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With 60% of 18-34 year-olds using their phone as their primary timepiece, there is no better time to buy a new watch than now. Sure, “wrist glances” are not as necessary as they once were, but that may explain why today’s fashion is big watches, really big, bling watches.
While I have been lusting after the Tiffany Atlas for a long time now, it’s probably a safe bet that a $7,900 watch is probably not the right message to send in today’s turbulent market, where the pauperization of certain regions demands visible restraint.
The Tiffany Atlas men’s stainless steel has beautiful Art Deco over tones, reminiscent of “Atlas Shrugged.” This stainless steel model features black rubber and gray dial. It has a 42 mm case, chronograph function, mechanical movement with automatic winding, date window, and is water resistant to 100 meters/328 feet (10 bars). Naturally, it’s Swiss-made.
This despite the fact that the latest edition of Esquire magazine showcases ads and articles spotlighting very expensive watches, like the Breitling Transocean Chronograph Unitime ($11,200), IWC Schaffhausen Portuguese Automatic Edition “Tribeca Film Festival 2013” ($13,600) and the Raymond Weil Freelancer ($2,950).
So what is it about these big watches? In the industry the trend is called “wrist presence” — a tongue-in-cheek reference to “web presence.” In the 90s, a watch case with a diameter of 38 mm was more than enough, with most watches sized between 33 mm and 35 mm. But now size matters, with the latest models reaching 42 mm and some even boasting a 45-mm diameter.
The big watch trend accelerated over the past decade, with watchmakers like Breitling, Franck Muller, IWC, Lange & Söhne, Omega and Panerai, plus even traditionally conservative companies like Cartier offering models with ample quantities of what the industry likes to refer to as “wrist presence.”
The record holder is probably the U-Boat U-1942, a limited edition of just 29 timepieces, that measures a whopping 64 mm, or 2.5 inches. The company has throttled that size back to “only” 53 mm (ref. 6157).
Behold, a 64-mm behemoth. The Uboat U-1942, of which, thankfully, only 29 pieces were made, has a 2.50-inch diameter, that screams “wrist presence here.”
In 1957, Piaget introduced the slimmest mechanism the world had ever seen, codenamed 9P, which was just two millimeters thick. That made way for the 12P, boasting a 2.3-mm automatic mechanism.
Ever since 1988, the Piaget Altiplano has held on to the thinnest watch record. But the Altiplano’s case size has grown in both girth and thickness, now measuring 43 mm and 5.25 mm, respectively.
But back to my decision process. You have to keep in mind that what makes a watch beautiful to one observer is a highly subjective opinion.
After deciding that the Atlas was out, my continuously shopping eyes fixated on the TAG Heuer Formula 1 WAU1113.BA0858. I always thought the Japanese and Koreans were bad at product naming, now I know better. The 42-mm TAG Heuer sells $1,100+ and as you can see from the picture below, it has a very nice white watch face:
I like this 42-mm TAG Heuer because it has a relatively reasonable price, but also because of its white dial, beautiful bezel and simplicity, for a TAG Heuer that is.
I also considered the UK’s Christopher Ward, whose C3 Malvern MK2 Chronograph ($365) captured my imagination for a spell, until I discovered that it was a manual wind watch, which slightly tempered my enthusiasm. But’s it’s a beautiful watch nonetheless:
UK-based Christopher Ward offers the very beautiful 39-mm C3 Malvern MK2 Chronograph for the very reasonable price of $365. Notice the C3’s elegant simplicity, beautiful stainless band, plus that gorgeous watch face texture.
Another beautiful model was the 42-mm Christopher Ward C60 Trident Automatic ($635), which is a nice Rolex look-alike. But after staring at its photo for a long time, I decided that I didn’t like the design of the watch hands and position of the date window at 4p (16:00). See how subjective evaluating watch esthetics can be?
After trying to pour over Amazon.com’s watch store pages one by one and giving up after viewing about 200 watches out of its total inventory of 89,635, I decided to surf watch forums where I found a recommendation for a watch that had recently shown up on my radar, the Tissot PRC 200 T014.427.11.051.01:
The 42-mm Tissot PRC 200 was a pleasant surprise. I was familiar with this brand from my days of living in Aruba, which featured many Tissot stores and advertising. This is was one of the chronographs to be mentioned in a watch forum question about top chronograph recommendations. It’s sub-$700 price is remarkable for such a fine Swiss automatic with a wrist-wrestling presence.
This highly recommended watch is also available at a very reasonable $650 at Amazon.com, which was a bonus. It’s also the lead image of this story, so you’ll get a really good look at what Mr. Ubercool likes.
Now I’ve focused primarily on stainless steel watchbands. A lot of people prefer watches with a leather strap but if you’re going to switch bands anyway, it’s helpful to know that it’s much easier to go from a stainless steel band to a leather band than vice versa.
No go out and buy some wrist presence, and give yourself some bling to look the part.
Apple released the much-anticipated update to its mobile operating system yesterday. The chorus of complaints has been unprecedented, but not unexpected. With any new design you always flush out, what Howard Cosell would call the “nattering nabobs of negativism.”
Is all the criticism deserved? Based on some of the design analysis out there, it’s quite evident that Apple’s redesign fell short in a number of areas.
Inconsistencies
Several pundits have pointed out the glaring inconsistencies and design incongruencies that have no place in a company with 50,250 employees.
You might argue that it’s difficult to get a large organization like Apple to act in perfect harmony, yet Apple reportedly pulled engineers from MacOS to work on iOS 7. For a company that prides itself on attention to detail, delivering sloppy design for a $100+ billion profit center is unacceptable.
Innovation
As one observer notes, Apple will most likely address these inconsistencies by the time iOS 7 ships, if not sooner. So the key question is, did Apple solve any challenges innovatively or introduce any new, gee-whiz feature? As TechCrunch pointedly observes, Apple borrowed a lot of ideas from other company’s apps.
Despite the negative reception, consumers care less about design intricacies. According to social media monitoring service Synthesio, the iPhone’s new look generated 172,000 comments online, of which only 10% were negative.
At the end of the day, iOS 7 is neither the result of a perfectionist vision nor the innovative breakthrough everyone was expecting. Let’s hope that the total package, iPhone 5S, reportedly in diverse colors to match the new interface, plus iOS 7 together, makes a powerful statement.
A few weeks ago, billionaire hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb asked Sony to focus on electronics by selling off its entertainment division. At Taiwan’s Computex show this week Sony showed off its new VAIO Pro 11/13 Series ultrabooks.
Judging from The Verge and Laptop reviews, Loeb is right. From uncomfortably sharp corners to a mushy keyboard that flexes to general flimsiness to running uncomfortably hot to a poor webcam, it’s abundantly clear that Sony, which in 2011 employed a whopping 168,000 employees, lacks an intensity of focus.
While everyone labels the PC market dead, I don’t know anyone who runs his or her business entirely on an iPad. So notebook computers remain the preferred productivity tool. Let’s examine what the Sony VAIO Pro 11/13 series offer in this regard:
- Base pricing – The Sony VAIO Pro 13 base configuration costs $1,249, which includes a Core i5-4200U CPU, 4GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD.
- Intel Haswell – The fourth-generation Intel i7, i5 and i3 chipsets offer much improved battery life but Laptop saw no increased performance from Intel’s integrated 4400 graphics.
- Display – Laptop says the 1920×1080-pixel LED screen is “one of the better laptops screens we’ve laid eyes on, but not the best.” The screen’s high resolution “makes it difficult to close apps and do other things in the desktop UI.” Score one for Apple, which made its Retina technology a seamless experience.
- Windows 8 – The OS no one wants but since this lappy has a touch screen, it’s mandatory.
- Weight – The 13-inch carbon-fiber model weighs just 2.4 lb. (1kg), and is 0.68 inches (17mm) thin — as thin as the MacBook Air but a half pound lighter. The 11-inch Pro is equally thin and weighs a svelte 1.9 lb. (871g).
Daniel Loeb is correct. Sony should simplify its product line and focus on getting things right. It’s amazing that a company with a large design staff feels compelled to create a MacBook Air knock-off. Instead of designing me-toos, Sony should pare its line down to, say, two notebook computer lines, a high-end and low-end one, and design a VAIO that wins in all regards, much like the Z series of the last decade.
Frankly, you’d be better off with a new HP ProBook 430 G1, starting at just $500, which scales resolution down to a more usable 1366×768 and weighs 3.3 lb. Watch HP’s video below and download the HP ProBook 430 G1 spec sheet.
America’s healthcare system is in dire need of more transparency, as this story in The New York Times so clearly suggests. We like it when startups work on solving tough challenges like these. Brighter brings transparency to the dental care market.
