MakeUseOf » contact manager

Try Out Hello & Food: Two Stylish Evernote Apps For the iPhone

Bakari Chavanu — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 23:30:51 +0000

For many of us savvy computer users, Evernote is among the top 10 essential apps for our computer and mobile devices. Even as a free app, Evernote provides a lot of online storage and app space to stuff notes, web clippings, screenshots, small PDFs, etc.

Though Evernote is just a file cabinet for collecting all sorts of stuff, its attractive design and simple user interface make it stand out above the rest.

And it is also its design appeal that makes Evernote’s two recently released iPhone and iPod touch apps, Hello and Food, worthy of a download.

Evernote Hello

On a few occasions I’ve taken out my iPhone and recorded the contact information of people I’ve met. It’s no big deal, for it’s part of what you do with a smartphone. I’ve also handed my phone to others and asked them to type in their contact information for me. Again, no big deal, but that’s exactly what Evernote Hello app does. It’s a simple way to collect someone’s contact information, except the user interface looks more like a greeting card than the techie text fields of an address book.

Let’s say you’re at network business meeting, event, or party and you meet someone who you want to keep in touch with it. You launch Hello on your iPhone, tap the + button, and then hand that person your phone. Your recipient enters his or her contact information and then snaps a photo of him or herself using the iOS self-facing camera.

The user interface for Hello consists of your photo and a personal small greeting that I would imagine — for I haven’t tried it on anyone yet — would make the recipient feel more comfortable about entering information into your phone.

If the recipient includes an email address, your contact information along with your snapped photo gets automatically emailed to your recipient. This email feature alleviates the problem of your contact not having an iPhone with the app installed on it to exchange information. (Remember the old Bump app that required you to “bump” another person’s iPhone to exchange information? Yeah, right…how many people did you ever get around to bumping with?)

Now of course if you meet someone who would give you a dazed look when handing them your iPhone, you could simply enter the information yourself and snap their photo, making sure you switch the lens direction of the camera.

Personally I can’t wait to use this app, for I can’t count how many times I’ve lost someone’s business card or didn’t have pen and paper to write down their contact information. I use my iPhone as my wallet now, so an app like this is perfect for storing contact information. The contact information you receive is also synced to your Evernote account for instant backup, but unfortunately it doesn’t get copied to your Address Book.

Of course with the first version of an app like this, there are many things you wish it could or would not do. First off, the camera snaps four photos, all of which are retained in the app. (Thankfully they are not copied to your device’s Camera Roll.) However, the camera starts snapping photos when the person raises the iPhone to his face. This may feel a little awkward for some users, which will probably mean retaking the photo several times to get it “right.”

It would be better if the recipient could just select one photo from the four that are snapped, though that would take away from the mini slideshow effect for each of your contacts on the homepage.

It’s also great that your contact information is sent to the recipient, but it would be even better if you could somehow select from a few previously setup profiles, say one for business and one for social contacts.

And many users will wonder why they can’t add their Facebook info, like they can their Twitter address.

Evernote Food

Evernote Food is another simple information gathering app that is quite frankly similar to how you probably already use Evernote or another note application that can also capture images.

Evernote Food has a clean easy-to-use interface, in which you simply launch the app, tap the + button, and snap a photo of a memorable meal that you have eaten at home or at a restaurant.

I have already started such an image collection in the aNote app I use on my iPhone. But honestly, I will now start using Food because the layout is more attractive.

Food will also record, using GPS integration, the location in which you take a photo, as well as allowing you to tag your images and write your own captions and additional notes.

You can share your captured content via e-mail, Twitter or your Facebook account.

The photos you take in Food are also copied to your Camera Roll, and the content can be saved to a notebook in your Evernote account.

Food might be very useful for recording recipes, restaurant meals and menus, wines and special types of coffee that you want to remember. But this Evernote app doesn’t have a folder structure, nor can you search content by tags, which are used in your Evernote account and related apps.

