But the iTunes Store is not the only web-based product from Apple that integrates well with Apple’s other popular products. There’s also MobileMe.

This is a service that provides its users with the ability to keep their email, contacts, and calendar up-to-date on all their devices automatically. MobileMe also provides a suite of web applications that let users access their information using a web browser, share photos and movies, host a website, and use an iDisk for online file storage.

The Price Is NOT Right

Considering the great ideas behind it, I can’t help but wonder why MobileMe receives far less attention than it should. Even from Mac users.

Maybe the main reason for this not-so-successful marketing attempt is the fact that MobileMe is not a free service. After the 60 days free trial, users should spare US$ 99 for a yearly subscription fee.

Actually, there’s nothing wrong about offering a paid service. The problem is, with everything that is available today online (and offline), you could assemble your own MobileMe-like features for free. And free is hard to beat.

Here are some options that you could use to have the similar features of MobileMe without having to open your wallet.

Matching the offers

Let’s break down MobileMe’s offers and then look at ways to match them.

1. Sync your contacts and calendars

With the help of GoogleSync, you could sync your Mac’s contacts and calendars to your smartphone.

The first thing you should do is to enable Address Book’s and iCal’s ability to synchronize with Google Mail and Google Calendar. Open Address Book and go to its Preferences (Command + Comma). Click Accounts, and give a checkbox to the “Synchronize with Google” option box and click “Configure”

Fill in your Google Account’s data and click OK.

Do the same with your calendar(s). Open iCal and go to the Preferences. Click Account and click Add.

Choose Google on the Account Type, fill in your Google account data and click “Create“.

Your Google account will appear and you could edit the information if you want to.

The next step would be to configure your smartphone to synchronize to your Google account using Google Sync. The supported devices are iPhone, Blackberry, Nokia S60 and Windows Mobile.

You can find the complete instructions on how to do this on the Google Sync page. Just choose the type of smartphone you have and click on the respective instructions.

Don’t forget to backup your data before and after the process. You can’t be too careful.

2. Access information online

If you set everything up right in the previous step, your information will automatically be available online through Google Mail and Google Calendar. So, no problem here.

3. Share photos and movies

You could use various online services like Flickr or Picasa Web Albums to share your photos and many other video sharing services like YouTube for movies. Alternatively, you could build your own Wordpress photo gallery for this purpose.

4. Website hosting

This is also something that you could build yourself. We’ve discussed about several places where you could host your site for free, a method to create your own self-hosted Wordpress blog, and create and publish your iWeb sites.

5. Online Storage

MobileMe provide its users with 20GB worth of online storage, but there are already many free online storage providers out there that offer even bigger (or nearly as much) storage space.

Unmatched offers

There are of course features of MobileMe that are irreplaceable, such as the ability to find a lost iPhone and secure it. The integration between all of the features is also a plus point for MobileMe.

After listening to a free audiobook entitled “Free” by Chris Anderson, I think Apple should change its marketing tactics for MobileMe to make the service more successful. Maybe the basic features of MobileMe should be available for free while users are given options to upgrade the services for a fee. But that is just my personal opinion.

Have you tried MobileMe? Do you know other free (and maybe better) alternatives?  Please share using the comments below.

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This is a royal pain in the ass, to say the least. I have tried lots of different programs to remove duplicate contacts on Windows Mobile devices in the past and had issues with all of them. They either didn’t work or they caused me more problems then I started with. But Contact Cleaner takes the cake.

This application and was written by Phil Chuang and I discovered it on the Windows Mobile Forum called Xda-Developers.com.

You can download the tiny cab file from his website here. The original link requires you to sign up, this one does not.

The application works on Windows Mobile 6.0, 6.1 and 6.5 (for you early adopters). I tried it out on my Windows Mobile 6.5 HTC Fuze.

Simply download the application and save it to your storage card or device. Then, browse to it on your device and run it.

Upon clicking it, you will be presented with the normal Windows Mobile installation screens. You can install it either to your main memory or your storage card. As you can see, it only uses 106KB of memory.

Once the install is complete, you will find the application in your Start Menu. It does not go into a folder so it should be at the bottom of your list like so:

I knew right off the bat that I did not have any duplicates. So, I created some near duplicates before I began to run the application, just to test it out. These contacts just had identical names as other contacts and no information (so they would be easily distinguished).

I left the default options to delete exact duplicates during my scan and hit Start. You can also choose to let Contact Cleaner find your dupes and delete them at the end. But it only deletes exact duplicates, meaning the data has to be exactly the same in both. If one has a second phone number but the first does not, they will not be deleted. This is exactly what I need!

I hit Start and was ready to rock and roll:

It ran through all of my contacts, letting me know if dupes were found as it went along.

Perfect. Just as I hoped, it found my 6 duplicate contacts (that only have the same name) and did not delete them. You can continue on to view and remove duplicate contacts but I decided to duplicate a contact and run it again.

I created an exact copy of this contact and synced my device. I then re-ran the application.

It found and deleted it! Nice. Do you use something to remove duplicate contacts on your Windows Mobile device? Do you have a duplicate horror story you want to share with us? Do so in the comments!

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I have found a solution to the problem, and it comes in the form of a Thunderbird extension called Email Address Crawler. It will crawl your inbox, outbox or any other folder you have for emails that aren’t in your address book. This way you can make sure to add all of your new contacts quickly.

After you install Email Address Crawler, all you have to do is right click on the folder you want to look through. There will be an option to in your menu to crawl through the email addresses in that folder.

Search Options

After clicking this option, a window will pop up that gives you options for the search parameters. This helps you refine the search of, in this case, your inbox.

As you can see, I elected to search the To and From fields in order to maximize my results. You can also choose the CC options, but I decided not to since I don’t get very many emails with anyone CCed. You’ll also want to set the number of occurrences you are looking for. If you set it too low, you might bring back spam emails or emails from people you don’t care about. I went with three occurrences, because I thought that if I had interacted with someone that much they are worthy of being in my address book.

You’ll also want to select which address book these new contacts will go to. I selected a new address book that I called ‘Crawled Contacts’. The reason behind this is that you aren’t given the choice of adding certain contacts. This will allow me to go through the contacts before I add them to my main address book.

Added Contacts

Clicking OK will just about immediately add whatever contacts it found to your address book. I tend to delete a lot of my emails, so I didn’t come up with very many contacts. Really, the only contacts that showed up were just another of my own emails.

This is a prime example of why you would want to have an intermediate folder to add the new contacts to.

Conclusion

Email Address Crawler is a great extension for Thunderbird, but it is only as good as how many emails you have in your folders. If you are like me and delete most of your emails, you may not get lots of value from it. However, if you have an overflowing inbox, this could be a great tool that will beef up your address book very quickly.

If you know of any other tools that extracts email addresses like Address Crawler does, please let us know about them in the comments.

As a Thunderbird user you might be also iterested in recently published 10 Great ThunderBird Addons You Must Have.

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It’s nice to have a picture of the person who is calling or whom you’re dialing. It adds a more personal touch. But it’s quite a lot of work to manually search for pictures of your friends and adding them to their contact information. The easier method would be to let your Mac do the work for you.

Who doesn’t have a Facebook account? I’m guessing that you would surely have added most of your friends on Facebook by now. Provided that your contacts’ information in Address Book are accurate (First name, Last name), I will show you how you can sync Facebook profile pictures to your mobile contacts – the easier way to manage contacts’ pictures.

Using AddressBookSync, you can search through all of your Facebook friends and find those who you have in Address Book and sync their profile pictures over. Here’s how to do it.

Firstly, download and copy AddressBookSync over to your Application folder and launch it. On initial launch, it will ask you to log in to your Facebook account and approve the application.

Once you’ve done that, it will search through your friends in Facebook and generate a list of matches i.e. the same contacts you have in Address Book. Here’s why you need to properly fill in the contacts’ first and last name. AddressBookSync depends solely on the names to find matches. That said, it is actually pretty smart. Names like Richard and Robert are also matched to Dick and Bob. It will match common short names automatically.

To further narrow or in this case, expand the matches – you can choose to match using only the last name. Now, the application will go through the friends you have in Facebook and it will ask you if the last names between a match corresponds with each other.

After the list of matches is generated, you can go through them individually to check if the profile picture is properly aligned. If it isn’t, all you need to do is double-click the picture to bring up the picture editor. With that, you can pan and zoom the picture until it is corrected. It’s worth noting that AddressBookSync grabs the highest resolution profile picture from Facebook. This is very useful for iPhone users.

If you’re an iPhone user, you will cringe when I tell you that if Address Book manages/edits the contact picture, only a thumbnail will appear when that contact calls you. But because AddressBookSync grabbed the highest resolution picture and synced it over to your iPhone, all you need to do is to ‘Edit Photo’ in your contact information to expand that picture to full-screen and save. There’s no workaround for this, unfortunately.

Besides profile pictures, this application will also sync your friend’s birthdays if they added it in Facebook. After syncing them into Address Book, you can use this workflow I created a while back which will send you weekly notifications if a birthday is coming up and automatically set alarms for them using iCal.

AddressBookSync will only work on Mac OS X 10.4 and higher. And as all things on MakeUseOf, it’s free. Let me know how it works out for you. Lastly, remember that in order to make the best out of this application, you will need to organize your contact information so that it matches your friends’ names on Facebook properly.

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Thankfully, there are a growing number of ways to use the internet to create, share and use your business card. Using these services, you can send your card to others, get contact information in your email (where all your contacts are anyway), and have the business card work with your existing address books, which are increasingly online.

Although there are many, here are five ways to bring your business card into the 2.0 World.

Retaggr

Retaggr is a business card, an “about me” page, and a signature to add to emails, blog posts, and anything else you can think of. When you create a card, you can embed it into emails, paste it onto your blog, or send it to someone. It’s a great tool for connecting with other people, and is very social-network heavy.

Retaggr lets you link to your profiles (on hundreds of sites), so you can find friends all over the Web. For more information, check out Kyle’s great article about Retaggr.

Dropcard

The thing I love about Dropcard is that it’s dead easy to use. While it doesn’t have any unique features to speak of, its delivery system is what makes it so great. When you meet someone, you send Dropcard a text saying “drop theperson’semail@theirdomain” and Dropcard sends all your contact information to their email. Most of us use contacts and email in the same location anyway, and Dropcard knows that.

There’s an iPhone version, lots of keyboard shortcuts, and a number of other great features. Another nice touch – you can have two different cards, a business card and a personal card. Customize them however you want, and give people only the information you want to.

Nuebbo

Nuebbo is a fully-featured contact manager, but also works great for giving people your personal information. You can import contacts from Google, Outlook or Windows Live Mail, and then send your contact information to others. Create one card or many, and send them to other people. Cards can be organized into categories, updated automatically by Nuebbo, and even downloaded as Points of Interest on your GPS (an unnecessary, but cool touch).

If you want a full address book, and not just a business card, Nuebbo’s a great one to try out. If you’re just looking for a simple business card to send to people, Nuebbo’s good, but not the best of the group.

Handshake

This one’s iPhone-specific, but deserves a mention. On your iPhone, boot Handshake. The application lets you send a business card or a picture to anyone else using the Handshake application, with the touch of a button. It’s a great way to exchange contact information with someone, right when you meet them.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see an application like this for the Blackberry or Windows Mobile in the near future.  For now though, if you meet a fellow iPhone user, a simple Handshake is all it takes to exchange your contact information.

Plaxo

Plaxo remains the gold standard online contact-manager. Plaxo syncs with Outlook, Google, Yahoo and others, automatically updates contacts’ information, has an integrated task list, and keeps everyone in contact.

Sending your card is easy, and it works really well. Plaxo even has a FriendFeed-like feature called “Pulse”, where you can see what your contacts are doing around the Web. Actually, ‘Friendfeed-like’ is a misnomer, because Plaxo did it first. Plaxo’s a great utility, and becomes unbeatable when all your contacts use it.

No longer is the business card a tiny, index card-like thing you put in your wallet, sit on for a while, try to find, and painstakingly enter onto your computer. With any of the services above, bring your business card to the Web, and make the sharing of contact information even easier.

You do everything else online, right? Why not your business card?

How do you manage your contacts and business cards? Online or on paper?

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Here’s one: iCal syncs your contacts’ birthdays from Address Book and creates a calendar for it. The problem is you can’t edit it to add an alarm in order to remind yourself about your friend’s birthday. It’s a simple issue, isn’t it? There just doesn’t seem to be a “fix” for it.

After vehemently browsing the Web for a free and simple solution, I got nothing. All I want is :

• the ability to add reminders for each contact’s birthday
• iCal to continuously sync with Address Book to update the Birthday calendar

Many users argue that the simplest solution is to manually add your contacts’ birthdays individually. True, it is the simplest but not the most time-efficient solution.

Then I stumbled onto what I’d like to think is the solution. It’s not very direct and requires the use of Automator but it does bring this whole birthday reminder conundrum to a temporary halt.

With the help of some existing Automator actions for iCal, I created my own workflow which in a nutshell, refreshes my contacts’ birthdays in Address Book, adds an editable Birthdays calendar in iCal (with alarms) and sends me weekly email reminders about upcoming birthdays. This workflow is set to run every week by adding it as an iCal plug-in so if there are any changes in Address Book, they will be reflected in iCal automatically after the workflow runs.

Sounds like a handful, doesn’t it? Don’t worry, I’ve written a short tutorial on how you can set this up for yourself. I’ve even attached the workflow at the bottom of this article for you to download and start using!

Step-by-step tutorial

I started by adding an Automator action called iCalBirthdays. This action searches my Address Book for the birthday of every contact and the results will automatically be added to a new calendar in iCal which you can name yourself. I aptly named mine “Birthday Reminder”. It also allows me to add an alert which can be configured to sound on a certain reminder date, the birthday itself or both. With that, technically, the issue is solved. But I went one step further.

Next, I added the Address Book action “Find People with Birthdays” and set it to find birthdays occurring in the upcoming week.

Then, I added the action “Get Contact Information” and checked only the First and Last Names; and the birthday boxes. Make sure “Add Labels” and “Combine Names” are also enabled, this will provide a more pleasing format if you have multiple contact birthdays during that week.

After the information is fetched, it is sent to the next action: “New Mail Message“. Enter your own email address as the recipient and a suitable subject e.g. “Upcoming birthdays”. The content of that email will be the information sent by the previous action.

Keep in mind that you have to select a different account to send this email to yourself. What I mean is, you can’t send this mail and receive it with the same email address. The Mail application will not register any emails sent by your own email address back to itself.

The final touch is adding the “Send Outgoing Messages” action. Lastly, choose “Save as Plug-in” in the File Menu, set a name for it and choose iCal Alarm from the drop-down menu. That will launch iCal and automatically add this workflow as an event in the Automator calendar. Here is where you’ll need to decide when this workflow should run. Set a day and time when your computer will most probably be powered on. Then set it to repeat weekly.

There you go! You have a workflow which is automatically set to refresh your birthday calendar weekly (with alarms) and also receive weekly updates about whose birthdays are coming up that week. The workflow will take approximately 1 minute to complete, depending on how many contacts you have and how many of them have their birthdays inserted.

And here it is, the completed workflow for you to download: Birthday Reminder and Alarm Combo

After downloading, unzip and open it with Automator to configure the “iCalBirthdays” action and don’t forget to input your email address in the recipient field in the “New Mail Message” action. Remember to choose different sending and receiving email accounts. Then continue from “Lastly, choose “Save as Plug-in in the File Menu” as per the instructions above.

I would appreciate any comments about the workflow and how to improve it. Hope this helps those in the same situation as I was in!

(By) Jackson Chung is a full-time medical student attempting to perform a juggling act with relationships, studies and his future.

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This week, I’ll be teaching you how to connect your phone to your Mac and sync data between them. You’ll be surprised how easy it is. The main reason most people sync devices is to prevent data loss and to easily recover data from a backup in any event that your device malfunctions.

The main applications that we’ll be looking at are iSync, Address Book and iCal, perhaps iPhoto as well.

But before we begin, you’ll need to check if your mobile device is compatible with iSync. Apple supports most mobile phones from the major manufacturers but there are some exclusions. Generally, most Sony Ericsson, Motorola and Nokia phones are compatible; on the other hand, Samsung being the black sheep, is a bit of a nuisance – they’ve got only 3 compatible phones. If you’ve got a relatively new phone (around 3 years old) it shouldn’t be a problem but it’s better to check and be sure. Additionally, syncing is performed either over a bluetooth connection (which most newer phones should have as standard) or through a sync cable so have those at the ready.

*In case your phone isn’t supported, I recommend Nova Media plugins for iSync. It’s not free but so far, it’s the only solution if you want to get it to work.

Right, let’s get cracking. The first step to syncing your phone with your Mac is to set up a bluetooth connection (or if you have a sync cable, just plug that in and connect your phone). Enable bluetooth on both your Mac and your phone and pair them.

There will be several interim steps i.e. entering a passcode on the phone and selecting services to use with the phone; have a read to understand what this whole process is about, then just click on ‘Continue’. Once they’re paired, launch iSync.

In iSync’s menu bar, select ‘Edit’ and ‘Add Devices’. It will then search for your phone so remember to keep the bluetooth running. Select your phone from the results to add it to iSync’s list of devices.

On the first sync, you will be asked if you want to merge the data from your phone and your Mac. You must select this option since you have no contacts in your Mac’s Address Book.

Once the synchronization process is over, you’ll be rewarded with your contacts in Address Book and your itinerary in iCal. Easy, isn’t it? Now, to tackle some of the random questions that most newbies may have:

Q: What if I make a change in my Mac’s Address Book and another change in my phone’s contact list? How will this reflect after synchronization?
A: iSync will always only sync the latest changes to each item. If more than a 5% change is detected, iSync will show a confirmation window where you may view the changes which will be made. This alert can be set to show at 5%, 25%, 50% or when any amount of data is modified.

Q: What if I accidentally delete a contact in my phone’s contact list? Will iSync re-sync them from my Mac?
A: Yup. iSync will always merge data to have a copy of each contact in both your phone and your Mac.

Q: Will iSync retrieve the photos I have in my phone?
A: Short answer — no. However, you can transfer them over manually. Here’s how.

• Click on the bluetooth icon in your menu bar and select browse device
• Choose your phone from the list
• A Bluetooth File Exchange window will then pop up allowing you to view the contents of your phone
• Select the files you want to copy over and press ‘Get’. (Usually, the phone’s file structure is pretty simple. From experience, I’ve only encountered folders labelled according to their content i.e. ‘Music’, ‘Pictures’, ‘Videos’, etc.)

So now, what do you do with your newly-acquired data? Well, for starters, you could edit them. Most people won’t bother re-arranging or properly labeling their contacts because their phones’ screens are so tiny and everyone knows how difficult it is to properly type on a numberpad. Now that your contacts are in Address Book, you can clearly see what’s what. Incomplete fields are more obvious. You can also add emails, addresses and birthdays to your contacts and even paste in a contact photo (if you haven’t already). Everything you do in Address Book will reflect on your phone upon synchronization (depending on the model, refer to the bottom of this page).

Your itinerary will also be copied to iCal. If you have always added new events on your phone, you will be relieved to see how easy it is to manage your life with iCal by comparison. Of course, when you’re on the run, you will always need your phone to add meetings/events on a day-to-day basis but once you reach home and after you’ve synced your phone with your Mac, everything will be laid in front of you on your [much] larger screen. Re-ordering and managing your schedule would then be much easier.

In iCal, you’ll have the option to view your events by the day, week or month. If you need to set a reminder for an event, just double-click it and press the ‘Edit’ button. The alarms will go off both on your Mac and on your phone so you’ll never have to worry about being late for a meeting.

If you haven’t noticed, there is a little pin on the bottom right-hand side of iCal — that’s the to-do list. Adding items onto the list will also sync over to your phone. Although, I have no idea how this feature would work on older phones which may not have to-do lists.

It doesn’t just stop on your Mac. Your contacts can be synced over to your iPod via iTunes so you’ll have an extra copy in case your phone goes kaput. Also, you could export your Address Book and calendar and save them online so that you could easily retrieve them from anywhere.

To sum up, iSync will retrieve contacts and schedules from your phone and add them into Address Book and iCal respectively, providing you with a backup of your data on your Mac. Simultaneously, that will also allow you to easily edit that information on your Mac and see your schedule span out on your screen.

(By) Jackson Chung is a full-time medical student attempting to perform a juggling act with relationships, studies and his future.

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