Although only available in Southern California for the moment, competitor HealthSouk covers all of California, Brighter has a more extensive listing of dentists and a nicer interface too. More than 130 million Americans are currently living without dental insurance, as a Senate Subcommittee report, “Dental Crisis in America” (PDF) found. We need more innovative startups like this.
Despite all the great reviews Macintosh computers have garnered over the years, we rarely see it stated that Apple’s groundbreaking platform has attracted some of the best designed software on the market today. In fact, we would venture to say that with few exceptions, the Mac has the best possible software for the task at hand.
And that’s from a former Windows user. That’s partly due to the fact that Apple was first on the market with an integrated smartphone design, pointing the way for Mac developers to create seamless synchronization solutions. But the real story is that the innovation the Macintosh GUI ushered in will celebrate is 30th anniversary next year.
Here are my picks for the most ubercool Macintosh software:
1Password
1Password can create strong, unique passwords, organize them, and insert them in web pages using a handy button installed in your web browser. There is a new 4.0 but I am sticking with v3 until I hear that 1Password works better, specifically in the area of capturing name and password for a site, it sometimes fails.
Publisher: Agile Bits
Website: https://agilebits.com/onepassword/mac
Version: 3.8.21
Category: Utility
Price: $49.99
Adobe Creative Suite CS6
Adobe’s Creative Suite includes four useful applications: Adobe Illustrator, Adobe InDesign, Adobe Photoshop and Acrobat X Pro. If you’re a designer, you can’t get by without these famous tools. Pricey but necessary, and now that Adobe has exclusively gone Creative Cloud, CS6 is your last opportunity to own Adobe’s core tools outright. Don’t miss this opportunity!
Publisher: Adobe Systems
Website: http://www.adobe.com/products/creativesuite/designstandard.html
Version: CS6
Category: Design
Price: $1,299.00
Aperture
This latest version of Aperture now shares your iPhoto library for greater simplicity in use.
Publisher: Apple Inc.
Website: http://www.apple.com/aperture/
Version: 3.4.4
Category: Photography
Price: $79.99
AppDelete
AppDelete is a great program uninstaller that removes not only applications but also any other associated files that reside anywhere on your Mac.
Publisher: Reggie Ashworth
Website: http://www.reggieashworth.com/
Version: 4.0.6
Category: Utility
Price: $7.99
Balsamic Mockups
Balsamiq Mockups is a cross-platform rapid software prototyping tool that lets a UX designer quickly create a mockup of software screens. One minor quibble: no ready-made icons for folders or documents. The image above shows the author’s concept for a next-generation CRM program, used in a ReadWrite story.
Publisher: Balsamic
Website: http://www.balsamiq.com
Version: 2.2.3
Category: Developer Tools
Price: $79.00
Bento
Bento is a simple database manager with built-in, predesigned forms that also lets you connect to, or edit, records in your Address Book.
Publisher: Filemaker
Website: http://www.filemaker.com/products/bento/
Version: 4.1.2
Category: Database
Price: $49.00
Breeze
Breeze is a window management application that is perfect for people who want quickly split-screen a window, or someone like me who needs to quickly replicate a standard windows size for screenshots.
Publisher: Autumn Apps LLC
Website: http://autumnapps.com/breeze/index.html
Version: 1.5.7
Category: Utility
Price: $8.00
BusyCal
BusyCal is far better than the Mountain Lion calendar because it works just like the calendar in Leopard. It can also be shared easily via iCloud or Google.
Publisher: BusyCal LLC
Website: http://www.busymac.com/
Version: 2.0.5
Category: Calendar
Price: $49.99
ChronoSync
Great solution for backing up and synchronizing files with an external hard disk or other storage device.
Publisher: Econ Technologies
Website: http://www.econtechnologies.com/
Version: 4.3.8
Category: Utility
Price: $40.00
Cinch
Gives Mac users a nice Windows 7 feature: Drag a window until the mouse cursor touches either left or right edges of the screen, and the window “”cinches”" into place. Cinch will resize a window to half screen, allowing you to easily compare two windows side-by-side.
Publisher: Irradiated Software
Website: http://www.irradiatedsoftware.com
Version: 1.1.1
Category: Utility
Price: $7.00
Cinematica
Need a central place to organize your videos? Cinematica is like iTunes for music or iPhoto for photos, only it can search your collection by technical properties like resolution, aspect ratio, frame rate or video codec.
Publisher: Xeric Design Ltd.
Website: http://www.xericdesign.com/cinematica.php
Version: 1.0.6
Category: Video
Price: $24.95
Clean Text
E-mails, Windows, and, yes, even some sloppy publishers produce files that are filled with funny characters. Use Clean Text to remove unwanted paragraph breaks, tabs, the quote marks in e-mails, etc.
Publisher: Apimac
Website: http://www.apimac.com/mac/cleantext/
Version: 6.8.2
Category: Utility
Price: $14.99
Cobook
Cobook resides in your Mac menu bar and can be called up any time to search, add and edit entries in your Address Book. Simply indispensable.
Publisher: Cobook
Website: http://www.cobookapp.com/
Version: 1.2.7
Category: CRM
Price: Free
Coda
Edit HTML code simply and quickly with this very nice web development tool. Coda lets you simply click on a file name and you can start editing web pages.
Publisher: Panic
Website: http://www.panic.com/coda/
Version: 1.7.5
Category: Developer Tools
Price: $99.00
Daylite
Daylite is becoming my preferred CRM solution. As I noted in my other post, CRM for the Mac, this category was seriously lacking but is seeing a lot of capable new tools being released.
Publisher: Marketcircle Inc.
Website: http://www.marketcircle.com/daylite/
Version: 4.2.2
Category: CRM
Price: $280.00
Direct Mail
Direct Mail is a freemium program that lets you create e-mail messages and send them to lists using either your e-mail account or Direct Mail’s pre-paid e3 delivery service.
Publisher: e3 Software
Website: http://www.directmailmac.com/
Version: 3.5.1
Category: E-mail
Price: Freemium
Drive Genius
Drive Genius is reportedly used by Apple to check storage devices, and can perform a number of functions, including defragging, permission repair and other optimization tasks.
Publisher: Prosoft Engineering Inc
Website: http://www.prosofteng.com/products/drive_genius_features.php
Version: 3.2.2
Category: Utility
Price: $99.00
Dropbox
Dropbox lets you save files to the cloud, so you can instantly access them on other computers, your iPhone or your iPad. A must have.
Publisher: Dropbox
Website: http://www.dropbox.com/
Version: 1.6.18
Category: Cloud
Price: Freemium
eMail Extractor
Email Extractor extracts email addresses from text files, which is a great way to build a customer contact list using your mailbox data.
Publisher: Maxprog
Website: http://maxprog.com/
Version: 3.5.1
Category: E-mail
Price: $20.00
eMail Verifier
This email verification tool actually connects to your mail server and checks whether an email address exists or not, and disconnects without sending.
Publisher: Maxprog
Website: http://maxprog.com/
Version: 3.6
Category: E-mail
Price: $30.00
Evernote
Evernote saves notes or web clippings and lets you access them from any platform. Indispensable for people who do a lot of research, like yours truly.
Publisher: Evernote
Website: http://www.evernote.com/
Version: 5.1.3
Category: Cloud
Price: Freemium
Export Address Book
Apple’s Address Book does not let you export contacts by group. Export Address Book does that and a lot more. Totally worth $4, don’t you agree?
Publisher: Stefan Keller
Website: http://www.subclassed.com/
Version: 1.8
Category: CRM
Price: $3.99
ExpressScribe
Need software to transcribe your Sony or Olympus digital voice recordings? Download the freemium ExpressScribe software and you have a good solution.
Publisher: NCH Software
Website: http://www.nch.com.au/scribe/index.html
Version: 5.50
Category: Writing
Price: Freemium
Fantastical
Fantastical has become my go-to calendar program. Yes I use BusyCal too, but I can always access Fantastical from the menu bar when I need it, and its scheduling intelligence is great. It also looks beautiful and there is an iPhone app.
Publisher: Flexibits
Website: http://flexibits.com/fantastical
Version: 1.3.7
Category: Calendar
Price: $19.99
Fetch
Fetch is file transfer utility that is easy of use and supports FTP and SFTP, the most popular file transfer protocols used to manage your web site or blog.
Publisher: Fetch Softworks
Website: http://www.fetchsoftworks.com
Version: 5.7.3
Category: Developer Tools
Price: $29.00
FileMaker Pro 12
FileMaker Pro is fully programmable database design tool that can be used to create custom relational databases that can be deployed in all platforms, Mac, iPhone and iPad. This database listing was originally created in FileMaker.
