O'Grady's PowerPage

Tag: Address Book

  • Skype 5.0 beta for Mac now available

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    Late Thursday, Skype announced a public beta of its client for the Mac. Per Macworld, the new version brings Skype much more in line with its Windows counterpart in both features and interface.

    First and foremost, the interface looks absolutely nothing like its predecessor, and entirely like its Windows counterpart, which got the 5.0 treatment in mid-October. Skype for Mac has shed the narrow-windowed “contact list” appearance—a staple of virtually every chat app on the market—in favor of an almost e-mail client approach. It’s a fairly minimal interface that feels all right (but not great) on the Mac.

    A left sidebar contains contacts, groups, and a Recent list that displays the contacts you correspond with the most frequently. For the first time, Skype 5.0 for Mac lets you turn on full integration with Mac OS X’s Address Book from the preferences. This means you can finally call, SMS, or IM contacts without first having to go through the process of adding them to your Skype contact list. Users can also open the Contact Monitor, which offers a compact window that is more akin to the style of a thin buddy list that you can keep to the side of your work.

    Beyond the major interface overhaul, the most significant new feature in Skype 5.0 for Mac is easily Group Video Calling (GVC), which first arrived in the Windows client last month. Skype 5.0’s group video chat looks somewhat like iChat’s, but unlike iChat, it supports up to ten members in a single chat (which requires that all parties have a minimum broadband connection of 4 mbps down and 1 mbps up). Skype chat is free to use while Skype 5.0 is in beta, but a paid plan will be required once the feature officially ships. There is no word yet from Skype on what GVC’s pricing will be or how it will fit into Skype’s existing price plans.

    Skype 5.0 for Mac contains plenty of other new features, though it is still lacking at least one feature of its Windows sibling, albeit one that not everyone will miss: integration of the Facebook News Feed.

    The Skype 5.0 for Mac beta can be snagged here and requires a Mac running OS X Leopard 10.5.8 and a 1GHz CPU or faster, though video calling requires at least a an Intel Core 2 Duo 1GHz CPU.

    Stay tuned for additional details and if you’ve tried the beta and have any feedback, let us know in the comments.

  • Mac OS X 10.6.5: What Will Change

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    With Apple releasing Mac OS X 10.6.5 seeds to its developer community, word around the campfire is that the new OS update will address the following issues according to MacNN:

    AirPrint:
    Due for a release ahead of iOS 4.2, Mac OS X 10.6.5’s key focus will be interfacing with iPhones, iPod touches and iPads running the new flavor of iOS, to allow them to print wirelessly to any printer on that’s connected to a Mac on the same WiFi network via Apple’s new AirPrint technology.

    Without Mac OS X 10.6.5, devices updated to iOS 4.2 next month will only have the option of printing to the Print Simulator (an Apple development tool) or one of three HP Photosmart printers that already include built in support for AirPrint, and don’t require a Mac running 10.6.5:
    – HP Photosmart Premium Fax e-All-in-One Printer series – C410
    – HP Photosmart Premium e-All-in-One Printer series – C310
    – HP Photosmart Plus e-All-in-One Printer series- B210

    General Stability Enhancements:
    – Improve reliability with Microsoft Exchange servers.
    – Resolve a delay between print jobs.
    – Address a printing issue for some HP printers connected to an Airport Extreme.
    – Resolve an issue when dragging contacts from Address Book to iCal.
    – Address an issue where dragging an item from a stack causes the Dock to not automatically hide.
    – Add SSL support for uploading files to iDisk.
    – Resolve an issue with Wikipedia information not displaying correctly in Dictionary.
    – Improve performance of MainStage on certain Mac systems.
    – Resolve spacing issues with OpenType fonts.
    – Improve reliability with some Bluetooth braille displays.
    – Resolve a VoiceOver issue when browsing some web sites with Safari 5.
    – Address stability and performance of graphics applications and games.

    While the last several pre-releases of Mac OS X 10.6.5 have contained no known issues, according to documents accompanying the betas, Apple continues to request that developers focus their testing efforts around a handful of key areas, namely traditional printing and AirPrint.

    In addition, developers have been asked to test the software against any of their own applications that include 3D graphics, make use of QuickTime, or read and write from USB devices. Apple has also been tweaking the performance of Time Machine, its automated backup software, for improved reliability.

    Mac OS X 10.6.5 is expected to arrive any time in the next few weeks. The last time Apple released an update to Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard was back in June, when it issued Mac OS X 10.6.4 to address trackpad issues and compatibility problems with Adobe’s Creative Suite 3.

    Stay tuned for additional details as they become available.

  • MWSF: iPhone Explorer Allows iPhone/iPod Touch to be Used as a Hard Drive

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    Albeit there have been some utilities that have allowed your iPhone and iPod touch to double as a flash drive, this one may have it down pat.

    And for free.

    Per The Unofficial Apple Weblog, myPod Apps’ iPhone Explorer can be installed on your Mac or PC and allows you to view the folder structure, and drag and drop items to or from the iPhone to your desktop or back the other way.

    Users can create, delete and rename folders on your iPhone. If your iPhone is jailbroken, they can access the real root and then recover things like your address book, emails and SMS messages.

    iPhone Explorer requires Mac OS X 10.5 or later and iTunes 8 or later to install and run.

    Take a gander, see what you think and feel free to hurl your two cents in as well.

  • Skype 2.8.0.851 Released

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    On Monday, Skype released version 2.8.0.851 of its popular Voice over Internet Protocol communications program.

    The new version, a 43.3 megabyte download, adds the following fixes and features:

    – Platform specific: OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard Skype Access was not working
    – Skype occasionally crashed when the host of a conference call would hang up on one participants during the call.
    – Platform specific: OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard Users were unable to call phone numbers via their Mac Address Book.
    – Platform specific: OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard Some animated emoticons were not displayed correctly.
    – Skype crashed due to invalid avatars (occurred seldom).
    – Users sometimes experienced an “Unable to mount database” error message when launching Skype.
    – Skype crashed when a user quit after opening an authorization missed event.
    – Platform specific: OS X 10.3 Panther Occasionally Skype crashed right after an account was created.
    – Improved notification on how to disable a mood message chat.

    Skype 2.8.0.851 is available for free and requires Mac OS X 10.3.9 or later to install and run.

  • Apple Seeds First Mac OS X 10.6.2 Build to Developers

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    A recently released build of Apple’s upcoming Mac OS X 10.6.2 operating system reveals a slew of changes, fixes and tweaks according to AppleInsider.

    A pre-release build of the next update to Mac OS X 10.6 was seeded to developers Monday, bringing a long list of changes, fixes and tweaks.

    People familiar with the latest build, dubbed 10C514, said the latest update has general focus areas that affect just about every facet of the operating system, from the applications like the Address Book and QuickTime, to services like Spotlight and Time Machine, and basic hardware functions like USB and Bluetooth. The disk image has a 445.4MB file size.

    The update reportedly features dozens of areas of change, including fixes for AppleScript, graphics drivers, Xtype, OpenCL and more.

    The pre-release build also allegedly comes with a handful of known issues, including hang-ups with the DVD player, crashing of the parental controls preference pane, and a glitch where the system does not recognize an optical drive.

    Monday’s build is the first that Mac OS X 10.6.2 has been seen by developers.