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!

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Synchronizing your Gmail email messages with Thunderbird is a breeze by using IMAP.   Every change you make in Thunderbird is more or less instantly reflected in your online email account.

But what about your Gmail contact book, your Google calendar and Google Reader RSS feeds?    Although Thunderbird offers their own versions, I wanted it instead to synchronize with my Google accounts and keep everything updated as I made changes.    The thought of having two versions, one in Thunderbird and one online, was not very appealing.

Here’s how I finally managed to do it.

Synchronize Your Google Contacts With Thunderbird :

This can be achieved by using an extension called Zindus.   Just install the extension and after restarting Thunderbird, go into the options :

It’s very easy to set up. Just insert your Google account name and password.   Then click the “test connection” button and it will connect to your Google account.    Your contact book will then be downloaded and any further changes in Thunderbird will also be synchronized with your online account.

Synchronize Your Google Calendar With Thunderbird

This one has already been covered by Tina (which is the guide I used) but here’s still a quick summary.   You need two extensions – Lightning and Provider For Google Calendar.   When you install them and restart, you’ll then see your calendar on the right hand side.

To start the synchronization, find the XML link of your Google Calendar (found under the settings on your GCal page), insert it into the Thunderbird calendar settings, and bingo, your events are downloaded and synchronized.

To get the full, in-depth process, read Tina’s excellent how-to.

Synchronize Your Google Reader With Thunderbird

This was the biggie as far as I was concerned.   With over 2000 unread RSS messages, I wanted to be able to browse through the feeds and have it instantly updated online.   I didn’t want to read them in Thunderbird but for them still to be sitting unread online.   That would have led to chaos.    Finally I discovered one possible solution.

Basically what the following method does is install a mini browser in your Thunderbird.   So technically you are still reading them online but inside your Thunderbird client instead.   So it’s not an offline synchronization solution which is what I am really looking for.   But for the moment this will do until I find a better method.

• First download Thunderbrowse and CSLite and install them in Thunderbird.
• Now go into your Thunderbird options and on the ‘General‘ tab, make sure the box labelled When Thunderbird launches, show the Start Page in the message area is checked, and in the location field, enter the URL http://www.google.com/reader/i/.



• Now go into your Thunderbrowse options. On the ‘Content‘ tab, check the option Enable SmartJavascript?, and click OK.
• Open the preferences for the CS Lite extension, and on the ‘Global‘ tab, select Allow cookies globally from the drop-down box.
• Now restart Thunderbird.   You should now see Google Reader in the main browser pane.   Log in and your feeds will appear.



• One piece of advice – place the Thunderbrowse button on your Thunderbird toolbar.  Then when you need to navigate away from the window to read your emails, you can click the Thunderbrowse button to go back again.

Do you have any better solutions to synchronize your Google accounts with Thunderbird? If so, I would love to hear about them. Let everyone know in the comments.

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I expected this question after my previous post – How to Send Personalized Mass Emails in Outlook. So, let me continue where I left off and do a bit of Mozilla Thunderbird add-on hunting. After all, Mozilla’s rich add-on universe has a cure for every conceivable ‘problem’ except world hunger.

Yes, I found the answer in Mozdev.org. It’s the Mozilla developers’ community dedicated to open and free, quality applications and extensions – a perfect place to check out when you want to know how to set up Mozilla Thunderbird for anything.

Mail Tweak is a Thunderbird extension for Thunderbird ver. 2.0+. It’s a collection of enhancements and workarounds for the email client. The enhancements total around 36 (113KB) and one of them is called Personalize messages.

This ‘productivity’ tweak sends each recipient an individual message using fields from the address book or a CSV (comma separated values) file.

1. Go to the installation page of Mail Tweak at Mozdev.org. Download the mailtweak-0.16.xpi file to your computer.
2. Open Thunderbird. Select Tools – Add-ons – Extensions. Browse to the location of your downloaded file and install. Restart the Thunderbird client to complete.
3. Open the Add-on window (from Tools – Add-on) and select the Mail Tweak extension. Click on Options.
4. Scroll down the entries in the Tweaks section and select Personalize messages. Click OK.
5. You can now compose a message by selecting Message – Personalize message from the menu toolbar.