Let us know what you think about Evernote Hello and Food. As free apps, requiring iOS 5.0 or later, they are so well designed that you will want to check them out for their sheer simplicity.

Import & Group All of Your Contacts In One Place With Neiio

Steve Campbell — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 23:31:25 +0000

Do you have a central contacts list? It’s pretty difficult to nowadays. In my case, it’s a near impossibility. I’ve simply changed services too many times, failing to copy all of my contacts over each time I move. With email alone, I’ve changed between Yahoo, Hotmail, Outlook, and Gmail over the last 5-6 years. Facebook’s probably where all of my most up-to-date contacts are, but it’s really just my friends and personal acquaintances there.

You know what we could all use? A consolidation tool. You know, something that will connect with all of my old services and pull all of my contacts into one complete list. In this article, I’m going to show you a web application that can help you do just that, because let’s face it, we’re never going to go through and do it manually.

What Is Neiio?

Neiio is a free service that lets you update, save, and export your contacts across different platforms. It allows you to import contacts from various profiles, including Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn, where you can organize them into groups. And once you got everything just the way you like it, you can export your contacts to apps like Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, or any program that supports the Microsoft Excel format.

Neiio can also convert contacts from your iPhone, Android, or Blackberry device, eliminating duplicates along the way. When contacts are imported, they are alphabetized and ready to be sorted.

The Process

To get started using Neiio, head over to the homepage and click on the ‘Need an account? Subscribe!’ link located under the Login button. Then just provide your name along with your desired username and password and you’re all set. You’ll need to confirm your email address before continuing.

After you confirm your email address, you can begin importing your contacts from all the other services you’ve been using prior to discovering Neiio. Facebook, LinkedIn, Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, and Outlook are featured on the app. Clicking on one of them will give you the option to connect to your account and import your contact list.

Neiio will import contacts from all of those services and then list them in alphabetical order. To create groups, click on Organize (step 2) at the top of the screen. Neiio will create smart groups based on how you currently have them grouped, like if you’ve listed people as ‘Family’ on your Facebook page.

To export contacts, click Export and choose which service you want to export contacts to. You can then choose which information will be exported (names, numbers, emails, etc.). If you’ve imported and grouped contacts from several accounts, you can also choose which groups you want to export. Just select your desired platform or file format and export. Both the Excel and vCard format are supported.Select either a mobile platform, an email service or a file format to export the contacts to.

Conclusion

The idea behind Neiio is simple yet useful enough to be of interest to you and I. Networking is a big proponent of making professional connections and being social on the web, and it’s a good idea to be able to get to any one of your contacts’ information if you need to. What do you think of Neiio?

3 Free Dialing Pad & Contacts Apps That Make Calling on Android Easier [Android]

Matt Smith — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 15:31:09 +0000

One of the most frequently used apps on many Android smartphones is the dialer, which is often only so-so. The dialer on my HTC Thunderbolt, for example, has always felt a slow and clunky, and doesn’t allow for customization.

As with any other function on an Android phone, these shortcomings can be addressed with third-party apps. Let’s have a look at three that improve the quality of the dialer and contacts experience free of charge.

Angel Dialer [2.0+]

If you’re looking for a simple and quick replacement for the default dialer and contacts app, Angel Dialer may be your best bet. There’s not quite as much to this Android calling app as some of the competition, but the basics are there. The dialer, contacts, groups and favorites are all available as part of one speedy interface. Most dialer apps have a tendency to lag just slightly from time to time, but I didn’t encounter that with Angel Dialer.

There are no themes available, but there are some customization options available which can be used to slightly change the interface. The only one I absolutely recommend checking out is the Page Animation option. When turned off, this app should perform well even on relatively old devices.

The free version of this app is ad supported. Those annoyed by ads can opt for the Pro version, which is functionally identical and priced at $1.93. Both versions require Android 2.0 and up.

DW Contacts & Phone [2.1+]

This powerful dialer and contacts replacement offers the most functionality of the three apps here. In addition to the standard dialer, contact, group and favorite tabs, the interface has several more options for sorting information such as events, which displays upcoming calendar events related to contacts in your phone.

But wait, there’s more! A sort feature available makes it possible to display contacts by first name, last name, frequency of contact, and more. There’s also a call filter that can temporarily block calls from specific people or groups of people. There’s even extensive support for interface customization.

DW Contacts & Phone is supposedly ad supported, but the ads only seem to appear in the Toolbox section, and only advertise the $9.98 Pro version. Free users also have a few features disabled, such as the background service for contact events, which means the app won’t automatically remind you about them. Both require Android 2.1 and up.

Go Contacts [2.0+]

The Go series of apps is one of the most popular on the Android Market. Most of them are popular because they are free, filled with features, and offer extensive customization via themes. All of this is true of Go Contacts which, in spite of the name, includes a refresh of the dialer and the contacts in one package.

Features includes easy group support, favorites support, and an interface that can work with both portrait and landscape phone positions. The most unique feature, however, is the theme support that is built into the app. Only two themes are available by default, but a wide variety is available for download through the app’s interface. Those who care about their phone’s appearance will enjoy browsing the themes to find one that’s appealing.

Go Contacts is not ad supported, and no Pro version is available. It requires Android 2.0 and up.

Conclusion

There are a number of dialer and contact apps available that aren’t covered here, including some popular options such as Dialer One. These three are my favorites, however. Currently, I use Go Contacts on my own smartphone.

Do you have any other Android calling apps that aren’t covered here? As always, feel free to let us know in the comments!

Insight.ly – An Elegant Google-Based CRM With An Attractive Free Plan

Erez Zukerman — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 22:31:16 +0000

If you run a small business, you will know how challenging it can be to maintain communication with all of your customers and sales at the same time without losing track or forgetting to follow up. If you’re fortunate enough to have more than one person in your sales team, then you may also experience uncoordinated sales reps, each talking to the same customer about different things. This is a what a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system is for, and insight.ly is one such CRM, with an attractive free plan and a strong focus on Google CRM services.

Insight.ly is a part of the Google Apps Marketplace. If you wish to install it, you will need to provide it with ample permissions to access lots of information stored in your Google Apps accounts, such as your contacts, calendar information, and more. Understandably, you may not be too keen on granting an app such extensive permissions just to give it a spin, which is why I went ahead and did just that.

This is the dashboard, which is the first thing you see once you register. Now let’s look at the settings:

The list of settings actually goes on, but this should give you an idea of what you can configure. If you’ve ever used a CRM before, terms such as “Pipelines” and “Relationships” would probably seem familiar. But if this is your first crack at a CRM, insight.ly offers a so-called Concept Guide (PDF), which is a 17-page text-heavy overview of all of these terms. If manuals aren’t really your thing, you might be pleased to know that some of the more cryptic screens contain built-in explanation text:

The heart of a Customer Relationship Management solution is obviously….customers. And relationships. Which is where insight.ly’s contact import option comes in handy:

When you click the Gmail import option, insight.ly quickly shows a list of all of your Gmail contacts, letting you select which ones you want to import. Once you make your selection, the actual import isn’t instant – it takes a few moments, and insight.ly notifies you it’s done using an email.

Contacts are individuals; but sometimes you may want to keep track of a company or an agency – in other words, an Organization. Adding an organization looks like this:

Once you add an organization, you can see your organization’s history with them at a glance:

This is a supremely useful feature, and is much better than a Gmail search, because it shows what everyone in your organization (not just you) did for or with everyone in that organization (even with people you don’t know).

The next tab is Opportunities. An Opportunity is basically a sales lead – a chance to make some dough, or to otherwise forward the purpose for which your organization was established:

You can also specify how much money an opportunity is worth, the probability of winning it (not an accurate science, obviously), and an estimated close date. Most importantly, you can assign a single individual as responsible for that opportunity, so it’s very clear who’s working on it.

Insight.ly also supports projects, which are collections of tasks. No need to go through the interface here – it’s pretty much what you’d expect. It also supports email, but in an interesting way. Rather than plug directly into your Gmail stream (as a Google-based service), it provides you with a forwarding address. When you want to record an email in Insight.ly, you forward it to this address, and insight.ly files it under the correct contact.

Bottom Line

Insight.ly is simple, almost utilitarian. But it’s a very handy Google CRM solution, especially if you’re just coming to grips with the concept. Its free plan allows for up to three users and a maximum of 2,500 contacts, and does not have a time limitation. If you have a small business, you might make use of this plan for quite some time, until you grow out of it. If you’ve been struggling to find a way to keep track of your customers, give Insight.ly a spin.

Twezr – Better Way To Stay In Sync With Your Friends And Contacts [iPhone]

Steve Campbell — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 23:31:53 +0000

How close are you with the people you have listed under Contacts on your phone? My guess is pretty close, seeing as you take them with you everywhere you go. If this is the case, I would also bet that you reach some of these people in multiple ways, like Twitter perhaps, or Facebook.

Twezr gives your contact list a major upgrade while still enabling you to see your friends and other contacts in the same place. If you have an iPhone, Twezr is an essential app. Imagine being able to look at the contact list on your phone and see emails from your friends, Facebook messages, and direct messages on Twitter, all in one place. See the benefits?

In this article, I’ll be taking you through the ins and outs of this application, showing you everything you can do with it.

What Can I Do With Twezr?

Twezr is your personal organizer – the best way to stay in sync with your close friends and co-workers.

Essentially, Twezr (App Store link) organizes all of your contacts for you. It takes all of the content they’ve shared with you (emails, tweets, etc.) and it puts it in one place on your phone. This allows you to quickly view and respond to the people you’re closest with, even if you aren’t near your computer. No longer will you have to spend all of your excess time logging in and out of your various accounts or running different apps.

One of Twezr’s key features includes generating a prioritized To See list with your contacts. It’s what tells you when you have shared items from your friends via email, Facebook, and Twitter.

You can also prioritize your contacts based on how frequently you’ve interacted with them, which offers you a way of sorting your contact list by the people you talk to and interact with the most. Twezr organizes all of the messages you get so they’re easy to sift through.

Aside from seeing when you get a message, you can also read and respond to your emails, DMs, tweets, and wall posts right within the app. If you have multiple Twitter or Facebook accounts, you can view those too. You can also post status updates on multiple accounts, which is a key feature.

Think incoming messages will be hard to keep track of with Twezr? The app also features an intuitive color-coding system, as well as multiple viewing options, like sorting by contact, message type, or platform.

Lastly, the search capabilities you get with Twezr are phenomenal. You can run a full text search across all your email and incoming messages, as well as search all your contacts by their first/last name, email address, company name, or Twitter handle.

To view some of the benefits you’ll be getting with Twezr, check out this short YouTube video:

Conclusion

Twezr lets you combine the profiles of all your contacts across iPhone, Microsoft Exchange, Google, Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL, IMAP accounts, Facebook, and Twitter and it creates a single comprehensive profile for each.

One thing I forgot to mention was how easily you can make phone calls, send SMS, email, Facebook, or Twitter messages with Twezr, which is definitely a plus. All-in-all, I was thoroughly impressed with this iPhone app. What do you think of it?

4 Android Apps that Link Your Contacts With Facebook

Ryan Dube — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 23:30:40 +0000

If there is anything that I always forget to do, it’s maintain my contact list. For years, I tried to keep a current list, but my family or friends would move, their address and phone numbers would change – and inevitably my entire mobile address book would be completely outdated. There has never been a very good way of “automatically” updating contact lists. However, now people willingly submit and update their own contact details online, so what better way to maintain an updated contact list than to extract and sync it all from Facebook?

I decided to search for the best mobile address book applications that could automatically connect to and sync up with all of my Facebook friends. The following four applications from the Android Market are the best apps to accomplish this amazing feat of contact automation.

EboBirthday

My favorite contacts application, even though it’s the simplest, is EboBirthday. Keeping track of birthdays is something that I’m notoriously bad at. I forget my own birthday, let alone my brother’s or sister’s. Thankfully, EboBirthday comes to the rescue with an app that can import birthday information from your Facebook or Google contacts, or from any previous birthday lists you might have been trying to maintain.

The beauty of this is that it acts like a central repository for all of your birthday data. Once you’re connected to Facebook, you’ll never forget another birthday again. On the downside, not everyone is completely honest about their listed birthday on Facebook. So, for those contacts, you’ll probably have to update manually.

Download EboBirthday with this QR code:

PicDial for Facebook

Remembering birthdays is nice, but the most valuable part of being plugged into Facebook is that it’s essentially a database of contact information that auto-updates itself. For that reason, it is the best source to sync up to if you want to maintain your phone’s contact list without any effort on your part. A very cool app for doing this is called PicDial. PicDial can pull in friend data from either Facebook or MySpace.

It can also automatically use your own profile picture on Facebook for an image to display on your friend’s phone when you call them.

Once all of your friends’ data is uploaded, including phone numbers, email addresses and any other contact information they’ve offered, you will finally have the following quick-dial pad. It’s like a speed-dial app that lets you call people instantly by just tapping on their picture.

Download PicDial with the following QR code.

ContApps

One of my favorite apps to connect my Facebook contacts with my Android address book is ContApps. It not only pulls in photos and contact info from your Facebook friends list, but it’ll also show you your friends’ latest Facebook status update as well. The main page looks a lot like PicDial’s speed-dial screen, but I found that the ContApps list wasn’t quite as well organized or easy to navigate.

What I liked the most about this app was the individual screen for each friend. Everything you need is all in one place, the person’s birthday, work email, home email, IM contact and phone number.

The buttons at the bottom are pretty cool. Social feeds doesn’t quite work yet as far as I can tell, but the “Google It” button will Google the person’s name – so you can view Internet details about the person whenever you like. From reviews I’ve seen, it also shows you the location of your friends and it pulls in Twitter data as well. As I mentioned above, you can view the person’s current Facebook status by tapping on their picture.

Overall, I think this is a useful app and goes a long way toward connecting the Android address book with popular social networks. If you want to give it a shot and use it to import your Facebook contacts, you can download it with the following QR code.

AddressBook for Android

By far, my favorite app to connect all of my favorite social networks with my Android address book is, aptly named, AddressBook for Android. After you download this app, you’ll be prompted to download all of the additional plug-ins that you want – such as one to connect to Facebook and another to connect to Twitter or YouTube.

Once your contacts are imported from those social networks, they’re displayed in a nice looking contacts list. This is meant to replace the standard Android address book, and throughout you’ll find all sorts of other features incorporated into it, such as a button for an emergency number (which you can program) and a one-touch connection to look up local movie listings.

I really like this app because it’s clean, fast, and it just works as advertised. You can add-on the features you want, or just leave off the ones you don’t.

Download AddressBook with the following QR code.

So, give a few of these address books a test drive and import your contacts into your Android mobile phone. Once you do, you’ll never have to worry about keeping track of contact details or making changes. Finally, we’ve entered a world where information gets automatically updated for you.

Did you pick any of these apps? Do you know of any others that you like more? Share your insight in the comments section below.

Image credit: Ricardo Santeugini

Manage Your Personal Information Easily with myPortablePIM

Varun Kashyap — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 22:31:26 +0000

Keeping track of how things are going, whom to contact, who your friends are, not forgetting important dates, all of this is part of modern life. Naturally managing such personal information is critical and having a helping hand doesn’t hurt.

Personal Information Managers or PIMs (as they are frequently known as) help you manage everything from appointments to emails to notes to reminders. If you use a computer for keeping track of all such things or if you spend a major part of your day on a computer you must try a Personal Information Manager. It is so much better and streamlined than using different software to manage different aspects or trying to squeeze everything inside post it notes!

myPortablePIM is an excellent Personal Information Manager, which you can download here. The software doesn’t require installation, just extract the downloaded zip file, run the executable and you are good to go. Being a PIM application, myPortablePIM has to keep track of a variety of information and be resourceful and feature rich enough to be easy to use, yet powerful at the same time. Gladly, it does so very well.

Let’s have a look at all the features that myPortablePIM has to offer and how it can help you manage your personal information.

A Calendar

myPortablePIM offers an excellent calendar functionality. You can easily create and manage events, tasks and reminders using the calendar view. In addition to that, the calendar also offers the usual monthly, weekly, daily and yearly views and supports the iCal format as well.

Reminders & Tasks

Although the line between a calendar and tasks and reminders is a little blurred and you might be able to use either of these to serve your purpose, it is nice to have them all available, allowing you to work with them the way you like.

Notes

You can create notes from within myPortablePIM. You can format and customize the text to your liking. Notes can be exported in Rich Text Format, if you need to use them elsewhere. In addition to that you can also create quick notes for smaller texts. The quick notes appear as a list that you can refer to again later.

Address Book

Address Book is your contacts manager inside myPortablePIM. It supports import/export in vCard format.

Password Manager

myPortablePIM lets you manage your passwords as well. You can store your passwords for different sites and accounts so that you don’t have to remember them or just in case you forget them. The stored passwords are protected by a master password. Entering the master password correctly would give you access to all your passwords.

In addition to the features mentioned above, myPortablePIM can also check your Gmail account for new mails. It also features an RSS reader allowing you to keep tabs on your favorite sites and resources from within your Personal Information Manager. The software also allows you to password protect the information it manages.

Moreover you can create custom launchers and make use of the 2 desktop view to view more information with a single click. You can also customize date/time format and language using the configuration dialog.

Since the software is portable you can use it equally well on a USB drive. All the information that myPortablePIM manages is stored inside the myPortablePIM folder, so you can easily carry it along with all the required information on a USB drive. Fire off the application, make necessary edits and the data is stored back within the same folder. You can even sync the folder with your computer using an external sync tool if you so desire.

Overall myPortablePIM is a very good option to manage the variety of personal information that we have to keep track of these days. It would have been great if it could sync with the web or a mobile device like the iPhone. If you don’t rely heavily on such synchronization then you should definitely look into myPortablePIM and see if it suits your needs.

How do you manage all your personal information? Do you use a PIM?

How To Move Your Contacts From Windows Mobile To Android

Simon Slangen — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 17:30:58 +0000

Let’s face it, Windows Mobile is losing control of the mobile market. More and more people find themselves with an Android or iPhone.

Most problematic in this big telephone switch, is having to move contacts from Windows Mobile to Android. Calendars expire and pictures can be copied, but contacts often hide away in a very phone-specific corner.

Using your SIM card to transfer contacts is one option but with large address books and SIM-locked phones, it’s just not possible. Below, we’ll show you a ridiculously simple and OS-independent method to move contacts from Windows Mobile to Android.

What You’ll Need

Your old Windows Mobile phone
A web browser
A Gmail address

Ironically, the Gmail address might be most tricky for some people. If you haven’t got one already (shame on you), create one now, and set it up in your phone. It’s as easy as adding your credentials in the Android options.

Step One – Exporting Contacts with TBexport Contacts

What we want to do first is export our contacts to a format that’s easy to work with — CSV. Most other sites will tell you to sync with Outlook to do this but let’s be honest, not everyone uses the application.

Instead, we’re going to use TBexport Contacts, short for ThunderBird Export Contacts. This nifty Pocket PC application will allow us to export all contacts (phone numbers and email addresses) with a tick of the stylus.

Download the software archive, and drag its contents to an easy-to-reach location on your Windows Mobile device.

Use the file explorer on your Windows Mobile phone to browse to the TBExport file, and open it. Next, specify a location to export your contacts and hit the Export button.

You’ve now got your contacts exported somewhere on your phone. Either copy it to your computer or leave your phone plugged in, but don’t forget the location — you’re going to need it in the second step.

Step Two – Importing Contacts to Gmail

Open the Gmail account linked to your phone. Head to the Contacts tab, and select Import module in the top-right corner. Browse to the CSV file you’ve exported in the first step, and press Import. You’ll be shown an overview of all the imported contacts.

And that’s all you need to do. Find a wireless hub to connect your cellphone to the internet, or use your mobile carrier. Your Android will automatically syncronize its address book with that in your Gmail account. Twiddle with your thumbs for a while, and your old mobile contacts will magically start to appear.

While you’re still in Gmail, it’ll definitely prove worthy to check for duplicate contacts. This feature is also located in the Contacts tab. Gmail will search your contact list for duplicates, also giving you the option to merge several email addresses, phone numbers and even profile URLs under one name. You might still have some cleaning up to do, but this will take care of the biggest mess.

Are you aware of another better way to move contacts to your Android – perhaps eliminating the need for a Gmail address? Be sure to let us know in the comments section below!

Osmo – Free Light Contact Management & Calendar Software

Karl L. Gechlik — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 15:31:32 +0000

Do you hate using Microsoft products? Do you instead want to use a free, lightweight, easy to use calendar and contact management application?

Well I needed something very lightweight for a project I was working on. My requirements were to use a small amount of memory, be cross-platform, we needed a calendar, Tasks, Contacts, Notes. Last of all, it needed to be easy and intuitive.

I went looking and I found a little application quickly called Osmo on Sourceforge. It fit the bill to a tee. You can find the project’s page over at this link here and the authors home page is over here.

The Windows download for this free contact management software is a measly little 4.6MB. The application is available for Windows or Linux and is released under the GNU General Public License.

After a easy installation of next, next, next you will see this screen:

On the calendar screen we have an easy to use calendar which display the current time, day of the year, amount of days till the year is over, week number, the amount of days you have marked as well as the moon phase. Click on one of the days and enter notes in the text box like so.

You can click on the timeline icon at the bottom of the screen where you can insert a timeline. I chose 8 hours in 1 hour intervals and I now see this:

You can fill in your information as needed. It is not Outlook but then again Outlook running at under 7MB of memory at its peak would never happen. No matter how hard you try you will always be closer to 100MB of memory than 10MB like Osmo. You can change the color of days on the calendar so you can tell what’s what from a quick glance.

Next up is the tasks tab. Here you can set up your to-do lists or other tasks and you can create categories and filter by them. They get a due date and a summary.

After you hit the add new task button you will see this screen where you can fill in the information. There is a check box to enable a sound notification when the task has come due. It won’t light up unless you change the no due date box. You can also choose priorities including high, medium and low. Nothing revolutionary but very lean and awesome.

The next tab is your contacts ““ you can’t have free contact management software without the contacts right?

There is a show birthdays button that will show you all the birthdays at a glance for easy reference. The button looks like a present up there in the task bar.

The notes tab gives you a place to…um…write and read notes. Big shocker! Then we have our options. We all love our options right? You can choose your fonts, color highlighting and more for each tab independently.

And did I tell you it runs at less than 7 MB of memory but it also runs on slow as molasses machines? So I was able to equip 10 machines over 10 years old with Windows 2000 Pro on them to run this for a small charity organization. It turned out well!

Do you have other lightweight, free contact management software alternatives for bogged down commercial solutions? Post them in the comments!

Gist – A Relationship Manager for your Professional Networks and Business Contacts

Mahendra Palsule — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 18:00:33 +0000

Gist takes elements of MS Outlook and LinkedIn, adds a dollop of social networking, and brings you a new business networking techniques to manage your contacts and control information overload.

It is a cool new “Relationship Manager” that recently launched publicly in beta. Gist is not for casual users, rather, it’s a one-of-its-kind service for professional users that bridges key gaps between other popular services. For personal use, you should checkout Life.IO.

What is Gist?

Gist aims to help you control information overload by focusing on people and companies that are important to you. First, Gist gets information from your inbox and social networking accounts to build a database of your network. It then monitors the web for information about the people and companies in your network. Using the concept of “importance”, it then provides customizable views of people and companies, showing you news, blog posts, tweets, etc. for each of them. Your Dashboard becomes a “intelligent reader” thus giving you insight into critical updates that are important to you.

Get Started By Connecting Accounts

Gist allows you to connect a variety of sources using built-in business networking techniques to build your network database. At present, you can integrate your email from Outlook, Gmail or any service that supports IMAP. Your professional contacts can come from LinkedIn, Salesforce, or any CSV file. Note that Gist doesn’t connect with LinkedIn at present, hence you need to export and import your LinkedIn contacts.

Social networking contacts can be imported from Facebook and Twitter. Gist also offers an Outlook plug-in so that you can use it from within Outlook. To use Gist effectively, you will need to personalize it as described later in this article, but first let’s look at the powerful views Gist offers.

Dashboard View

The Dashboard is your top-level view to get all the news about your network. It is a RSS news feed reader, Twitter client, and Calendar rolled into one, with optional widgets showing shared links and attachments received in your email inbox.

You can customize the Dashboard to show Recent News, or news from people you’ve recently contacted or added. Information displayed can be filtered by date, content source, importance and tags. You can search to quickly find people, companies, attachments, or shared links.

You can also share any information item from your Dashboard to Facebook or Twitter. In this way, Gist goes beyond an “intelligent reader” to being a “intelligent networking” tool.

People and Companies View

The People and Companies tabs organize your contacts according to importance. It shows your email history and stats, the last time you were in contact, number of contacts from a company, and so on, for each person and company in your network.

You can search to find and manage contacts, or add new contacts manually. You can sort the view using any of the column headers, and use tags to filter the view. For each person or company, you can edit their names, add tags, and adjust their importance. You can merge duplicates, and use multi-select to perform bulk operations. Finally, you can instruct Gist whether to Watch a person or contact for news updates.

Profile View

Gist Profile pages are a central place to find out everything about the people and companies in your network. Gist scans your email accounts, calendars, contact databases such as LinkedIn, and social networks like Facebook and Twitter, to create unified profiles for each person or company. Gist is continuously searching for new information about your contacts even when you’re not using it.

The What’s New section pulls blog posts, tweets, and news from thousands of sources with sharing and filtering tools. You can flag items, mark them as read, share items via email, Facebook, or Twitter, or dismiss them as not relevant. The right-hand side shows searchable widgets such as aggregated conversations, shared links and attachments. Shared Contacts shows related people with links to their profiles. There is even a Google Search widget pre-populated with search results that can be customized with your own search term.

Profile information can be manually edited and updated. If the Gist profile doesn’t have it already, you can add a relevant image, website, phone number, address, and tags. The best way to organize your contacts is to use tags. Finally, a cool Dossier feature provides a printable version of a profile that you can use before meeting or communicating with a person.

Optimize To Get The Most Out Of Gist

After initially building your Gist contacts network, I recommend that you spend some time tweaking it for your needs. I found this necessary because:

Gist may not recognize that the person from your LinkedIn network and your friend on Facebook are the same person. In these cases, you will need to Merge them.
Similarly, Gist may not correctly associate Twitter handles with the contacts from your email inbox.
Gmail has a rather unconventional approach of adding every email address you send email to, as a contact. To my dismay, this doesn’t work well with Gist, which imports all Gmail contacts. I ended up deleting tons of frivolous help@”¦, support@”¦, and info@”¦ kind of “contacts”.
You may not have had much interaction with influential people who are actually important to you. It appears that Gist’s ranking uses frequency of communication as a benchmark to assess importance, because of which you may need to manually adjust their importance.
If your Facebook friends are primarily personal friends who work at companies that don’t really matter to you, you will need to either delete or lower their importance in Gist.
Also, profiles may need to be edited to add individual websites, blog feeds and news sources so that you get relevant information.

Are you excited about Gist using as an intelligent networking tool? Did you like the post? Tell us in the comments!