Google Contacts. You can get A to G here.
2. After you created the CSV file on your desktop, go to your Google Contacts page:
   https://google.com/contacts
   Note: For Google Apps users go here:
   https://mail.google.com/a/[domain name]/#contacts
3. Click on “Import”, choose the CSV file on your hard drive, and boom, your contacts are now in Google.

Exporting your iCal calendars to Google

1. Unfortunately, you have to export your iCal calendars one at a time. You can do this by clicking once on a calendar in the CALENDARS area, and selecting File -> Export.



2. Then, go to Google Calendar:
   https://www.google.com/calendar/
   Note: For Google Apps users go here:
   https://www.google.com/calendar/hosted/[domain name]/
3. Settings -> Calendars -> Import Calendar
   
4. Click “Choose File” to select the exported calendar on your hard drive. Choose which Google Calendar you want to import the information into. I recommend manually creating calendars in Google Calendar with the same names as your iCal calendars. Then, import the iCal files into their corresponding Google calendars. Repeat for each file you exported from iCal. Your calendars are now on Google.

Let’s recap. Your current contacts and calendars are now on Google. However, that information will never change unless you set up synchronization on your iPhone and Mac(s).

Configuring Google Sync

Warning: This is where you begin changing settings. If you’re a MobileMe user, all of your data is safe with Apple and everything you do here is completely reversible.

It’s easy to temporarily disable MobileMe while you set up Google Sync. Go to Settings -> Mail, Contacts, Calendars, select your MobileMe account from the Accounts list. Switch Contacts and Calendars to their OFF positions. If, in the end, you don’t want to use Google Sync, you can remove the Google Sync account you are about to set up, and switch your MobileMe Contacts and Calendars to their ON positions.

If you sync your Address Book and iCal information via iTunes, you should deselect those options in iTunes and resync your iPhone. The goal here is to clear out your contacts and calendar information on your phone. Again, if you decide to not use Google Sync, you can remove your Google information, select the contacts and calendars checkboxes in iTunes, and sync your iPhone with your computer once more to restore your data.

Now you’re ready to get your iPhone syncing data from Google. Follow these instructions about setting up your iPhone to get that working.

Important Google Apps note #1:
Apps users have to enable Google Sync in your dashboard, which can be done following these instructions.

Important note #2:
If you use more than one calendar, you have to configure that on the iPhone, otherwise only one will appear in the phone’s calendar app. After you’re done with the “Setting up your iPhone” section, go to m.google.com on your iPhone and select Sync. If you’re a Google Apps user, scroll to the bottom to select the “Google Apps User?” link. After logging in you can select which calendars you want to sync to the iPhone (maximum is five currently).

Now, any changes you make in Google Contacts or Google Calendar will be reflected on your iPhone. Also, any changes you make to your iPhone’s contacts or calendar information will be reflected on Google’s corresponding sites. Do you use IMAP for your Gmail account? Then consider yourself 100 percent synced.

If you’re satisfied with using Google’s sites and your iPhone to manage your information, then you’re done. However, if you want your current information to appear in iCal and Address Book, then you have a few more steps:

1. Importing your Google Contacts into Address Book
   This requires setting up built-in Address Book preferences.
2. Importing your Google Calendars into iCal
   This uses software called Collaboration.

Conclusion

Congratulations on making it this far. Hopefully, you’ve successfully set up Google Contacts and Google Calendar with your existing information, and both your iPhone and Mac(s) are now synchronized with Google. You can now make changes to or add contacts and events from any computer or your iPhone, and all without spending a dime. Please leave a comment below if you have any questions!

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One of the perplexing limitations about MobileMe is its inability to sync birthdays in iCal to the iPhone and iPod touch. As you may already know, iCal can take birthdays from Address Book and add them into a special “Birthdays” calendar, which is really a subscription calendar.

But while the latest updates to MobileMe now allow for the syncing of subscription calendars from your Mac to MobileMe, their events are not pushed to iPhone and iPod touch. Apple’s explanation is this:

When syncing subscribed calendars to MobileMe, the calendar information and settings for the calendar is synced, but all of the downloaded events are not. This is done to help streamline the syncing process with MobileMe, as it prevents syncing redundant information to other computers with an Internet connection.

Duh.

To get around this limitation, you can disable over-the-air syncing, and sync Calendar events via iTunes instead. But that defeats the purpose of paying for MobileMe’s push abilities. The other way is to export the Birthdays calendar that iCal has created and re-import it back into iCal as local calendar events. These birthdays and anniversary events will then be synced with MobileMe and, subsequently, pushed to the iPhone Calendar app. The problem is, you will have to do that every time you add a birthday to a contact in the Address Book.

Well, I’m happy to tell you that there is finally a solution that requires little to no effort on your part.

Dates to iCal 2 is a small application for OS X Leopard that reads birthdays and anniversaries from Address Book and writes them as regular calendar events into iCal. It does this automatically in the background; set it once and forget about it.