Publisher: Filemaker
Website: http://www.filemaker.com/
Version: 12.0v4
Category: Database
Price: $299.00
FinalDraft
Want to write a screen play or Broadway book? FinalDraft lets you approach it the right way, seamlessly formatting your script as you type.
Publisher: Final Draft Inc.
Website: http://www.finaldraft.com/
Version: 8.0
Category: Writing
Price: $249.00
FontDoctor
Need to organize and repair your fonts? FontDoctor does this very well.
Publisher: FontGear Inc.
Website: http://fontgear.net/fontdoctor.html
Version: 8.1.3
Category: Utility
Price: $69.99
Free Ruler
Free Ruler is a floating horizontal and vertical ruler that measures on-screen items in pixels, inches, picas,or centimeters. A necessity for web designers.
Publisher: Pascal
Website: http://www.pascal.com/software/freeruler/
Version: 1.7b5
Category: Utility
Price: Free
GarageSale
Now here’s a tool for today’s economy. GarageSale is basically an eBay management tool. Use pre-designed templates to make your old stuff look good and GarageSale manages uploading of the content and seller communication. Slick.
Publisher: iwascoding GmbH
Website: http://www.iwascoding.com/GarageSale/
Version: 6.6.2
Category: E-commerce
Price:
GitHub
If you use GitHub, and what technocrat doesn’t, you already know about this app.
Publisher: GitHub
Website: http://mac.github.com
Version: Drum ‘n’ Rebase (150)
Category: Developer Tools
Price: Free
Google Chrome
Google Chrome has become the most popular browser because it’s frequently updated in the background, lighting fast and easily extensible.
Publisher: Google
Website: http://www.google.com/mac/
Version: 27.0
Category: Browser
Price: Free
Google Earth
Put the world at your fingertips. Fly to any place around the globe and see maps with 3D buildings and street-view terrains. Mindbendingly fun.
Publisher: Google
Website: http://www.google.com/earth/index.html
Version: 7.0.3
Category: Mapping
Price: Free
GoToMeeting
If you produce or attend webinars or online presentations, GoToMeeting is definitely one of the gold standards of the online meeting world. Work with anyone, anywhere, as long as you can afford the monthly $49 entrance fee.
Publisher: Citrix Online LLC
Website: http://www.gotomeeting.com
Version: 5.4
Category: Online Meeting
Price: $49.00
GrandTotal
Create invoices and estimates with a customized design. Automatically attaches a PDF invoice to email for quick sending. Great for consultants.
Publisher: Stefan Frst
Website: http://mediaatelier.com/GrandTotal/
Version: 2.1
Category: Finance
Price: $90.00
iBooks Author
From Apple comes e-books love in the form of iBooks Author, which lets you create sophisticated e-books with video, photo gallery widgets and much more. Download your free copy now.
Publisher: Apple
Website: http://www.apple.com/ibooks-author/
Version: 2.0
Category: E-books
Price: Free
Icon Slate
Do you need to design a favicon for your website? Then you must use Icon Slate, which is an easy-to-use tool that generates favicons, including Retina versions.
Publisher: Jeremy Marchand
Website: http://www.kodlian.com/apps/icon-slate/
Version: 3.4
Category: Developer Tools
Price: $4.99
iLivid
Do you want your very own copy of a YouTube video to show off in your presentations? Then you must download the free iLivid app. It’s the only one that works.
Publisher: Bandoo Media Inc.
Website: http://www.ilivid.com
Version: 4.0
Category: Video
Price: Free
iMovie
iMovie lets you edit your camcorder and iPhone movies and organizes them for easy browsing and watching. Totally Apple, totally ubercool.
Publisher: Apple Inc.
Website: http://www.apple.com/ilife/imovie/
Version: 9.09
Category: Video
Price: $14.99
iPhoto
iPhoto grabs photos from your digicam, organizes them by event or import date, lets you retouch photos and sends them to your friend’s inbox or mailbox.
Publisher: Apple
Website: http://www.apple.com/ilife/iphoto/
Version: 9.4.3
Category: Photography
Price: $14.99
Kaleidoscope
If you code you know how often you have to compare two pieces of code to detect the differences. Kaleidoscope makes this easy and sports a beautiful interface too. Unfortunately, Black Pixel decided to nearly double its price to $70. Not totally ubercool but worth it if you compare files a lot.
Publisher: Black Pixel
Website: http://www.kaleidoscopeapp.com
Version: 2.0
Category: Developer Tools
Price: $69.99
Keynote
Keynote was the program that made yours truly switch back to the Mac. It’s that good. Outstanding ease of use and power, makes PPT fans green with envy.
Publisher: Apple
Website: http://www.apple.com/iwork/
Version: 5.3
Category: Presentation
Price: $19.99
Kindle for Mac
Want to read Kindle books on your MacBook? No problem with the free Kindle for Mac app makes, which can now be also downloaded in the App Store.
Publisher: Amazon.com
Website: http://kindle-for-mac.en.softonic.com/mac
Version: 1.8.2
Category: E-books
Price: Free
LittleSnapper
Need to take screenshots of entire web pages, i.e. more than is shown on your screen? LittleSnapper not only takes these screenshots but organizes them too.
Publisher: Realmac Software
Website: http://www.realmacsoftware.com/littlesnapper/
Version: 1.8.3
Category: Design
Price: $39.99
MailSteward
MailSteward archives huge volumes of email by storing them in a database that offers sophisticated searches plus the ability to extract mail addresses.
Publisher: Publog.com
Website: http://www.mailsteward.com/
Version: 9.2
Category: Database
Price: $49.95
Mint QuickView
This Macintosh application is a companion program to the Mint website. It brings the same beautiful graphics to the desktop but adds another nicety: a menu icon that tells you when a bank transaction has occurred. Great tool for organizing your financial life.
Publisher: Intuit Inc.
Website: http://www.mint.com
Version: 2.0.1
Category: Finance
Price: Free
Mountain Tweaks
Mountain Tweaks, and Lion Tweaks, lets you customize and correct certain features in Mac OS X 10.7, many of which are undoubtedly annoying to you. After you download this free app, donate to developer Fredrik Wiker, so he can get a college education.
Publisher: Fredrik Wiker
Website: http://tweaksapp.com
Version: 1.1
Category: Utility
Price: Shareware
Name Mangler
Need to rename a large set of files, like for instance add their size in pixels to the file name? Name Mangler will do this chore.
Publisher: Many Tricks
Website: http://manytricks.com/namemangler/
Version: 3.1
Category: Utility
Price: $19.99
Numbers
Numbers is the Excel of the Mac. It has much of its power, but some might feel it’s not enough. While Apple needs to update the iWorks suite badly, it’s well worth $20.
Publisher: Apple
Website: http://www.apple.com/iwork/
Version: 2.3
Category: Finance
Price: $19.99
OmniOutliner
OmniOutliner is our favorite tool for creating to-do lists, data lists, or any task that requires outlining. While its unconvential formatting techiques demand a steep learning curve, it does offer many nice features.
Publisher: The Omni Group
Website: http://www.omnigroup.com/products/omnioutliner/
Version: 3.10.6
Category: Writing
Price: $39.99
OpenOffice
Need a free tool that can open Microsoft Office documents? Look no further, OpenOffice is here to help you word process, spreadsheet and present to your heart’s content.
Publisher: Apache Software Foundation
Website: http://www.openoffice.org
Version: 3.4.1
Category: Productivity
Price: Free
Pages
Pages is the Microsoft Word of the Mac. Like Numbers, Pages has outstanding layout capabilities, as exemplified by its built-in templates. Well worth $20.
Publisher: Apple
Website: http://www.apple.com/iwork/
Version: 4.3
Category: Writing
Price: $19.99
Panorama Sheets
Need to manipulate data? Like join two fields or clean up a database marred by sloppy data entry? Panorama Sheets parses your data fast by doing all its work in RAM.
Publisher: ProVUE Development
Website: http://www.provue.com
Version: 6.0.0
Category: Database
Price: $39.95
Paparazzi
Paparazzi captures screenshots of websites but goes beyond the call of duty by grabbing the entire page, as far as the eye cannot see.
Publisher: Nate Weaver
Website: http://derailer.org/paparazzi/
Version: 0.6.7
Category: Utility
Price: Shareware
Paprika
Manage all your recipes on the Mac and then sync the recipe and shopping list to your iPhone. Paprka is one of the best recipe managers.
Publisher: Hindsight Labs LLC
Website: http://www.paprikaapp.com
Version: 1.4.2
Category: Food
Price: $19.99
Parallels Desktop
Run Windows apps on your Mac in a separate window. Drap and drop text between Mac and Windows applications, all made possible by Parallels. The progress in the field of virtualization is remarkable. Parallels 8.0 is so much easier to use than previous versions.
Publisher: Parallels IP Holdings GmbH
Website: http://www.parallels.com/products/desktop/
Version: 8.0
Category: Virtualization
Price: $79.99
Pixelmator
Need Photoshop but don’t want to pay Adobe any more money? Pixelmator does what you absolutely need: resizing, retouching, layering and more. We have totally fallen in love with the latest version Pixelmator 2.2. Its ease of use, clean interface and very attractive price make Pixelmator a viable alternative to Photoshop.
Publisher: Pixelmator Team Ltd.
Website: http://www.pixelmator.com/
Version: 2.2
Category: Creative
Price: $14.99
Presentation Prompter
Presentation Prompter turns your Mac into a teleprompter, offering full control over display preferences, including scrolling speed and character size.
Publisher: NextForce Software
Website: http://www.nextforcesw.com/presentationprompter.html
Version: 4.3.1
Category: Video
Price: $65.00
QuarkXPress
We created MacWEEK using Quark. It would not have been possible to publish a 50,000-circulation weekly in 1987 on the Mac without it. Enough said.
Publisher: Quark
Website: http://www.quark.com
Version: 8.5
Category: Design
Price: $799.00
Quicken Essentials
Here’s one case where a Windows version still outshines, but if you want balance your checkbook the Mac way, Quicken Essentials is good enough.
Publisher: Intuit
Website: http://quicken.intuit.com/personal-finance-software/mac-personal-financial-software.jsp
Version: 1.7.4
Category: Finance
Price: $39.99
Reeder
Silvio Rizzi has written the most gorgeous RSS reader bar none. Reeder syncs with Google Reader feeds but showcases articles beautifully and simply.
Publisher: Silvio Rizzi
Website: http://reederapp.com
Version: 1.2
Category: RSS
Price: $9.99
ResizeIt
ResizeIt is a free batch image editor that lets you process a series of images, including scaling, cropping or rotating them, plus optimizing images for the iPad.
Publisher: NSLab
Website: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/resizeit/id416280139?mt=12
Version: 3.6.0
Category: Utility
Price: Free
Safari
Certain extensions, like ResizeMe, are only available for Safari, so for those with consistent window size capturing needs, Safari is the only way to go. (Chrome has no setting to get rid of its toolbar, which is why all advertising screenshots are taken in Safari.)
Publisher: Apple
Website: http://www.apple.com/safari/
Version: 6.0.4
Category: Browser
Price: Free
Scrivener
I just found the ultimate writing tool: Scrivener. I can’t believe it took me this long to find this amazing writing organizer and thought outliner. Designed for book authors, Scrivener lets you organize your writing and thoughts by folder or sub-folder. It can even attach a document to a document. I have started moving all my writing, wheter for book, site, collateral or anything else into Scrivener. Massively highly recommended for anyone who does any writing, whether for business plan or brochure.
Publisher: Literature & Latte
Website: http://www.literatureandlatte.com
Version: 2.3.1
Category: Writing
Price: $45.00
Search & Replace
Search & Replace is a powerful batch-processing utility that replaces content in text files, renames or trims file names, adds prefixes or suffixes, or changes text to upper and lower case with just one click. It will also provide you with a count of changes, if you like to keep track of stats.
Publisher: Dorian Chapeau
Website: http://search-and-replace.en.softonic.com/mac
Version: 1.8
Category: Utility
Price: $9.14
Skype
Since its launch in August 2003, Skype has reshaped the chat and internet calling market. The Mac version, while radically different from Windows, is pretty nifty.
Publisher: Microsoft
Website: http://www.skype.com/
Version: 6.4
Category: Chat
Price: Free
Smultron
Smultron is no longer updated but I have yet to find a simple text editor that does what it does, which is quick-and-dirty CSS or text editing.
Publisher: Peter Borg/Sourceforge
Website: http://sourceforge.net/projects/smultron/
Version: 3.6b1
Category: Developer Tools
Price: Free
Snapz Pro X
Mac designers create a lot of user manuals, so taking great screenshots is key. Snapz Pro X works the same way as Apple’s Grab but offers more options.
Publisher: Ambrosia Software Inc.
Website: http://www.ambrosiasw.com/utilities/snapzprox/
Version: 2.5.0
Category: Utility
Price: $69.00
Sol Basics Solitaire
If you’re addicted to Solitaire, specifically Spider Solitaire, you will dig Sol Basics. For 10 bucks, you get Sol Basics Solitaire, Spider, Free Cell and Klondike.
Publisher: Smallware LLC
Website: http://www.solbasics.com/
Version: 1.2
Category: Entertainment
Price: $9.99
SplashID Safe
We have two password keepers in this list. That’s because SplashID does a better job of organizing, while 1Password is better at inserting. Both could be far easier to use.
Publisher: Splash
Website: http://www.splashdata.com/splashid/desktop/
Version: 6.2
Category: Utility
Price: $19.95
Suitcase Fusion 4.0
The bane of dealing with a lot of fonts is that the one you need is not always available. Suitcase Fusion makes it easy to manage a huge font library by turning fonts on and off when needed. Not cheap but definitely worth it.
Publisher: Extensis
Website: http://www.extensis.com/suitcase-fusion-4/
Version: 15.0.5
Category: Utility
Price: $99.95
Text Expander
Here is another program that I wished I had acquired earlier. Text Expander has saved me so much time typing repetitive things like URLs and return addresses, simply amazing. It even handles embedded terms that require further input when you type. Highly recommended.
Publisher: SmileOnMyMac LLC
Website: http://www.smilesoftware.com/TextExpander/index.html
Version: 4.0.5
Category: Utility
Price: $34.95
Things
Things is a well-executed list manager and was one of the first apps that let users synch between Mac and iPhone app ($10), perfect for list checkers.
Publisher: Cultured Code GmbH
Website: http://www.culturedcode.com
Version: 2.2.1
Category: Task Management
Price: $49.99
TimeMachineEditor
While Time Machine is a great backup solution, it has one annoying habit, it backs up all the time, slowing your Mac down. TimeMachineEditor solves that.
Publisher: Time Software
Website: http://timesoftware.free.fr/timemachineeditor/
Version: 2.5.3
Category: Utility
Price: Free
Tune Up
Tune Up will parse your iTunes music library and find song duplicates, cover art and correct information, including artist, track name, album name, etc. While it is not retina-optimized, particularly galling given its $50 price, it does what work well.
Publisher: TuneUp Media Inc.
Website: http://tuneupmedia.com
Version: 2.4.8
Category: Utility
Price: $49.95
TurboTax Home Business
This is great tax preparation software. While you can choose between the online and software version, the software has more features.
Publisher: Intuit
Website: http://turbotax.intuit.com/
Version: 2013
Category: Finance
Price: $74.95
TweetDeck
You have probably arleady heard the bad news. After taking Facebook out of Tweetdeck, Twitter has announced the end of the road for TweetDeck, my preferred Twitter client. So get it while you still can. Perhaps I will make the older version available here, so you can still download what was once the best social media client.
Publisher: Twitter
Website: http://www.tweetdeck.com
Version: 2.7.1
Category: Social Media
Price: Free
UnRarX
Some online repositories like compressing files in a weird format called “rar.” UnRarX lets you expand these rare rar archives. 
Publisher: Alexander Roshal
Website: http://www.unrarx.com/
Version: 2.2
Category: Utility
Price: Shareware
VLC Media Player
VLC lets you watch videos encoded in formats QuickTime player cannot handle, including MKV, WMC and AVI. As CNET puts it: If you want a player that can be totally customized and configured to suit, and is not only updated frequently but also regularly offers new features and options created by a huge community of programmers and users, the answer is VLC Media Player.
Publisher: Twoflower
Website: http://download.cnet.com/VLC-Media-Player/3000-13632_4-10267151.html
Version: 2.0.6
Category: Video
Price: Free
White List
White List will parse your Apple Mail folders and provide stats on e-mail addresses you have communicated with and rank them in order of e-mails sent. An invaluable tool for making sure your e-mail lists contain the people you correspond with frequently.
Publisher: Patrick Stein
Website: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/whitelist/id412034673?mt=12
Version: 1.0.8
Category: CRM
Price: $0.99
Wondershare Video Converter Ultimate
Despite the fact that Macs are hugely popular among video pros, you rarely find good info on the best video converter utility. Search no more, we think Wondershare is it.
Publisher: Wondershare
Website: http://www.wondershare.com/mac-video-converter-ultimate/
Version: 3.0.1
Category: Video
Price: $69.00
Xee
Xee is an image browser that lets you turn any folder into a slide show. It will open any format Preview can open, plus a few esoteric ones, like PCX.
Publisher: Dag Agren
Website: http://wakaba.c3.cx/s/apps/xee
Version: 2.2
Category: Photography
Price: Shareware
XMind
XMind is a brainstorming and mind-mapping software program that lets you diagram web site structures or org charts. It’s priced using the freemium model, so no arguments here.
Publisher: XMind Ltd.
Website: www.xmind.net/
Version: 3.2.1
Category: Design
Price: Freemium
Note Regarding Pricing
- Price – All prices are list but promotions are frequently available, as are Amazon.com discounts.
- Free – Means the product is free.
- Freemium – There is a more capable version available or you can avail yourself of paid premium services.
- Shareware – The author would like you to donate money so he/she can survive. Make sure you do if you find the app useful.
Remember how difficult it used to be to design an iPhone app? Now you can design and build complete interactions with Briefs ($199). What I like about Briefs:
- Brief concept – A “brief” is a way to describe a mobile app design to others. Like the company says, Briefs is a prototype app that requires no coding.
- Complete solution – So many companies offer “end-to-end” solutions that you usually tune out after hearing the abused term, but Briefs allows you to design your app on the Mac and then preview your design live on the target device, either iPad and iPhone. Others can preview your design on free Briefscase player app.
- Native animations – With Briefs you can build live apps with hot spots. No web-based animation, with briefs you can You can now see precisely how it works. You can see natural renders and hotspot.
MacStories has a very in-depth interview. Meanwhile enjoy both the introductory video above by developer Rob Rhyne and the video below, then download the Mac trial app.
Briefs is another example of innovative Mac software.
Sony groundbreaking NEX series of digital cameras feature a large APS-C sensor, thereby offering image quality that approximates that of DSLRs. My research suggested that the Sony NEX-5R ($650) represent the best value in terms of features, cost and bulk/weight.
Download this feature comparison between the Sony NEX-3N, NEX-5R and NEX-6 to see how each scored on a focused set of features. While the NEX-6 has received rave reviews, I don’t believe that spending $900 on a model that will be superseded this fall is a good idea.
Here’s I chose the Sony NEX-5R:
- Wi-Fi – Like the Sony NEX-6, the NEX-5R has built-in Wi-Fi and the ability to be updated via apps. Testing going online to buy apps turned about to be a bit frustrating, mainly because you have to learn how to hit keys on Sony’s resistive touch screen, which is not as good as a capacitive one, like the iPhone. But it works and what’s really cool? Watching pictures live on your favorite mobile device, via Wi-Fi and a free app. That’s ubercool.
- Compact – The NEX-5R is so small, it will blow your mind. This for camera that features interchangeable lenses. The 5R is smaller than the NEX-6 and can now be ordered through Amazon.com with the new SELP16-50mm power zoom lens (bundle price: $650), which Sony somehow failed to bundle with the NEX-5R at launch. You’ll appreciate the small size of this package, approaching the diminutive NEX-3N.
- Flip-up LCD – Like the NEX-3N, the 5R can an LCD screen that can flip up 180 degrees, making “selflies” easier to take, and what self-respecting online socialite doesn’t do that these days? The LCD also swivels down, a plus for shooting above crowds (all specs in PDF below).
- Quality – The NEX-3N is receiving its share of comments about the cheap feel of construction. The Sony NEX-5R has a metal top/front plate and a polycarbonate body.
The Sony NEX-5R definitely feels heavier than my Canon S90 but it’s only 12mm wider, 1mm deeper and 9mm thicker, making it equally pocketable save for the protruding zoom. Picture quality is outstanding and will report back on video quality, but I expect that to be remarkable as well.
Now download the Sony NEX model comparison. And remember, as video sharingand Voyeurgasm reshapes society, it helps to be on the leading edge.
I have been using Marketcircle’s Macintosh CRM program Daylite 4.2 ($280) for the past few months and I have to admit, it’s definitely a major improvement over the last version I tested, at least on a top-of-the-line MacBook Retina Pro with SSD drive. Very impressed with its new feature set and functionality, promise a full review soon.
Meanwhile, I would like to tip you off on a program that has become a critical part of my Macintosh software toolbox and that’s Literature and Latte’s Scrivener ($45) — a writing program that simply amazes me with its well-thought out features, designed to help you organize and structure content. Highly recommended.
Finally, in response to Adobe’s poorly received adoption of a Creative Cloud pricing model, I downloaded both Flying Meat’s Acorn and Pixelmator and I’m most impressed with Pixelmator, especially at its remarkable $15 price point. Take that Adobe!
The Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera exudes quality. Sporting a 12.5mm x 7mm sensor that is said to said to offer 13 stops of dynamic range, equal to quality film cameras, the Pocket Cinema is designed with the videographer in mind, with a full complement of video ports, like external mic, headphone, LANC and HDMI that most of its competitors seem to give short shrift to.
While Sony et al., seem to relish overloading us with barely differentiable video cameras that instead of getting better often sacrifice features in new generations, like the deletion of the touch screen in the Sony NEX-6, compared to the previous NEX-5, Blackmagic is following the Apple strategy: keep it simple and focus on the design.
Blackmagic’s Retina-optimized immediately tells visitors that they’re dealing with a company that understands its target audience. And the Pocket Cinema delivers in spades:
- Resolution – Its 1920×1080 resolution is available at 23.98p, 24p, 25p, 29.97p and 30p frame rates.
- LCD screen – A 3.5”-wide LCD screen is optimized for 16:9-class previewing with an 800×480 resolution.
- Lens mount – Offering an MFT (Micro Four Thirds) lens mount, allows buyers to choose from a large selection of lenses, including Olympus, Panasonic, Zeiss, Sigma, Tokina and others.
- Output – Instead of a proprietary format, the Pocket Camera produces lossless CinemaDNG RAW and Apple ProRes 422 (HQ) 1920×1080 files, which any Final Cut Pro user will be able to edit immediately.
- Ports – Users of the Sony NEX-6, which is generally regarded as one of the best video cameras today, generally bemoan the lack of a dedicated microphone input. The Pocket Cinema offers the ability to remotely control the camera via LANC, use external mics and headphones with standard 3.5mm ports, plus outboard monitoring via Micro HDMI.
B&H Photo & Video promises that the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera will be available on July 25, 2013. We can’t wait! Meanwhile, check out the first known to have been shot with the Pocket Cinema, created by Australian videographer John Brawley:
Ten years ago, you would have been labeled crazy if you thought the West could produce video brands that could take on the formidable Japanese and South Koreans. Then came Flip, RED and GoPro. At NAB another brilliant competitor, hailing from Australia, caused a sensation with its the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera ($995), a dedicated videocam that’s certain to rock the video world.
The Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera focuses on quality. Sporting a 12.5mm x 7mm sensor that is said to said to offer 13 stops of dynamic range, equal to quality film cameras, the Pocket Cinema is designed with the videographer in mind, with a full complement of video ports, like external mic, headphone, LANC and HDMI that most of its competitors seem to give short shrift to.
While Sony et al., seem to relish overloading us with barely differentiable video cameras that instead of getting better often sacrifice features in new generations, like the deletion of the touch screen in the Sony NEX-6, compared to the previous NEX-5, Blackmagic is following the Apple strategy: keep it simple and focus on the design.
Blackmagic’s Retina-optimized immediately tells visitors that they’re dealing with a company that understands its target audience. And the Pocket Cinema delivers in spades:
- Resolution – Its 1920×1080 resolution is available at 23.98p, 24p, 25p, 29.97p and 30p frame rates.
- LCD screen – A 3.5”-wide LCD screen is optimized for 16:9-class previewing with an 800×480 resolution.
- Lens mount – Offering an MFT (Micro Four Thirds) lens mount, allows buyers to choose from a large selection of lenses, including Olympus, Panasonic, Zeiss, Sigma, Tokina and others.
- Output – Instead of a proprietary format, the Pocket Camera produces lossless CinemaDNG RAW and Apple ProRes 422 (HQ) 1920×1080 files, which any Final Cut Pro user will be able to edit immediately.
- Ports – Users of the Sony NEX-6, which is generally regarded as one of the best video cameras today, generally bemoan the lack of a dedicated microphone input. The Pocket Cinema offers the ability to remotely control the camera via LANC, use external mics and headphones with standard 3.5mm ports, plus outboard monitoring via Micro HDMI.
B&H Photo & Video promises that the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera will be available on July 25, 2013. We can’t wait! Meanwhile, check out the first known to have been shot with the Pocket Cinema, created by Australian videographer John Brawley:
I have been using Marketcircle’s Macintosh CRM program Daylite 4.2 ($280) for the past few months and I have to admit, it’s definitely a major improvement over the last version I tested, at least on a top-of-the-line MacBook Retina Pro with SSD drive. Very impressed with its new feature set and functionality, promise a full review soon.
Meanwhile, I would like to tip you off on a program that has become a critical part of my Macintosh software toolbox and that’s Literature and Latte’s Scrivener ($45) — a writing program that simply amazes me with its well-thought out features, designed to help you organize and structure content. Highly recommended.
Finally, in response to Adobe’s poorly received adoption of a Creative Cloud pricing model, I downloaded both Flying Meat’s Acorn and Pixelmator and I’m most impressed with Pixelmator, especially at its remarkable $15 price point. Take that Adobe!
The Mac is not strong in database management, particularly CRM-type solutions. Managing contacts is an arduous task on the Mac, particularly now that everyone knows that social networking is absolutely essential to your success.
Why is maintaining a customer, or even a personal database, so difficult on the Mac? A large part of the blame lies with Apple itself. This innovative company provides a lackluster, but free, contact management tool, Address Book (now called Contacts), as part of all MacOS X operating systems.
Because Apple’s contacts manager is capable enough to keep most users happy, few developers have taken on the challenge of building a truly useful database manager for the Mac. Yet as most power users know, Contacts is one of the weakest elements of Apple’s ecosystem, one that leaves a lot to be desired.
At SXSW 2013 this week, VIPorbit introduced a new Mac application, VIPorbit for Mac ($TBD), which will be able to sync with their iOS mobile app. This is a good move given that mobile apps really need a corresponding desktop platform to be able to perform real work.
And things got worse with Mac OS X Lion, which introduced an annoying split-window view of contact groups and contacts, all sheathed in faux leather that while cute looking contributes zilch to the productivity of Mac users. Luckily, the split view window was abandoned in Mountain Lion, but the faux leather look remains.
If you have not upgraded to Mountain Lion, you know how terrible it is that Apple forces you to change the display mode to add new records, a totally unnecessary extra step. I can’t tell you how many times I have added a new group because I clicked the + button in the group view instead of clicking “+” in contact view to actually create a new contact. The upgrade to Mountain Lion is worth the elimination of this annoyance alone.
Another annoying feature is merging duplicates. Apple’s approach is to do as it sees fit. The user has no interaction with what happens to duplicate records. Apple simply combines them and puts conflicting data in the Notes field.
That may be fine for some but it’s a major headache for users who need to wade through all their entries to find the ones that were deduped and look at the Notes field to see what Apple did to your record.
Since many people only have about 300 contacts that’s not too much of a chore, but when you have 2,360, like I do, it’s a big mess. It would have been nice if Contacts automatically created a Smart Group containing merged records, so one could easily review changes.
Business Card Scanning
Ever since the slow demise of the CardScan, thanks to its purchase by DYMO (part of Newell Rubbermaid), we have been lamenting not having a solid Mac solution for scanning business cards. Yes, I know there’s such a thing as the NeatReceipts desktop scanner, but for $370, we’ll pass. Plus reviews suggest its software is not great either.
Worse, after LinkedIn bought CardMunch it has, in effect, killed the product since the app has not been updated since December 2011. Luckily I have been testing two new apps, ScanBizCards Lite and one just released yesterday by FullContact, called CardShark.
ScanBizCards will scan your cards and will get them mostly right, as my tests showed. The app has a lot of features, including integration with Salesforce.com and Sugar CRM. The Lite version is free but is limited to five scans each week. You can upgrade for the full app at $7, which has no limitations. A cloud backup service is also available for $10 per year.
The FullContact app comes from a company that promises to revolutionize the whole address book updating conundrum with a number of developer tools that provide card scanning, card syncing and contact look-up services. The CardShark app is based on their card-scanning API and is free to download but is limited to 25 free scans. Unlimited subscriptions are available for $10/mo. or $100 per year.
CardShark needs to submit your business card to FullContact’s servers to scan and the program promised to return results in 30 minutes, which it did. Of the two iOS apps, ScanBizCards is definitely more full-featured, although that comes at the cost of usability. The app largely works but has an interface only a mother could love.
CardShark also offers integration with Salesforce.com and can sync scan results directly with your Mac Contacts database, which is all you really need. The business card we tested was also scanned flawlessly, another big plus.
In our continuing quest to find a great Mac contact management and CRM solution, we have tried many tools, listed below, to help achieve the quality contact management we deserve.
A new app called Cobook, created by Kaspars Dancis, is now available for free from the App Store and gets around a slew of Contacts weaknesses. Cobook adds a “book” icon to my already crowded menubar, which lets me instantly search, add and modify entries without having to open Contacts.
Cobook also adds a number of much-wished-for enhancements, like auto data recognition for placement in the correct field and social media integration, a major weakness of Apple’s Contacts.
Another promising solution is to use a new online tool by Streak that turns your Gmail account into a CRM solution. We tried using Google Apps and Gmail but gave up on Google’s overly complex method of administering email, so tools like Streak are of limited use to us.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. To best understand how you can build an effective CRM system on the Mac, you need to know the strengths of apps I use to manage each aspect of list creation and maintenance:
Assumptions
This article assumes you’re running a business using your Mac. It also deals with the need to achieve a very important objective: to separate your personal contacts from your business contacts.
You might, for example, want to keep certain business contacts in your Contacts because it syncs with your iPhone. But if you have thousands of business contacts, you don’t really want them all in your iPhone contacts because that makes finding a certain individual in your iPhone list an arduous task.
As business people who work in realtime we have to deal with a lot of these types of mundane problems. To help you understand the role of each software component used, we have created another list at the end of this article to help you understand how each component fits into the Mac CRM process.
Contacts (free)
As maligned at it is, Mac users rely on Contacts because Apple Mail and a host of other programs seamlessly sync with it, allowing you to instantly call up names for easy emailing but also to be able to store your personal database on iCloud for syncing with an iPhone or iPad.
Mountain Lion thankfully adds the three-pane view back to Address Book, which was renamed Contacts in this newest OS release to match its iPhone counterpart.
By right-clicking an email address in Apple Mail, you can quickly add a contact to Contacts. Apart from this nifty integration, Contacts is poor for fast entry and data cleansing. Unfortunately, whenever you use this handy feature, Contacts will label the newly added email address “Other,” which presents numerous challenges when sharing contacts with other applications.
Another irritation: While Contacts allows you to categorize contacts by group, and a single contact can belong to multiple groups, you have to hold down the Option key (in “groups view” in pre-Mountain Lion versions) to see what group(s) a contact belongs to. There is no view that displays all this data at once.
Bento ($30)
Apple’s Filemaker division offers Bento, which can link directly to your Contacts and is able to display your contacts in table view, allowing you to quickly edit multiple contacts and also search on multiple field parameters, both features sadly lacking in Contacts.
Bento not only syncs with Contacts directly but offers a list view that is fully editable and can be searched on multiple parameters as shown above.
Table views are much better for checking data integrity because you can quickly see where the missing gaps are, or which fields were entered incorrectly. Unfortunately, like Contacts, Bento is not able to quickly show you all the groups a contact belongs to. For that you need the following tool, Cobook.
New Tool: Clean Text ($20)
Quite often when transferring files from databases to programs like Panorama Sheets or Direct Mail, you will discover that the file contains non-ASCII text characters, such as accents and em- or en-dashes, that some programs or services will choke on. I have discovered a new tool that allows one to quickly remove these: Clean Text. It works simply, although it has not yet been optimized for Retina displays, but perhaps it doesn’t need to.
Cobook (free)
As we mentioned before, Kaspars Dancis’ Cobook is a godsend for Mac users. Cobook simplifies rapid data entry and searches, rendering the use of Contacts almost unnecessary. Cobook simplifies address entry with smart fields that can detect what type of data you’re entering and automatically enter it into the right fields. This doesn’t always work, of course, but it’s a big plus. Another Cobook feature is the easy way with which it allows you to integrate social media contacts into Contacts.
Cobook shines in the contact editing department, offering users the ability to group edit contacts, like assigning or removing tags, indicated with a “#” (pound or hashtag).
However, you should be careful here. When I started using Cobook and connected my social media accounts, I activated the program’s ability to import all my LinkedIn contacts. Result: my Contacts grew by 800 contacts overnight.
That would be great if these contacts proved helpful but many connected with me after I spoke at an event. Interaction is minimal and there’s no real reason to carry all this extra bulk in my core Contacts.
However, they could be helpful for future business opportunities. That’s why tagging contacts is very important and Cobook simplifies that process. Unlike Contacts and Bento, Cobook actually displays group names, called “tags” by Cobook, in each record. You can easily add or remove tags, quickly organizing contacts. And Cobook can do this for single or multiple contacts at once.
Direct Mail (free)
Once you have all your email addresses organized, you need some way to connect with them on a regular basis. You can download Direct Mail, a free app, to email your contact list. Direct Mail lets you import email templates created by other programs or designers, and rapidly create ad-hoc lists or import existing lists to do promotions.
Direct Mail is an easy-to-use promotional tool that lets you send emails to small or large lists, and features its own built-in address list manager.
When emailing, you have two options. If the number of emails you’re sending is relatively small, say fewer than a 100-200 per month, you can use your own email account to handle the emailing for a one-time $99 fee but you give up tracking “opens.” Direct Mail will also send emails for free, as long as you send no more than 50 emails each month. Unfortunately, the company has added an annoying “Sent with Direct Mail” banner to the bottom of each email making the “free” option largely unusable in a business setting but which, thankfully, can be turned off in the Preferences/Messages settings.
But when email lists get large, it’s better to send them via the e3 Delivery Service built directly into Direct Mail, which charges about $10 per 1,000 emails sent $15 for 500 subscribers each month, or you can buy 5,000 credits for $60 if you don’t want your credit card charged each month. These pre-paid credits are better for those who don’t email frequently.
eMail Extractor ($20)
I like eMail Extractor because it does something unique: it can extract emails from text files. In “Doing CRM the Mac Way,” process described later, I will show you how I use this utility to create highly targeted lists of prospects you have been too busy to add to your Contacts.
eMail Verifier ($30)
The problem with collecting contacts over the years is that people move and many email addresses become outdated resulting in as high as a 20% bounce rate on a typical promotion.
eMail Verifier performs a very useful function — email address verification. This utility will ping addresses to verify their validity.
Email marketing services that charge by the number of emails you send love this of course, because the more email addresses you have the more they charge you. eMail Verifier will test each email address in your list by pinging them without actually sending anything and verify it they’re still valid or not.
That’s not only a money saver but you can also separately save invalid email addresses and let an intern search for them online to update your contacts.
Export Address Book ($3.99; App Store)
Export Address Book deals with a very annoying shortcoming of Contacts: it does not allow you to export email addresses by address group.
Export Address Book is literally a lifesaver if you use Contacts and want to export contacts by category, or only include certain fields in your export file.
What if you wanted to let your suppliers know that you have a new head of accounts payable who will see to it that they never get paid? Export Address Book handles that task beautifully.
MailChimp (free for less than 2,000 email addresses)
MailChimp is one of the most popular emailing services in the business today. Run by the affable Ben Chestnut out of Atlanta, a former graphic designer for Cox Communications, Ben has turned MailChimp into not only the most fully featured email service in the business but one that has a tongue-in-cheek sense of humor that must be experienced.
Most importantly, MailChimp created one of the first APIs to allow third parties to connect directly to your email lists, which comes in handy when you use outside CRM services like BatchBook or Nimble, which both sync to it.
Mail Designer ($70)
From Germany comes a nice program, Mail Designer, that lets you customize company emails by including your logo in the header.
I only mention Mail Designer here because I not only spent $70 for the program but also an additional $40 on their Business Edition stationery pack. This combination might work for you because the designs are nice and once customized to your liking they can be directly installed in Apple Mail to be used quickly.
But I found Mail Designer a little constraining. For example you can’t modify the width of templates and while Mail Designer works with MailChimp, another favorite emailer of mine, they failed to heed MailChimp’s recommendation to make emails no more than 620 pixels wide.
Mail Designer templates are 690 pixels wide, which makes them unwieldy for simple business communications, but great for emailing a Google Maps picture directly in your office directions.
MailSteward ($50)
I have about 160,000 emails stored on my Mac. More than 90,000 are in Mac Mail and additional 70,000 are stored in a separate MailSteward database. MailSteward allows you to archive your old Mac email inbox folders to a standalone database that can be searched quickly using multiple parameters.
In “Doing CRM the Mac Way,” below, I’ll describe how I use MailSteward to resurrect old business development contacts for promotional mailings.
Numbers ($20; App Store)
You often need a spreadsheet to look at files that have been exported by other programs. Apple’s popular spreadsheet Numbers can handle this task. Numbers lets’ you look at exported data in a table to help you clean up your contact list.
One popular use of Numbers is to join two fields for using with an event invitation site like Pingg, which lets you paste two fields, a combined name field and email address, at once to add to your invite list. In Numbers you can combine First Name and Last Name, using this simple trick:
- Start with a sheet that has first names in column A and last names in column B
- Create a new column C and paste in the formula C=A&” “&B.
- Replicate the formula down for as many contacts as you have.
- Copy joined column C to Column D, and select “Paste Values” from the Edit menu.
- Now you have a list of joined first and last names, and you can delete columns A, B and C.
Panorama Sheets ($50)
I’m glad to see that James Rea still runs one of the oldest Mac development companies, ProVUE, and continues to publish Panorama Sheets, an offshoot of the original Panorama.
What I like about Panorama is that you can handle big list manipulations very quickly, because Panorama does what few other programs do. For example, it can split database record fields or join them at the blink of an eye.
This is a boon for those of us who need to deal with bonehead disorganized co-workers who store names in a spreadsheet using one field for both First and Last. Panorama lets you split those fields, and a lot more, with ease.
Plaxo ($80)
This is not your old grand daddy’s Plaxo. The reinvented service syncs Contacts and offers an optional Platinum assistant-driven service that actually plies the internet and unmentionable databases to make sure you have the latest and greatest on your database of prospects.
Unfortunately the service went from bad to good and then back to bad again when it comes to eliminating duplicates from your Contacts list. But I feel that the Platinum service is unique enough that you should spend some bucks to see if it meets your needs.
It’s definitely a big help in a world where there’s never enough time to do anything.
WhiteList (App Store; $6)
I was happier than a pig in you-know-what when I found this program. It may seem simple, but believe me, nothing else does what WhiteList does. WhiteList searches though email inboxes and it finds people you emailed most and ranks them by number of emails sent.
In the next section, “Doing CRM, the Mac Way,” I show how to use WhiteList to create a list of your most important business development contacts so you can reach out to them personally.
Doing CRM the Mac Way
I’m going to describe a process that every business executive faces. You have emailed hundreds of business prospects over the past few years, but you were too busy to add most of them to your Contacts each time you engaged.
Now your business development email folder is full of hundreds of emails of people you want to reach out to with an update about your firm or to send them “We just moved” emails. How does one do this?
Well the good news is that it can be done. The bad news: it takes many steps to get it right. Here, I’m going to describe the process flow using the tools mentioned above.
Contacts
Store all your contacts in Apple’s Contacts, since everything, including your iPhone and iPad, lives off this contact list. You will want to add new contacts directly using that handy right click (using the Control key if you don’t have a new trackpad or two-button mouse). Make sure you categorize your contact’s email correctly because most CRM programs will want to import your contact’s “work” email, not other. Also make sure you add each contact to the right group so you can do custom list selections.
Don’t know how to organize your Contacts by category? Here are a few basic categories, or “groups” as Apple calls them, I use that will help you get organized:
- Promo – this is your core business promotion group. All people who are to receive your promotional emails should be on this list, save perhaps for your personal contacts and suppliers, this a group you should definitely create using whatever name you prefer.
- Personal – Put your family members, doctors, and other personal contacts here, so you can avoid sending them unwanted business promotions. Some may be interested, like that dentist who wants to invest in your business, so you can always add them to the Promo group too, because Contacts lets you assign contacts to multiple groups, a powerful feature.
- Restaurants/Bars – You know visitors are going to ask you for personal restaurant recommendations, so keep this group separate from your personal contacts. This list also makes it easier to suggest a place for a business lunch.
- Suppliers – Keep your suppliers or vendors separate so you are able to send them emails no one else wants to read, like “No more 2% cash discount!”
The sky is the limit when it comes to organizing contacts. Some will prefer to split family from the personal group, so they can keep their GFs or BFs separate from their better halves. 
You get the picture. But don’t overdo it. Part of being well-organized is keeping things simple.
Edit and Update with Cobook
You are encouraged to use Cobook to help update and maintain your contact list and avoiding having to use Contacts, which will save you a lot of time.
Parse Mail Inboxes with White List
Use White List to ply through your “Business Development” folder in Mac Mail and filter a list of people you emailed most. Set a cut off of two emails and consider everyone above that as a candidate for your promotional, or promo, list.
You do have a business development folder, right? If not, make one pronto and use it to store emails of people you want to do business with in the future.
Distill Email Addresses with MailSteward
In our system, we export our Mail’s Business Development folder and import that inbox database into MailSteward. MailSteward will then create a list of all email addresses found in your business development folder.
Use Bioinformatics to Compare Lists
You can compare the list of email addresses generated by MailSteward with the one you created with White List to find the people you corresponded with most. A great list comparison tool is Bioinformatics’ Compare Two Lists. This nifty tool will show you the difference between two lists, their intersection (what they have in common), etc.