   Add your recipients (or a recipients list) as you normally do. You can include the contacts in other ways, of course.

   • Click on Address Book on the menu. Select the bunch of names – right click and choose Personalize from the context menu.
   • Open a new message window from Message – Personalize. Select the Personalize button on the menu and pick up the mail addresses from a CSV file.
6. To send the messages, click on File – Personalize (or click the Personalize button on the toolbar). An alert pops up with the option of ‘Send now’ or ‘Leave unsent’. With the latter option, Mail Tweak saves the messages (as individual emails) in the Unsent folder. After reviewing them you can email them from File – Send Unsent Messages.

Further personalize your email using Mail Tweak…

To include other fields like address, city, work phone etc. from the address book, specify field attributes in the emails. For example, to include the first name of each individual recipient – place a %%firstName%% where needed.
(All available address book field names are the properties as given in the nsIAbCard file. This is where all address fields of a particular contact are stored as attributes. Check out all the attributes here.)

Here’s an example to illustrate – to include the home address and the city of the contacts, include %% homeAddress%% and %%homeCity%% in the appropriate place. Similarly, it can be worked out for the other fields.

Without turning this into a soup of geeky codes and syntax, let me direct you to the Mail Tweaks Personal Messages section for some more help.

Although, Mail Tweak is built for the latest version, it can also be installed in Thunderbird 1.5 and in Shredder (pre-release versions of Thunderbird 3) with limited functionality.

MozDev.org does put out this caution – Performance may be poor if you use this feature for large messages or many recipients, and you might see warning messages from Thunderbird. For bulk mailing, it is better to use a specialized bulk mailing program.

That’s a good advice but for a home user’s run-of-the-mill mass mailing needs using the Thunderbird client, Mail Tweaks is a good enough productivity solution.

So, how often do you use bulk mailing? Do you think this solution is workable for you? Let us know if you have any other freeware to lessen the load.

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• How To Send Personalized Mass Emails in Outlook (26)
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Before I leap ahead, mail merge is used when we want to create several documents that are basically the same but where each document contains unique details. For example, a set of letters where the content is the same but the name, address or even the subject bits are unique for each. The best use I have found – use it as a job hunting application with custom details for each employer.

The mail merge feature uses two parts – a main constant document and the inconstant data source – and merges them. With Outlook being a part of the MS Office suite, one can use this feature to bulk send mail, each personalized for a different contact (it ain’t spamming, although I guess mail merge is mass mailing by another name).

So here’s how to send mass emails in Outlook and make emails look personal:

Select contacts
1. Open Outlook. Go to Contacts and select the people whom you want to mail by Ctrl – clicking the multiple names on your contact list. To effectively select the multiple names, opt for View – Arrange by – Categories.
2. Remember: Mail merge does not work with distribution lists.

Mail merge contacts

3. On the menu bar, go to Tools – Mail Merge. The Mail Merge Contacts dialog box opens up.
4. For the fields bulleted under Contacts, choose Only selected contacts.
5. At the bottom, for Merge options – Merge to; select Email from the drop down. A Message subject line field appears. Fill it with the common subject. Click OK.

The completed dialog box looks like this…



Compose the email in Word

6. When you click OK, MS Word starts up and opens in a new document with the focus on the Mailings tab. You can use the default document or any other template you desire.
7. The selection of recipients has already been done from within Outlook. So, we will use the Write & Insert Fields panel to insert our custom fields.
8. For the word of greeting, click on Greeting Line. Configure the greeting as you want it to appear.
9. To insert any other contact specific like a home address or a phone number, click on Insert Merge Field for a large drop down list.
10. Write the body of the email in the Word document.
11. Once you are finished with the fields you want to include, preview the final look by clicking on Preview Results and then moving through your recipients by clicking on the previous and next record buttons in the Preview Results panel.

    
    All that remains… Mail it!

12. Click on Finish & Merge – Send E-mail Messages. The Merge to E-mail dialog box opens up. Click on OK.

MS Word then does the job of automatically posting the emails in a flash. You can save the document you used for the mail merge, as it also saves the link with the data source i.e. the contacts.

Once you get the hang of it, the whole process takes barely a few minutes from start to finish. In the same time I would have earlier composed an email for just a single person; now, I did so for a group. So here’s how we managed to save on repetitive typing and save up on time.

Any other way to send personalized mass emails in Outlook? Do you use mail merge for email? Or the more common fields of carbon copy (cc) and the ‘anonymous’ blind carbon copy (bcc)? So, what are your productivity tips for Outlook? Share with them with us!

Image: ’smil

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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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Import mail and contacts from other accounts

You know the “Invite Mr. X to Gmail” notice that appears when you send an email to a non-Gmail user? Ever invited someone, only to get a response like, “I have all my mail and contacts in [Yahoo/Hotmail/other email provider], how can I possibly switch?” Or maybe, this very reason was holding you back to make a complete switch to Gmail? Earlier, you could do this via POP3, by exporting and importing contacts via CSV. Well, guess what? Importing contacts just got a heck of a lot easier — down to almost a no brainer.

All you have to do is click on “Settings” and then hop over to the “Accounts and Imports” tab. Specify the account you want to import the mail and contacts from, choose the options and you are done! Most of the major email providers are supported.

Gmail uses Trueswitch to transfer mail and contacts, so you might want to have a look at their Terms and Privacy Policy if you are concerned. The feature is available to newly created accounts but may take some time to reach you if you are a long time Gmail user.

Oh and by the way, you can have new messages from your old account forwarded to Gmail for 30 days just in case you feel like Gmail isn’t for you, although I doubt you would!

Inbox Preview

You ought to try Gmail on slower connections to appreciate how wonderful the idea of Inbox Preview is. Imagine you are waiting for Gmail to load, looking at the progress bar, wondering if you could just grab it and pull it towards the right! Well, how about doing something worthwhile actually related to email? What if you could get a sneak peak of your account while Gmail is still loading?

That is precisely what Inbox Preview has to offer. It present a static (means you cannot read, delete or perform other operations) view of the 10 most recent messages in your account. So now, even before Gmail has finished loading, you’ll know that you only have got hate mail from your ex-girlfriend, so might as well close the browser. Never mind loading! On a more serious note though, I LOVE IT. Can’t believe it was not there all this while.

Insert Images

Nothing too fancy but useful all the same. You can now click a button, upload an image and insert it into the mail. No more copy and paste tricks to add images to your mail. Just enable “Insert Images” from the Labs settings page.

Sender time zone and automatic message translation

“Sender time zone” lets you know the current time in the part of the world from where your good old friend has sent you the email. Primarily, it shows a green or red phone icon depending on whether the sender would be probably awake (9am to 6pm) to receive a call. You can click on the “Show details” link and you will be shown the sender’s exact local time.

Automatic message translation, as the name implies, helps you translate emails written in a language other than your own. You get a “Translate message” link in your email if Gmail detects another language. Click on it and you are done. Useful if you have friends who can’t write/read language you are well versed in.

View PowerPoint and TIFF files

Gmail has always had the option to view PDF, .doc, .xls and .ppt files as HTML or provided you with a link to open them in Google Docs. Not so long ago, Gmail added an online PDF viewer that presents the file as it is, displaying images and proper formatting. Well now, you can view PowerPoint and TIFF files similarly with all the same features.

What do you think is the one feature is most useful to Gmail? Okay, make that two. Or as many as you like! We would love to hear about them in the comments. Also, what else would you like to be added to Gmail Labs next? How about a Google map showing where the email originated from?

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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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Setup

Signing up for an account is painless and only takes a second. Just put in your name, number, username and email, and you’ve got an account. Once you have your login information, you will need to fill out your “business card.”

As you can see, it’s very easy to set up your digital business card. You have 140 characters to provide as much information about yourself as possible. If you are familiar with Twitter, putting all your information in a simple 140 characters will be extremely simple and easy. I did find that my title and company weren’t coming through in the text message, but they could easily be placed within the body of the text message.

How it Works

In order to send out your card, you just need to get someone to text your username to 50500.  My username is KyleJ, so if you want to see it in action, just text KyleJ to 50500.  You also have the option to receive a text when someone has requested your business card.  This is a great way to remember who got your business card after a long night on the town.

If you are at a conference (for example) and someone asks for your card, you can also send your digital business card to their phone.   Just ask for their mobile number (in this example, it will be “3034759204″) then text from your phone, send 3034759204 to 50500 .   The other person will then get your card details on their phone.   The other advantage is doing it this way is that you will now be on their mobile phone contact list.

Your Profile

This is one area where Contxts is a little lacking. There are options to fill out your information for other social networks, but they don’t appear on your digital card or on your site profile. This may just be due to Contxts being in alpha, but it is a feature that I would really like to see.

There is also a section for adding contacts. This would be a great feature, as I see this digital business card idea taking off, especially in very technical circles and areas of the country. It would be great to keep all of your technical contacts together on this website. However, this feature is still under construction.

Conclusion

Contxts is a great service as is. It is extremely easy to use and gets the job done when you don’t have one of the old business cards lying around. However, the lack of other services makes me a little sad, but it’s only because I see the potential there. I really think everyone should go out and make their own digital card. It’ll come in handy one day. I just know it.

Do you agree? Is this a service you see yourself using? Or can nothing replace the good old cardboard business cards? Maybe online digital cards are the way of the future and SMS cards are just a fad? Let us know what you think in the comments.

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Why do you need to use this? Well if you need to use contacts in more than one program or service (like email, IM, Skype, or others) or use a desktop app and need it on more than one computer, it’s difficult or even impossible to automatically keep everything in sync. The solution that iContact proposes is to have Gmail contacts as your central repository for everything having to do with people you know. When you need to look up one of them, instead of opening a full browser you open this small stand-alone contact manager to find or search for the person you want. It keeps everything in the cloud in your Gmail contacts, so they’ll still be available on any device with internet access and a decent web browser.

To get iContact, you can download it as a zip file with a portable executable and accompanying files, or an msi installer package (although the msi doesn’t seem to do anything special except extract the files and create a shortcut…um, I guess it’s good for people who don’t have unzip software?) and then run the executable.

Enter your Gmail credentials (if you’re using an @gmail.com account, you can just enter your username; if you’re a Google Apps user, enter the full email address, i.e. your_name@your_domain.com), and then watch as it loads your contacts. Certainly a lot faster than opening a web browser, signing into Gmail and navigating to the contacts!

You can edit your contacts by selecting one and clicking ‘edit’ at the bottom, add or remove contacts by clicking the (+) or (X) buttons, and all changes you make are made directly to your online Gmail contacts. I noticed, however, that if you modify your contacts in iContact, it won’t show up in Gmail until you refresh the page. The reverse is true for anything you do in Gmail, you have to sign out and sign back in to iContact in order to show the changes.

When you click a contact, you can then do a few things. If you have their email address stored, you can click the email category next to the address (Home, Work or Other) and click ‘Send Mail’ to open your default mail program and begin a new message to that address. For phone number, click the category (Home, Work, Mobile, Other, etc.) and you can choose ‘Call with Skype’ or display in large text. For addresses you can drop down the category and choose ‘Show Map’ to map it on Google Maps, and for any piece of information you can click ‘Copy’ to copy it to your clipboard. This solves the problem of having a separate contacts list in every program!

iContact currently doesn’t work with contact groups (in Gmail/Google Apps you can add contacts to a group, enter the name of the group in the To: field when writing an email, and send to all addresses in the group at once).

Also, unlike the Gmail contacts manager, there are no “actual contacts” and “suggested contacts” for people who you’ve communicated with but haven’t explicitly added as contacts. They all just show up in the same list.

These limitations aside, iContact does its job well. It’s certainly a convenience for people who use a desktop mail or chat client (especially Skype) and who wants all their contact information in one place without having to sync.

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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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