In setting up Dates to iCal 2, you can customize in various ways how it should create events.

You can choose to add either birthdays or anniversaries, or both, and specify only a certain group of contacts.

You can customize the way event titles will be written, such as adding the age of a contact to his or her birthday event. To me, this feature alone is worth the price of the application.

And one very powerful aspect of Dates to iCal 2 is the many ways it can remind you of upcoming birthdays and anniversaries. You can set up to five alarms for an event, useful if you want, say, to be reminded each of the five days leading up to a birthday or anniversary. It can even send a reminder email to any of the email addresses in the Me card in your Mac.

Dates to iCal 2 costs £3 (approximately USD $4.50) for a single license. Until Apple improves MobileMe, I highly recommend this well-designed and useful gem.

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Apple’s Address Book is a clean and concise way to manage all of your contacts. It does what it needs without a bunch of frills, and for the most part, that’s a good thing. My use of Address Book is fairly infrequent — and by infrequent I mean that it’s pretty much only utilized around this time of year when I have to send out the annual newsletter or photo card of the kids.

Recently when my younger sister moved into the Big City and sent her ritzy new Manhattan address around to all of us, I entered it into Address Book like a good boy, and promptly forgot about it. It wasn’t long after that my lovely wife wanted to know about the new City digs, but I didn’t know a whole lot. So being a good nerd, I copied the address from Address Book and then copied it into a Google Maps session in Firefox to see what the area looked like. That’s when it hit me — why should I have to go through such a process?!

Following some easy Googling, I found a relatively old solution to my problem. In fact, our own Grand Poobah, Om Malik, was pretty jazzed about the same solution back when he discovered it three and a half years ago! But in internet years, that’s like 2.3 lifetimes past, so what’s old is new — onto the solution! The Google Maps Plugin for Address Book is by Brian Toth, and a perfectly elegant solution to my problem.

The plugin allows you to right click on any address from Address Book, and gives you a few options for how to view it:

• Google Map Directions: Select two contacts in your address book that represent the beginning and ending of your travels, and have it opened in either your default browser or Google Earth (if you have that installed).
• Google Earth: Take a look at the location from the Google Earth application.
• Google Maps: Take a look at the location from your Google Maps in your default browser.

Ok, so really all this does it take away the arduous task of copying the address in Address Book before CMD+TABing to Firefox, opening a new tab, and pasting it into Google Maps. But if I can save 5 keystrokes, I consider it a victory — perhaps you will too. It’s Donationware, so show Brian a little love if you get some use out of it, and while you’re at it, he’s got some other software to peruse too. Happy stalking Google Mapping!

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Apple’s replacement for .Mac has had a very rocky start, and has a long way to go before its ready to compete with free alternatives. Many users do not want to move away from MobileMe because of the deep integration with the Mac desktop, while others are reluctant because its hard to find another single service that provides all of the services that MobileMe does. If the latest outage has you ready to jump ship, here’s a guide to making the break.

Mail: Gmail

Making the transition to Gmail is very easy. Gmail allows you to use POP3 to download all of your existing mail from MobileMe into Gmail, and Gmail also allows you to send email as yourname@me.com allowing you time to migrate slowly. With instant search, integrated chat, nearly infinite storage, and an extremly fast interface, making the switch to Gmail not only replaces MobileMe Mail, it makes your email overwhelmingly more enjoyable.

Calendar: Google Calendar

Using the mail substitution above, its a simple click away to use the excellent Google Calendar. The web interface is excellent, but if you are an iCal user, Google Calendar provides a very simple way to migrate all of your existing calendars off of MobileMe. 

First, create blank calendars on Google Calendar to mirror each MobileMe calendar you use today. Next, simply follow the instructions here to sync your Google Calendar to iCal. Finally, drag and drop your calendar events from the local iCal calendar to the newly added Google Calendar. Once all of the calendar events are moved over, delete each of the iCal calendars. Give Google a second to sync everything up to their servers and then check the web interface. All of your calendars should be available.

Address Book: Plaxo

Plaxo not only syncs your address book contacts to their web service, it also keeps your contact information current with others who use their service. Plaxo includes a plugin for the Mac’s Address Book that makes the sync painless. It can also sync to Gmail’s contacts, Outlook, and a host of other services.

iPhone Bonus! If you’ve got an iPhone, you can sync Address Book directly with Google, bypassing Plaxo. There’s also a clever hack to enable this ability without an iPhone, but, being unsupported, the next Mac OS update will probably wipe it out.

