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Filed under: iPhone, App Review

Vlingo adds voice control to older iPhones

Pity the poor iPhone 3G owner who now has to grapple with reality; yes, what was until Friday the world's coolest smartphone is now simply a piece of yesterday's tech, as current as a punchcard and as enduring as a wax cylinder recording on a hot afternoon. No, not really -- the iPhone 3G is just as cool as it was a week ago, and for $99 it's a relative bargain. Still, there's some envy on the wind.

Some of our readers have apparently been so dazzled by Apple's enthusiastic promotion of the new iPhone 3G S that they were fooled into believing that the hardware-linked features of the 3G S (the compass and the voice controls, specifically) would be made available on the 3G with the delivery of the 3.0 software update. They have written to us, irate and frustrated, wanting to know what happened to their promised features. We sympathize, and we want to help.

There is, as it happens, a way to get one of the marquee features of the 3G S -- voice control -- onto your iPhone 3G or original iPhone. The vlingo app, available free in the App Store since December of last year and also available for Blackberry & Windows Mobile, gives you voice command dialing from your address book, map search, Yahoo web searches, Twitter/Facebook updating, and more. The recognition quality is quite good; it's worked as well as Google Voice Search for me in most cases.

Vlingo is quite a bit slower to recognize audio on the 3G than the built-in Voice Control is on the 3G S (unsurprisingly, considering the horsepower boost on the new phone); it also does not allow iTunes control, while Apple's tool does. Despite these drawbacks, it's fun to use and very slick. Update: As Eitan points out in the comments, vlingo's speed is not necessarily limited by the local processing power, since it depends on the remote server for audio analysis.

One of the major points of contention regarding vlingo, and a cause of many negative reviews on the App Store, is that the app does have to do something a little bit touchy in order to enable voice dialing: it asks if it can upload your contact names to vlingo. While this is a necessary step if you want to use voice dialing, and while the company says it does not include phone numbers with that upload nor does it use the information for any purpose other than creating spoken profiles to recognize the names of your contacts when you speak them, there are plenty of users who aren't comfortable with this step. If you're not OK with it, you can still use vlingo without the voice dialing feature; at that point, however, it's not dramatically better than Google's Voice Search.

You can watch a video demo of vlingo in the 2nd half of this post. If you've got other workarounds or third-party apps that help 3G owners level up with their happy 3G S comrades, please let us know.

Continue readingVlingo adds voice control to older iPhones

Filed under: Enterprise, Software, Productivity

Kerio MailServer 6.7

Yesterday, amidst the SlingMobile débâcle and an OS update, Kerio Technologies released Kerio Mail MailServer 6.7. The mail and collaboration server, often used as a replacement for Exchange, has added several new features, including a few geared toward Mac users.

The Kerio Global Address List (GAL) is a new feature that provides a simple way to get address and contact info from clients like Outlook or Entourage. It syncs and authenticates with both Microsoft Active Directory and Apple Open Directory, as well as Kerio's own user directory. In any company, people join and leave the group, and users are often required to manually update their address books to add and remove entries. With GAL, it's a single directory in a single place, and changes are transparent for users. It supports Entourage, works with the iPhone and functions offline.

Kerio MailServer 6.7 also comes with an auto-configuration script for Entourage 2008, downloadable within the Kerio client, providing pre-configured account setup. There's support for private events in iCal, allowing users to maintain personal schedules without requiring a separate calendar application. AddressBook gets some additional love with support for synchronizing groups (which become Categories in Entourage).

Kerio has had good support for iPhone users for a while now. For non-iPhone mobile users, there's new support for viewing HTML emails on Nokia devices, as well as DataViz RoadSync compatibility.

The MailServer itself is now a certified VMWare appliance, and promotes compatibility with two new Linux distributions: Ubuntu 8 and Debian 5. CentOS is the preferred platform for running on VMWare. IT admins and users alike will appreciate the dramatically improved anti-spam engine, which has been optimized for multi-CPU use, parallel processing of email messages for large queues, improved heuristics and 13 layers of spam protection.

In addition to some of the previously available migration tools provided by Kerio, a new IMAP migration tool relieves what is undoubtedly one of the biggest headaches in switching mail servers: keeping your old mail. It's a cross-platform utility which moves messages, folders, accounts and domains from the old system to Kerio MailServer. The IMAP migration tool has been fully tested with OS X.

Kerio's pricing has remained the same with this release. Starting at $499 for 10 users, there's a range of options available for different configurations and add-ons, as well as subscription pricing. See Kerio's pricing page for more details.

Filed under: Software, Freeware

Twitter and Skype and FileMaker, oh my! FMWebSchool integrates them

FileMaker Pro fans can now tweet and make Skype calls directly from databases, thanks to a pair of free files from FMWebSchool. There are a couple of movies that demonstrate how these files work, which you can view by clicking the links below.

The FMSkype file allows you to import your Skype address book into a FileMaker Pro database (Windows only; Mac FileMaker users must manually import their Skype info), and then click to call a contact using their Skype name or phone number.

FMTweet lets you send messages to Twitter from a FileMaker Pro database. This is not a plug-in; it's a database with associated scripting that can be customized by the user. FMTweet could be useful if you want a database to provide notification of a specific situation through Twitter -- for instance, send a tweet when someone enters information into a web-enabled Filemaker database.

To get the two files and other FileMaker goodies that may come out in the future, you do need to subscribe to the free FMWebSchool newsletter.

Filed under: Features, Troubleshooting, Ask TUAW

Ask TUAW: Bypass the registration screen, install Leopard Server on the new Mac Mini, iPhone 2G AppleCare options and more

Once again, it's time for another edition of Ask TUAW: the place where we try to answer all of your Mac and Apple-related questions. This week we're taking questions about bypassing the Apple registration screen, installing Leopard Server on the latest Mac Mini, AppleCare for iPhone version 1.0 and more.

As always, we welcome your suggestions for this week and questions for next time. Please leave your contributions in the comments for this post. When asking questions, please include which Mac and which version of OS X you're running. If you don't specify, we'll assume you're running Leopard on an Intel Mac.

Tom asks:

When I do an install of OSX or after bringing home a new Mac I get to a screen that asks me to register. If I don't want to fill out that information in is there any way to bypass it?

Sure. Once you get to the registration screen simply press the Command and Q keys and you will see a new dialog box come up. On it, one of your choices will be to "Skip" the registration process. Simply click it and you'll move on to the next screen to create your user account and finish the setup of OSX.

John asks:

I have a Leopard Server installer DVD from last year and I'm having trouble installing the software on one of the new Mac Minis. It won't even boot the Mini nor will it work when I try upgrading OSX client to server. Once it installs I get endless restarts, etc. What's the best way to accomplish this?


Continue readingAsk TUAW: Bypass the registration screen, install Leopard Server on the new Mac Mini, iPhone 2G AppleCare options and more

Filed under: Features, Troubleshooting, Ask TUAW

Ask TUAW: Preventing automounting, Exchange support, printing selections, and more

For this edition of Ask TUAW we've got questions about preventing an external partition from automounting, printing text selections, getting email from an Exchange server, syncing the Address Book with Google contacts, and more.

As always, your suggestions are welcome. Questions for next week should be left in the comments. When asking a question please include which machine you're running and which version of Mac OS X (we'll assume you're running Leopard on an Intel Mac if you don't specify). And now, on to the questions!

Continue readingAsk TUAW: Preventing automounting, Exchange support, printing selections, and more

Filed under: Terminal Tips

Terminal Tips: Enable Address Book debug menu

You may recall that Safari has a debug menu that enables some hidden features, but did you know Address Book also has a debug menu?

In Address Book's debug menu, you can get options for logging, controls for metadata, printing selections, and removing orphaned images. You can enable this debug menu by typing the following command into Terminal.app (/Applications/Utilities):

defaults write com.apple.addressbook ABShowDebugMenu -bool YES

If you no longer wish to have this menu hanging around, you can remove it by typing the same command above, but replace "YES" with "NO."

