Used to be, people maintained literal personal phonebooks. Books into which they scrawled the names, numbers, and addresses of their friends and family members. Those were dark times. In 2014, there’s no need for such old-fashioned foofaraw. Your Mac and iOS devices can sync all your contacts for you, and store more data than those books of yore could have handled even if you wrote with the sharpest of number two pencils.

Look no further than our list of the best Mac apps available around the internet, from excellent productivity tools to social media apps, entertainment, and security software! Business Social. CoBook is a replacement for OS X's built in address book that automatically updates contacts based on their social media profiles. Veronica shows off the. How can i get c++ and java on the same eclipse for mac.

There are plenty of ways to deal with your contacts’ information, so which method do you choose? There are plenty of ways to deal with your contacts’ information, so which method do you choose? I spoke with Apple experts Glenn Fleishman, John Moltz, Jaimee Newberry, David Sparks, and Marco Tabini about how they organize their contacts. The upshot: No one’s thrilled with how they organize that Rolodexical data, but there are numerous approaches that work “well enough.” Our panel of experts, clockwise from top left: David Sparks, Glenn Fleishman, Jaimee Newberry, Marco Tabini, Lex Friedman (yours truly), and John Moltz. How they sync contacts Making sure that you can access every address in your address book on all your devices is a top priority for contact management. Syncing contacts is a big deal. You have options: For example, you can use to sync contacts between Apple devices (iPhones, Macs, iPads) or you can use services like or Microsoft Exchange to sync instead—particularly if you need to sync your contacts with non-Apple devices, or if you just.

Each of the five experts I spoke to uses iCloud for contact syncing; I’m the lone outlier who relies on Google’s syncing instead. But the reliance on iCloud, at least on occasion, seems at best unenthusiastic: Each of the five experts I spoke to uses iCloud for contact syncing; I’m the lone outlier who relies on Google. Macworld senior contributor said his dependence on iCloud “is stupid of me, as I shouldn’t trust it.” But another contributor,, said that “so far, iCloud does an admirable job of keeping everything in sync and safe from loss.” Macworld contributor and cohost of the David Sparks sticks with iCloud because “Microsoft Exchange has been a little more spotty.

I think part of my hang-up is I remember how terrible contact syncing was back in the Palm Pilot days. That platform used to randomly make multiple copies of contacts with no rhyme or reason.” When Sparks runs into trouble now, he uses the $5 app to eliminate duplicates and fix other issues. How they organize their contacts For organizing their contacts, every Mac expert I spoke to relies on Apple’s own Contacts apps on the. Again, I’m the lone outlier, clinging to Google’s (horrendous) on the Web—mostly due to inertia: I started using Google’s contact management before iCloud existed, and I just haven’t taken the time to switch. —a speaker, writer, and podcast host—doesn’t only use Contacts; she also uses the Web service and app to manage mailing addresses. She likes the service in part because it makes quick work of sending actual postal mail from a computer or iOS device, so she relies on it for managing those addresses.

For organizing their contacts, every Mac expert I spoke to relies on Apple’s own Contacts apps on the Mac and iOS. Sparks, who is also a lawyer, occasionally considers a move beyond Contacts: “Part of me really wants to geek out with one of those online customer relationship managers to handle all my calls to clients, lawyers, and everyone else I deal with in my day job. Instead I keep it simple and use the Apple Contacts application to sync my personal iCloud contacts and my office’s Exchange-based contact list.” How they add contacts Still, Sparks doesn’t love adding or editing his contacts with Apple’s Contacts. “It takes far too many mouse clicks to get things rolling.” Although he stores his contacts in Apple’s app, he also uses the free (with in-app purchases) app, “which is much faster and always rests in my menu bar.” Sparks stores his contacts in Apple’s app, but also uses Cobook, ‘which is much faster and always rests in my menu bar.’ Cobook, which I only looked at on Sparks’s recommendation, can merge contact data from various places, including—for free—Facebook, Google, and Twitter. It can work either from the addresses stored in the Contacts app (which, in general, live in your iCloud account) or from your Google contacts. Updating contact data in Cobook definitely takes fewer steps than using the Contacts app, and the changes you make sync quickly via whichever service you rely on. Cobook can help organize and update your address book from your Mac’s menu bar—regardless of which service you use to sync your contacts.