Gallery: Flickr/Picasa

There’s certainly no shortage of photo sharing web sites available.  Crowd favorite Flickr is a great choice, and with the $24 FlickrExport tool from Connected Flow, you can upload directly from iPhoto.  Flickr also has a ton of social media capabilities, and the ability to integrate into other online services.  If you’d like to keep with one provider as much as possible, Google’s Picasa is another great photo sharing site, which also has a free iPhoto plugin to upload photos.

iDisk: Amazon S3

This is another area where there is certainly no shortage of competition but I ultimately chose Amazon S3 + Cyberduck for my online storage needs. Box.net is another strong option; however, my initial tests found very poor WebDav capability. Amazon S3 can be a little complicated to set up, but at only 15 cents per gigabyte, the price is hard to beat, and there is an active developer community creating new applications for accessing S3 all the time.

Sync: Mozy

Mozy provides 2 gigabytes free online storage, and their Mac client integrates easily with the desktop. The utility installs as a menu item, and offers pre-configured “Backup Sets” for many common items like Address Book, Apple Mail, Keychains, and Firefox or Safari bookmarks. It also offers to backup your entire Documents, Music, and Movies folders. With the Backup Sets feature I set up a custom Yojimbo set by selecting all of the files in ~/Library/Application Support/Yojimbo. Mozy also allows you to specify a specific file or directory that you would like backed up.

Sync Bonus! If you are using Firefox as your main browser, Foxmarks can sync both your bookmarks and passwords between multiple machines, regardless of operating system. I use it to keep my browsers in sync between my Mac at home, and my Windows XP laptop at work.

iWeb Hosting:  Google Sites

Google Sites gives you a very simple and easy way to setup a web site for sharing stories, photos, and movies with friends and family. While not as all encompassing as an iWeb site, it still gets the job done. If Sites is not really what you are looking for, consider setting up a free blog site with WordPress.com. If sticking with iWeb is a necessity, simple, low volume web hosting with a company like 1and1 or Dreamhost is relatively inexpensive, and can give you full control over the content, look, and feel of your site.

Breaking away from MobileMe is not a decision to be taken lightly, but by taking an objective look at exactly what you want out of an online service, the move can be relatively painless, and surprisingly enjoyable.

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This week we’re looking at Remember The Milk, Mokugyo (With Cat), Ocarina and iFriends.

Remember The Milk (free) - Remember The Milk is a clever site that gives you a selection of list-based tools for keeping track of all the tasks that life throws at you. It makes use of a great methodology called Getting Things Done. This fantastic iPhone app links in to your online RTM account, meaning you can become a blur of productivity even when you’re on the go.

Mokugyo (With Cat) (free) – While Mokugyo (With Cat) seems to be utterly useless, it’s endearing enough to warrant a quick mention. To reach a state of ‘nagomi’ (higher relaxation), you must tap on a Japanese wooden gong and what seems to be a singing bowl (used for meditation). This makes just enough sense until you try out ‘cat mode’, where tapping the bowl and gong triggers cat meows as you watch a totally weird lolcats-esque slideshow.

Ocarina ($0.99) – Rapidly becoming one of TAB’s favourite iPhone developers, Smule have created another unique app. By literally blowing in to the iPhone and pressing buttons on the screen, you can play different notes and, with a little practice, string together a tune. This is an enchanting musical instrument masquerading as an iPhone toy and certainly worth more than a buck.

iFriends ($1.99) – So far, it’s been worth steering clear of contact list management apps. They rarely bring added value, tend to be ugly, featureless and poorly-designed. iFriends, though, is potentially a worthy replacement for the phone button. The app features a dynamic top friends list with a clever friend scoring system, cutesy and slick graphics, contact searching and access to SMS too.

A recording studio in your pocket!

Before we close the gates on our fruity garden, we’ve got a few moments left to tell you about something we missed a couple of weeks back. FourTrack, from Sonoma Wire Works, is a traditional four-track recorder, crammed with a surprising number of features and functionality at the great price of $9.99.

By plugging in your iPhone headphones (with mic), you can record direct to FourTrack — effectively having a mini-studio in your iPhone. It’s great for toying round with ideas and creating quick track demos. Expect a full TAB review and tutorial for FourTrack sometime soon, in the meantime, for bedroom music makers and even pros on the go, you should grab this app and get recording.

That’s all for this week, we’ll be back next Saturday for another App Store Roundup. Drop by the comments and let us know which apps you’ve tried in the past week.

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A little hidden gem in Leopard has been discovered. It would seem Address Book holds the key to a slew of additional image filters that can be applied to user images in Address Book. From my rough guess, there are about 25+ new filters here that don’t seem to be available anywhere else.

A short listing of some of the filters:

• ASCII Art
• Blue Print
• Color Invert
• Color Controls
• Dot Screen
• False Color
• Film Stock
• Kaleidescope
• Line Overlay
• Line Screen
• Monochrome
• Motion Blur
• Neon
• Pixellate
• Tracer

Thanks Adam Wilcox for the tip

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Just personal opinion here, but I keep that thing (as well as ‘Personal File Sharing’) unchecked at all times, and only turn them on for the few minutes I need them. Maybe I’m being paranoid, but that’s just me. Now it seems like it wasn’t such a bad idea, eh?

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• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks