I know that one of the frustrating things about switching from one computer to another is the process of moving things like your address book may gets lost in the shuffle. Moving from a PC to a Mac could complicate the issue even further. For me this was a major reason why I went to web based email as I knew that I could keep my contacts forever and never have to worry about moving them. But despite the ease of web based email, its just not as powerful as system based email applications. Thankfully to Google and Apple I can now have the best of both worlds!

QUICK AND EASY EXPORT

While in the past there have been a number of methods to get your Gmail contacts into your Mac Address Book, most required a third party application and for some reason something always complicated the process. Thanks to the ever increasing friendship between Apple and Google it seems that with the latest updates to Gmail, exporting contacts in to an Address Book Format is quick and easy.

After logging into a Gmail account navigate to your contact list. From there you can export all your contacts or create a contact group that includes the addresses you want included into your Address Book on your Mac. After creating a group simply click export and then select the group from the export drop down menu. Be sure to pick vCard format as the export format and save the download to your desktop.

IMPORT IN TWO EASY CLICKS

Open Address Book and select File >> Import >> vCards. Select the downloaded .vcf file and confirm the import and your Gmail/Google contacts will now be included in your Address Book and accessible from all your other Mac Applications. You can repeat the process if you update your Gmail contacts often. Address Book will only import the new contacts and/or update edited information.

The shared contact list and the new IMAP feature of Gmail makes it a great tool to use with Mail on your computer and on your iPod/iPhone.

Read this to Import Address Book Contacts to Gmail.

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Besides all of the really useful features that makes OS X stand out from Windows, there is also the spoken user interface (also known as speakable items). This nifty (big) little feature gives demonstrates how well polished the operating really is. The spoken user interface was developed mainly to assist people with disabilities, but since most macs also have built in microphones, anyone can use it. Instead of interacting with the computer using the keyboard and mouse, you can speak commands. The commands range from the simple telling you what day it is, to sending an email to someone in your address book (it will recognize their names too).

You can activate the spoken user interface under the “Speech” section of System Preferences. The system preferences screen looks like this:

Your first task is to enable speakable items by clicking the “on” radio button next to “Speakable Items”. Normally, this will enable your Mac’s internal microphone to start listening for voice commands as well as display the Speakable items interface window. I’ve noticed the microphones that come with macs are very sensitive to background noise so once you turned on speakable items you will want to click on the calibrate button to adjust the mic’s sensitivity as well as test your Mac’s “ears”.The calibration screen looks like this:

The speech recognition software can adapt itself to the person speaking and so calibration helps your mac “learn” your voice. The phrases to the left are actual commands your mac understands (there are lots more). Go ahead and calibrate, it’s a great moment when your mac hears you for the first time.

With speakable items on, you’re probably noticed a new little window appear that looks something like this:

This is the speakable items interface. The “Esc” means that I have to press the Escape key in order for my Mac to listen for voice commands. You can change that to another key in Speech Preferences. Also, you can have your mac listen for a special word instead of pressing a key. The little down arrow will bring up a menu where you can open a list of available speech commands or go to the speech system preferences. There is an impressive number of commands to help you accomplish tasks simply by using your voice. My personal favorite is still “Tell me a joke”. You really haven’t experienced all that OS X has to offer until it tells you a joke (or two).

I came across an application that enables the use of your Nintendo Wiimote on your Mac. DarwiinRemote can be downloaded at Sourceforge.net. Its a small application that uses both the motion sensors or the IR sensors to allow you to navigate around OSX as you would with your mouse.

1. Installation
Installation is easy, simple download the file and drag it to your applications folder. You can of course launch the application from the dmg file if you’re not sure you’ll want to keep it on your system.

2. Enable Bluetooth
The Wiimote will communicate with your computer through Bluetooth so make sure you have this enabled. You should be able to do this by selecting the Bluetooth icon on your menu bar and clicking Enable

3. Sync the Wiimote to your Mac
Open DarwiinRemote and push the 1 and 2 buttons on your wiimote simultaneously. This will put your wiimote in discover mode and DarwiinRemote will let you know when its found your wiimote.

If you have problems detecting the wiimote or can’t connect it to your system at all, close DarwiinRemote, open it again, and try to connect the wiimote to the system again. If this does not work. Go to System Preferences and then to Bluetooth. Remove the Wiimote from the device list and then open DarwiinRemote and try again. I had to do this once and it worked perfectly.

4. Using the Wiimote
Once your mac and the wiimote have been synced you should be able to control the pointer as you would with you mouse by enabling mouse. The application gives you the option to do so using the motion control or through IR control. IR works best but you may not have IR receivers setup on your computer. Motion control is a bit jerky but is fun to play around with as the mouse follows the movements you make with your hand.

The Great feature that the DarwiinRemote offers is the ability to pull up Front Row as you would with your Mac Remote Control. Pushing the B button pulls up Front Row and you can navigate around with the arrows and other buttons on the system. B will also return you to your desktop.

Conclusion
Overall, using the wiimote as your mouse can be fun to play with. The process only takes a few minutes and is as simple as clicking a few buttons. The ability to use the remote in place of the Remote Control for Front Row heavily outweighs the ability to use the remote as you would a mouse.

If you’re like me and have a number of songs or mp3 files in your iTunes library that are missing the name, artist, and album and you’re not sure who sings it you need to look no further.

ieatbrainz is an application for Mac OSX that uses the sounds from the song to help it determine what song it is and then updates the meta data information for the file.

To update your iTunes library, download ieatbrainz and then after launching the application, select the songs you want to update the information on and it will scan the files, compare them to the musicbrainz database and then display what it has determined to be the name of the song you’re looking up.

Be sure to look at each songs because sometimes it will offer a number of options that are potential matches. After you accept the suggested changes from ieatbrainz it will update your iTunes Library with the additional information.

After you’ve added the missing information, be sure to have iTunes go out and get the related album artwork so that you can browse your library in Full Screen mode on the latest version of iTunes.