Want more tips and tricks like this? Visit TUAW's Terminal Tips section!

Filed under: Software, Mac 101

Mac 101: Address Book A-Z

New to the Mac? Welcome back to our Mac 101 series, which explores the basics of Mac OS X, provides tips and tricks, and dives into key features of Apple's bundled applications.

Address Book is the contact management software bundled with every new Mac. It's easy to use and well integrated with Mail and iCal. Let's explore some of its capabilities.

Creating a new record

There are three ways to do this. The first is to select "New Card" from the "File" menu. The second is to click the "+" icon below the "Name" column. Finally, you can press Command - N on your keyboard.

Next, fill in the fields. Some have drop-down titles. For example, you can label a phone number as "work", "home" or "mobile". Finally, you can add a note to the notes field.

Adding a photo is fun. Just click the photo box next to a contact's name and a new window appears. From there, you can browse to a photo on your computer or take a snapshot with your iSight camera. You can even apply some filters to the photo by clicking the Filters button on the right hand side of the window. That photo will appear on that person's record, on email messages retreived with Apple's Mail and on a synchronized iPhone or iPod.


Continue readingMac 101: Address Book A-Z

Filed under: Mac 101

Mac 101: Get a Google Map from Address Book contact

How many times have you looked at an Address Book contact address, only to realize that you don't know where they're located? What do you do? Most would copy and paste the address into Google Maps, but there is a better way!

In a contact's Address Book card, right-clicking on an address and clicking on "Map Of" will launch your default browser and map out the address in Google Maps.

If you are using Tiger, you will need to install a plug-in, however, this tip works beautifully in Mac OS X Leopard.


Want more tips and tricks like this? Visit TUAW's Mac 101 section.

Filed under: Mac 101

Mac 101: Back up Address Book, iCal, iPhone before MobileMe

Being the paranoid person that I am, it occurred to me that it would be a good idea to back up Address Book and iCal before all of the syncing madness begins between Macs, MobileMe, "the cloud", and iPhone/iPod touch. Here's how to do it (Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard only):

Backing up Address Book
  1. Launch Address Book
  2. Select File > Export > Address Book Archive
  3. Find a location to save the Address Book archive, then click the Save button.
Backing up iCal
  1. Launch iCal
  2. Select File > Backup iCal
  3. Find a location to save the iCal backup, then click the Save button.
Backing up iPhone / iPod touch
  1. Just sync it
Ahhh, don't you feel all safe and happy now? And remember, if you're running Leopard and Time Machine, your backups are going to be backed up, too!

Filed under: OS, Rumors, Software, Snow Leopard

New screenshots of Snow Leopard appear, show desktop web apps

A German site, Apfeltalk.de has posted screenshots of the forthcoming version of Mac OS X, 10.6 (a.k.a "Snow Leopard"). Most of the screenshots show off the Safari 4 developer preview that will include the "Save as Web Application" option in the File menu.

The website also shows off the next version of Address Book.app that will bring Microsoft Exchange support to the Mac platform. We do however have to speculate about the System Preferences.app screenshot that shows two Time Machine icons with one labled "Dock" and another labeled "Time Machine" -- this seems out of place and unlike Apple.

You can see all of the screenshots (before Apple's legal team gets a hold of them) on the Apfeltalk.de site.

[via Engadget]

Filed under: Productivity, Bluetooth, Leopard

Get Address Book Bluetooth dialing back with Nova Media Phone plugins

One of the the stranger changes in Leopard was the loss of the ability to dial (and send text messages) from the Address Book to a Bluetooth paired cell phone. Fortunately, however, Nova Media has released its Phone plugins to return this functionality to the Leopard Address Book and other applications through a system-wide Service.

When installed it allows you to call a number or send a text message just by right-clicking on the number in the Address Book (or selecting it elsewhere and invoking Phone plugins from the Services menu). It works with a number of phones from Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, and Sony Ericsson; check the compatibility list for details. Annoyingly the iPhone is not compatible.

Nova Media Phone plugins is $9.95 and a demo is available.

