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Cobook: The Best Way to Manage Your Contacts on OS X

By
April 20, 2012
Software
cobook screenshot

Main view - app is accessible through the menubar.

Cobook is a new Address Book application for Mac OS X that makes use of popular social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google Voice to provide unparalleled functionality.

By using information stored in the cloud, it automatically adds and updates relevant information to your contacts.

You can set it up to sync Address Book.app and, if you’re an iCloud user, all your contacts will be available on your iOS devices. If you have lots of contacts, keeping your contacts up-to-date can be a daunting task to do manually – Cobook saves you time and effort. It’s a must have, and it’s completely free.

 

Thoughts About The iPad 2 Announcement

By
March 3, 2011
Op-Ed

I watched the TWiT Live coverage of the Apple event last night (local time) and I think that the iPad 2 is a step in the right direction.

The original iPad was an interesting device, and was great for consuming media. Tech pundits pointed this out numerous times and pondered whether Apple was intentionally trying to stifle ‘creation’ by popularising such a device. I can see now the rationale behind the functionality of the first generation iPad. They wanted to create, for starters, a media consumption device, which they nailed. Once that was done, they could focus on adding other functionality, instead of doing both of those at the same time and failing.

It’s an incremental update, much like the updates to the iPod touch and iPhone line. What started as a phone with web browsing and music ended up being the mainstream platform for mobile computing. I’m writing this on my iPod touch and publishing it without the need of a computer, which is pretty awesome for what was 2 years ago an mp3 player. In a way posting from my iPod touch is better than posting from my computer; Safari managed to crash on me while I was writing in WordPress more than once. PlainText has an auto-save feature that automatically syncs what I’m writing to my Dropbox folder.

Once again Apple has successfully pushed computing in the right direction, towards innovation. For all it’s failures in App Store revenue policy, I still think Apple is doing technology and us a big favour.

Notes on Mac OS X 10.7 Developer Preview

By
February 27, 2011
Software

It’s good to know that Apple hasn’t abandoned development of its desktop operating system, however I’m personally underwhelmed with it so far.

Mission Control

  • The user interface elements are not consistent throughout the OS. Some elements, such as the login window still have remnants of the old UI, which look out of place. While a fresh coat of paint is always something neat and to be expected of a new release, I wouldn’t exactly decide in favor of the new desaturated approach to visual design, or the buttons that look transplanted from GNOME. Don’t get me wrong, GNOME is an awesome window manager, but I’d prefer Aqua any day.
  • The new ‘About this Mac’ application is a commendable effort and stays true to the ‘it just works’ mantra.
  • Launchpad is buggy, slow and superfluos to desktop computing. I understand that they want to get rid of the Dock, maybe even Finder, but instead of making things easier to access, they implanted a mobile UI paradigm into a full-blown OS. You can fully replace the Dock with Spaces, Mission Control and Launchpad, but why do I need three things to do what one small application does?
  • I’ve wanted for so many years to get back to the MS-DOS days of single tasking, and full screen applications do just that. Aside from photo and video editing, which already had full screen views, why would I want to fill my entire screen with just one application? To make use of the Spaces feature and distract myself with beautifully rendered smooth transitions… .
  • They’ve implemented Sessions, which means that when you restart, the n-th applications that you had opened, will be restored, which does an amazing job at simulating how time would pass if you were in the accretion disk of a black hole.
  • The new Mail app is wonderful from both a design and functionality standpoint. I’m sorry for the developer of Sparrow.app which will have its user-base significantly diminished.
  • FileVault had its security significantly boosted, with whole disk encryption now implemented.
  • Scrolling is bass-ackwards. They’ve removed the open application Dock indicators by default. The WiFi status icon is always animated, even when connected (AirPort Express) and options like show time connected don’t do anything. You can now reset your account password using an AppleID and use iChat with your Yahoo! Messenger ID. FaceTime is installed by default. Accounts for services like Gmail, Yahoo and MobileMe are available to all applications that make use of the API. For example, if you set up your email account, those settings will be available to chat applications.
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