Subscribe by email
Follow us on Twitter Subscribe to our RSS Feed

iMovie Themes

Enhance the look and feel of your movies with iMovie Themes
Read More >>

Refurbished Macs

Want a Mac but don't want to spend a fortune? Get great deals with Refurbished Macs
Read More >>

Google Wave on the iPhone

Check out how well Google Wave runs on the iPhone
Read More >>

Sync Your Facebook Friends With iPhone Contacts

by Dan

The Facebook App for the iPhone has continually seen improvements over the past year that have allowed us to keep up with the latest happenings with our friends and family as they post their information out to the world.

Just recently Facebook updated their app again, making it even easier for us to keep in contact with our friends. The latest iPhone Facebook App updates include the ability to sync our contacts in our iPhone Address Book with phone, website, email, and other information our Friends provide to Facebook. In the past we described a way to add your Facebook friends to Address Book and we wanted to now bring you the latest and greatest way to keep Facebook and your iPhone Contacts in sync.

To sync your Facebook Friends with your iPhone Contacts:

  • Be sure to download the latest version of the iPhone App from the Apps Store, without it you will not be able to sync your Facebook Contacts
  • After your app is updated, Open Facebook on your iPhone. For me, the App appeared and asked right away if I wanted to sync my Facebook contacts with my iPhone contacts, but in case you skipped this message we’ll provide you with the rest of the steps
  • From the Facebook Landing page click the Friends button
    • Facebook1.jpg
  • Next, Click the Sync button in the top right corner
    • Facebook2.jpg
  • On the next screen slide to Yes the Syncing option, and if you’d like to pull in the profile pictures from Facebook, slide to Yes the Replace Photos option
    • Facebook3.jpg
  • Accept the agreement screen that displays to allow Facebook to start syncing up your Facebook Friends with your iPhone Contacts
    • facebook4.jpg
  • Your Facebook Friends information should start downloading from the Facebook server and syncing up with Address Book on your iPhone to keep the contact information of your friends up to date.
    • Facebook5.jpg

Now that you’ve pulled down the latest contact information from Facebook to your iPhone you can open up Address Book and see the changes to your contacts. Many of your Friends Contact information will include their latest profile picture on Facebook as well as a “website” link to their Facebook Profile.

Share this on Facebook Share this on Digg Share this on Twitter Share this on StumbleUpon Comments 4 Comments »

Quick Tip: Imported LinkedIn Contacts to Address Book

by Dan

We’ve recently described how to add your Facebook phonebook to Address Book as well as the steps needed to sync Address Book with your Google Accounts.

To continue with efforts to make your Address Book as comprehensive as possible, you may want to include all your LinkedIn.com business contacts.

Add LinkedIn Contacts to Address Book

To add your LinkedIn Contacts to Address Book:

  1. Navigate to LinkedIn.com and login to the site
  2. After Logging in, select Connections on the navigation bar
    3. LinkedIn_ My Contacts_ Connections.png
  3. At the bottom of the connections page select Export Connections
    4. LinkedIn_ My Contacts_ Connections-1.png
  4. Select vCard(.VCF file) from the Export Drop down, enter in the contents of the security image and then click Export.
    5. LinkedIn_ My Contacts_ Export LinkedIn Connections.png
  5. After the .VCF file downloads, open it with Address Book and confirm the details of the contents you’re importing. Merge the files that should be merged and allow new entries to be added for those you don’t already have.

Adding LinkedIn.com contacts to Address Book will make you more and more likely to utilize the application in your every day activities. The more relevant the data it houses the more important it will be to you. Gather as much information about the people you want to keep in contact with and let Address Book keep that information organized for you.

Share this on Facebook Share this on Digg Share this on Twitter Share this on StumbleUpon Comments 1 Comment »

Add your Facebook Friends Phone numbers to Address Book

by Dan

Update: Facebook released an update to their iPhone App that makes it quick and easy to sync your Facebook Friends with your iPhone Address Book Contacts. If you have an iPhone, this is a great way to import your Facebook Information to Address Book on your Mac.

When Apple announced the iPhone the importance of the Address Book application increased significantly. Address Book was now not only the tool to keep the various contact details about your friends, family, and work colleagues but was now the way you managed your phonebook on your iPhone.

Over the past few years Facebook.com has emerged as a great way to keep in touch with your friends and family. One of the optional fields in Facebook that your friends can make available to you is their phone number. Now, you can import your Facebook Friends phone numbers to Address Book.

Firefox & Greasemonkey

The first thing you need to be able to import your Facebook phone numbers to Address Book is the Firefox Web browser and a plugin called Greasemonkey.

Head over to the Firefox website and download the web browser if you don’t already have it installed on your computer.

Firefox web browser | Faster, more secure, & customizable.png

After you’ve installed Firefox you need to install the Greasemonkey plugin. This plugin will allow you to utilize a free application to gather all the Facebook phone numbers from our account.

Navigate to the Greasemonkey plugin page and click the add to firefox button.

Greasemonkey __ Firefox Add-ons.png

After Greasemonkey is installed the application will ask to restart Firefox. Restart the browser and navigate to the Greasemonkey script page that you will utilize to get your Facebook friends phone numbers and import them into Address Book. Click install to add the script to your Greasemonkey collection.

Firefox.png

Getting Your Facebook Friends Phone Numbers

Now that you’ve added Firefox, Greasemonkey, and the Greasemonkey script to get Facebook phone numbers, head over to http://www.facebook.com/friends/. Login to Facebook if you’re not already logged in and click on the Phonebook button.

Facebook | All Friends.png

Once the page has loaded, in Firefox click Tools >> Greasemonkey >> User Scrip Commands… >> Export Facebook Phonebook.

Spotlight.png

The application that will export the data may require you to login with a Google Account but will then transfer you to a page where it will allow you export your friend’s phone numbers into Address Book.

Adding to Address Book

Once you’ve ran the Greasemonkey script to export FacebookpPhone numbers and have found yourself on the AddressBooker menu, select Export as vCard. In the popup window that appears, select Open with Address Book and then press Ok.

Opening addressbooker.vcf.png

Address Book should then launch and ask you to confirm that you’d like add the contacts to Address book. Allow Address book to import the new new vCard details and then merge the contact details on any overlapping imported contacts.

Once sync’d, Address Book on your desktop and iPhone will now contain the name and phone numbers of your friends who have shared their number on Facebook.

For additional details on the script and application used to export the phonebook details from Facebook visit Brad’s Life (the creator of the script and application).

NOTE: latest version of the script is working for some people. Others are still receiving errors.

Stay fashionable, go wireless with a Plantronics Voyager 510 Bluetooth Headset for your iPhone.

Share this on Facebook Share this on Digg Share this on Twitter Share this on StumbleUpon Comments 28 Comments »

Automator Tip #5: Add Address Book Contacts to Gmail

by Dan

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
contacts.png

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
Gmail - Contacts - dhinckley@gmail.com.png

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.

Share this on Facebook Share this on Digg Share this on Twitter Share this on StumbleUpon Comments 5 Comments »

Import Gmail Contacts to Address Book

by Dan

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 Maccould 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.

Get more tips like this by subscribing to Maciverse.com Its free!

Share this on Facebook Share this on Digg Share this on Twitter Share this on StumbleUpon Comments 28 Comments »