[via Hawk Wings]

Filed under: Rumors, Internet, Internet Tools, .Mac

.Mac and Me rumors: TUAW inside look at Apple's next-gen service

What's next for .Mac, Apple's much-maligned online service offering for OS X users? TUAW has learned that .Mac will no longer be sold by Apple after WWDC, as new users will migrate to the new MobileMe service (not too shocking, given the swirling rumors as of late). Existing users will have their @mac.com e-mail addresses forwarded to their @me.com address in perpetuity, which should provide some relief for nervous .Mac users who depend on that email.

MobileMe is slated to include a host of new features, which we alluded to early in May; in addition, there will be new web interfaces for all aspects of MobileMe -- calendars will look just like iCal, Contacts will look just like they do in Address Book, etc. This is similar to the way .Mac Webmail works today, though we've heard that the new interfaces will be much snazzier (yes, that's a technical term). Apple should also be updating the .Mac dependent applications (iChat, iWeb, iPhoto etc.) to work with the new service. The new service will be backwards compatible with .Mac protocols for the time being -- so developers will not have to rush out updates as soon as they hear the official word.

MobileMe is scheduled to be available sometime in late June/early July. We have also heard reports that the latest build of the iPhone beta firmware (2.0) has already undergone revisions to handle the new MobileMe service. Some of the features of the service on iPhone will include: over-the-air syncing of contacts, calendars, and photos. Interestingly, there is also a Windows version of MobileMe planned.

Though we're confident in the source of this information, this is still a rumor until Apple reveals all. We should hear more information about MobileMe at the World Wide Developer's Conference starting on Monday (June 9th).

Filed under: iPod Family, OS, iPhone

Address Book - Google syncing without iPod touch or iPhone

Did last night's news of 10.5.3 boasting Google contact syncing with iPhone and iPod touch owners get you down? Well, LifeHacker hopes to lift your spirits as they tell you how to enable Google syncing in Address Book.app without ever syncing an iPhone or iPod touch.

The process requires you to edit some .plist files within Address Book.app. LifeHacker notes that the .plist entry only occurs when you sync some type of iPod first. So, you will need to do at least one sync for the entry to show up. Some of the comments seem to suggest that the .plist entry will change back to the original value once you sync an iPod a couple times. Even still, this is a cool hack.


[via LifeHacker]

Filed under: OS, Internet, Internet Tools, Software Update

10.5.3: Sync your iPhone contacts with Google

If you have an iPhone synced with Address Book.app, then you've been able to sync your contacts with Yahoo for a while now, but something that has been missing is Google sync. Sure, you can always use Spanning Sync, but we all want something free and built-into the OS. Well, those dreams are now true according to a new Google blog post and the introduction of Mac OS X 10.5.3.

On the Mac you normally sync your iPhone with, you will see a new option when you open the "General" tab in Address Book preferences. When you check "Synchronize with Google" you can enter your Google credentials and syncing will proceed. Apple and Google did leave some people out, however, as this new feature works only on Macs that have an iPhone synced with iTunes.

Thanks, Nathan and Ryan!

Filed under: Software, Productivity

Espy: lovechild of iPhoto and Address Book

Espy is an Address Book replacement that focusses on pictures rather than names. Basically it capitalizes on the fact that many folks remember faces a lot better than they remember names. The interface blends an iPhoto-like photo browser with Address Book contact info. Espy is compatible with the OS X Address Book and works with Mail.app, etc.

While the basic idea of organizing contacts by photo is not bad, I can't help but observe that the hard part is going to be getting all the pictures. I try to keep photos of my contacts in the Address Book, but except for good friends this is often a challenge. It's a bit of a catch-22 since the people whose names I'm more likely to forget (and so benefit from something like Espy) are also the people I'm less likely to have pictures of.

In any case, Espy is $24.95 and a demo is available.

[via Macworld]

Tip of the Day

To find out what version of Mac OS you are running, go to the Apple logo in the top left corner, click it and choose About This Mac. From that window you will see the version number, processor, memory and chosen startup disk. Clicking Software Update will check for updates, and More Info... will open up an extensive list of everything on your machine.


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