As many of you may have heard, HBO has joined the iTunes store. While all of HBO original television shows are not yet included, the following are now available for download:

1. The Sopranos
2. Sex and the City
3. Deadwood
4. Rome
5. Flight of the Conchords
6. The Wire

The most interesting piece of news to come out of the deal is that Apple has agreed to sell their shows for more than just $1.99. Many of the shows listed above will sell for $2.99 an episode.

Does this mean that Apple and NBC will make up?

The folks over at The Apple blog posted a few articles today about status on the iPhone. We’ve mentioned previously that AT&T has recommended use of the 3G network with the iPhone but now some details about the new phone coming soon come straight from Apple themselves.

First, the 3G iPhone preference is included in the Beta 5 Firmware for the iPhone. This is a feature that you can turn on or off and instructions list that using 3G will decrease battery life.

Second, the online Apple Store is currently listing that they are out of 8gb and 16gb iPhones. This usually means that Apple has stopped selling the current model as the new model is just around the corner.

With the developers conference still being a few weeks away, I find it hard to believe that Apple will just stop selling iPhones for most the month of May. Of course… they may just be waiting on the next shipment from their manufacturers.

Either way, I hope to see new 3G iPhones sooner rather than later.

The Automator tip of the week walks you through one way to extract the contact information from Address book and put it into a format that you can upload to Gmail.

Gmail accepts csv files for importing contacts. Unfortunately Address Book does not export directly to csv. Why it doesn’t is a puzzle in it self, but thankfully we can get the same results through Automator with the use of some Microsoft Office actions.

To create a csv file Automator of your contacts in Address Book add the following actions to a workflow:

1. Find People in Address Book, Set Whose to Name, is not equal to, and then use * in the input field - This tells automator to look through all the names in your address book and return everyone that doesn’t have a * in their name.
2. Get Contact Information, Export Format: Spreadsheet (tabs) - This gathers all the information about each contact and puts it into a standard format we can work with.
3. New Text File - I named it contacts.txt and saved it to my desktop - This will write the information from address book to a text file
4. Import Text Files to Excel Workbook - Select New Workbook and mark the delimiters as Tab
5. Save Excel Workbooks - Save Workbooks as contacts, on the desktop and select CSV(Comma Delimited) as the format

Import Address Book CSV File to Gmail

If everything was constructed correctly you should be able to run the workflow and 2 files will be written to your desktop. From here we can import our contacts.csv file into Gmail.

To import your contacts.csv to gmail:

1. Login to Gmail
2. Click Contacts
3. Click Import
4. Choose your contacts.csv file and click Import
5. Follow the final instructions from Gmail and verify your contacts imported correctly

Now that we’ve showed how to complete this process with Automator, there is also an application - A to G that was built do extract Address Book Contacts and place them in a CSV file.

Importing Contacts from Gmail into Address Book is a bit easier.

Adding spotlight like features to Safari was one of our top 10 ways to enhance your Safari browsing experience. The plugin that allows us to do just that, Inquisitor, has just joined the Yahoo family!

Of course with the new owner comes a new default search engine set for the Inquisitor plugin. For all new downloads of Inquisitor Yahoo will power your search requests from the Safari search bar, but the ability to set it to a different search engine is still included with the plugin.

Thankfully Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo feel apart! just imagine how awkward it would be having MSN live search as the default search engine powering the Safari browser. That really wouldn’t have helped Inquisitors potential.

If you’re already an Inquisitor user, installing the latest update will leave the default search engine what you had set previously but new users will be set with Yahoo.

To change to another search engine:

1. Open Safari and Click Safari on the Menu Bar and then Preferences
2. Select Search
3. Pick the engine you’d like to use from the Search Engine drop down

If you haven’t already picked up Inquisitor, it is worth a try!

OpenOffice.org, a Sun Microsystems supported project, has been a free competitor to Microsoft Office for a number of years, but their support for OS X based systems lacked the integration with the Aqua user interface.

In fact, the current stable version (OpenOffice.org v2.4) requires X11 to display the office suite in OS X.

Fortunately, OpenOffice.org has announced the beta version of OpenOffice 3.0 that includes Aqua support for Mac OS X Intel computer owners.

While not the most important feature of an office suite, native interface will make for a more enjoyable user experience. Additionally, OpenOffice.org may gain support from Mac users now that the organization has contributed some attention to the Apple OS.

Head over to the 3.0 beta page if you’d like to download the latest version of OpenOffice.org v3.0 beta for the Mac with Intel Aqua capabilities.

As version 3.0 gets closer to a stable release it may be a solid option for Mac users when considering Microsoft Office or iWork.