Isn’t it amazing that this functionality is not offered by a regular application? I would love to see a utility developed that would be able to do this based not only on a single field, but to compare complete Contacts databases, so you can find out which people are missing from one list to the other.
Test Email Addresses with eMail Verifier
Once you’ve extracted email addresses from a MailSteward database or exported them from Contacts, you can test the validity of email addresses using eMail Verifier, and save only the ones found to be still correct.
Send Targeted Promotions with MailChimp
Export your final list to MailChimp, where you will add them to your “Promo” list. MailChimp also synchronizes with Nimble, the app described below, so use the “Promo” tag to identify the correct list to sync with.
Using a (SaaS) CRM Service: Nimble
One way to deal with promotion lists is to use online services that fundamentally mimic Salesforce.com. Why not Salesforce.com itself? Because as most salespersons will tell you, Salesforce.com is very difficult to use.
If you like what CRM services can do for you, we recommend you look into Nimble. Nimble debuted in 2011 and shines in one regard: it integrates your social media contacts and lets you communicate directly with them via each service’s API. Nimble currently supports direct messaging with Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
The basic version of Nimble is free. If you opt to pay $15/month you can get a few more features, notably that highly desirable syncing with MailChimp.
Turning Your Gmail into a CRM System: Contactually
As we mentioned earlier, we tried using Streak with Google Gmail to create a CRM system, but we found the way Gmail works to be mystifying. Streak only made things worse.
A much better solution that works with both Gmail and IMAP email accounts is Contactually, which will help you follow up on mission-critical customers by letting you organize your contacts by “buckets.” Each morning, or using another interval setting specified by you, you will be reminded to follow up by contact.
You can also specify “Actions” by contact, which can provide greater granularity for tasks required for each business account.
I’m now working with a system hack involving both Nimble and Contactually, backed by Contacts and Cobook, and will reports back in a few months on how well this is working for me.
Google Apps Contacts
Google offers free Google Apps accounts for entities of 10 users or less. A Google Apps account lets you receive email at your own company email address, i.e. john.smith@yourcompany.com, while also receiving the benefits of Google Calendar and Contacts.
But syncing Google Contacts also presented challenges. Didn’t we warn you that managing contacts on the Mac is unnecessarily complicated? We know that many readers use Gmail, so the tools listed below are for you:
- Spanning Sync 3 – We tried using Spanning Sync, a $30/year service, but quickly found out that it had problems syncing with Google Calendar initially, producing a “Google account is over quota” message. Then we discovered that you have to turn off iCloud syncing of your contacts to make it sync with Google Contacts. When we turned iCloud syncing off temporarily, it did the job. What happened when we turned iCloud back on? iCloud wanted to merge local contacts with iCloud contacts. That would have instantly doubled my Contacts, with no promise that de-duping would work. So we had to trash our iCloud database to turn iCloud back on again. Clearly, not a workable solution.
- SyncMate – Another option is SyncMate, which is free. SyncMate can synchronize Google Accounts, and we’re currently testing this option vs. Spanning Sync.
iPhone-only Contact Managers
There are three iOS apps that have recently surfaced:
- Brewster (free) – Brewster was created by Brewster Inc., and is a next-generation contact manager that integrates your social media contacts, including Facebook, Foursquare, LinkedIn and Twitter. The app displays the profile pictures of your contacts and allows you to “favorite” them, so they’re shown at the top. While we like Brewster for what it does, it remains of limited use because it lacks a desktop application.
- Smartr Contacts (free) – Smartr Contacts is made by Xobni Corp., bestknown for its Gmail application Smartr Inbox. Smartr also integrates social media profiles with your contact list. Like Brewster, Smartr lacks a desktop application, although Xobni clearly expects you to use Gmail as your main CRM interface.
- VIPorbit – From the co-inventor of Act!, Mike Muhney, comes VIPorbit Lite (free; $10 for the non-nag version) lets you organize contacts by “Orbits.” The program, available for both iPhone and iPad, also syncs with your Calendar so that you don’t have to leave the app to view your schedule. VIPorbit announced a desktop application at SXSW, so stay tuned for a review.
As you can see there are numerous challenges in maintaining contacts and doing email promotion, i.e. CRM, on the Mac. It is our sincere hope that a few smart Mac developers will read this story and be inspired to create a truly awesome solution. Meanwhile, please like us on Facebook and retweet this article if you found it helpful.
I’ve been testing a simple FileMaker contact solution but it’s too basic for most of my needs. I’m still largely dependent on Cobook and occasionally use Bento but that one has fallen out of favor too. Can anyone help me build a good one? I have the design all spec’ed out, all I need is a hacker.
The Mac is weak in database management, especially in CRM-type solutions. Managing contacts is an arduous task on the Mac, particularly now that everyone knows that social networking is absolutely essential to your success.
Why is maintaining a customer, or even a personal database, so difficult on the Mac? A large part of the blame lies with Apple itself. This innovative company provides a lackluster, but free, contact management tool, Address Book (now called Contacts), as part of all MacOS X operating systems.
Because Apple’s contacts manager is capable enough to keep most users happy, few developers have taken on the challenge of building a truly useful database manager for the Mac. Yet as most power users know, Contacts is one of the weakest elements of Apple’s ecosystem, one that leaves a lot to be desired.
At SXSW 2013 this week, VIPorbit introduced a new Mac application, VIPorbit for Mac ($TBD), which will be able to sync with their iOS mobile app. This is a good move given that mobile apps really need a corresponding desktop platform to be able to perform real work.
And things got worse with Mac OS X Lion, which introduced an annoying split-window view of contact groups and contacts, all sheathed in faux leather that while cute looking contributes zilch to the productivity of Mac users. Luckily, the split view window was abandoned in Mountain Lion, but the faux leather look remains.
If you have not upgraded to Mountain Lion, you know how terrible it is that Apple forces you to change the display mode to add new records, a totally unnecessary extra step. I can’t tell you how many times I have added a new group because I clicked the + button in the group view instead of clicking “+” in contact view to actually create a new contact. The upgrade to Mountain Lion is worth the elimination of this annoyance alone.
Another annoying feature is merging duplicates. Apple’s approach is to do as it sees fit. The user has no interaction with what happens to duplicate records. Apple simply combines them and puts conflicting data in the Notes field.
That may be fine for some but it’s a major headache for users who need to wade through all their entries to find the ones that were deduped and look at the Notes field to see what Apple did to your record.
Since many people only have about 300 contacts that’s not too much of a chore, but when you have 2,360, like I do, it’s a big mess. It would have been nice if Contacts automatically created a Smart Group containing merged records, so one could easily review changes.
Business Card Scanning
Ever since the slow demise of the CardScan, thanks to its purchase by DYMO (part of Newell Rubbermaid), we have been lamenting not having a solid Mac solution for scanning business cards. Yes, I know there’s such a thing as the NeatReceipts desktop scanner, but for $370, we’ll pass. Plus reviews suggest its software is not great either.
Worse, after LinkedIn bought CardMunch it has, in effect, killed the product since the app has not been updated since December 2011. Luckily I have been testing two new apps, ScanBizCards Lite and one just released yesterday by FullContact, called CardShark.
ScanBizCards will scan your cards and will get them mostly right, as my tests showed. The app has a lot of features, including integration with Salesforce.com and Sugar CRM. The Lite version is free but is limited to five scans each week. You can upgrade for the full app at $7, which has no limitations. A cloud backup service is also available for $10 per year.
The FullContact app comes from a company that promises to revolutionize the whole address book updating conundrum with a number of developer tools that provide card scanning, card syncing and contact look-up services. The CardShark app is based on their card-scanning API and is free to download but is limited to 25 free scans. Unlimited subscriptions are available for $10/mo. or $100 per year.
CardShark needs to submit your business card to FullContact’s servers to scan and the program promised to return results in 30 minutes, which it did. Of the two iOS apps, ScanBizCards is definitely more full-featured, although that comes at the cost of usability. The app largely works but has an interface only a mother could love.
CardShark also offers integration with Salesforce.com and can sync scan results directly with your Mac Contacts database, which is all you really need. The business card we tested was also scanned flawlessly, another big plus.
In our continuing quest to find a great Mac contact management and CRM solution, we have tried many tools, listed below, to help achieve the quality contact management we deserve.
A new app called Cobook, created by Kaspars Dancis, is now available for free from the App Store and gets around a slew of Contacts weaknesses. Cobook adds a “book” icon to my already crowded menubar, which lets me instantly search, add and modify entries without having to open Contacts.
Cobook also adds a number of much-wished-for enhancements, like auto data recognition for placement in the correct field and social media integration, a major weakness of Apple’s Contacts.
Another promising solution is to use a new online tool by Streak that turns your Gmail account into a CRM solution. We tried using Google Apps and Gmail but gave up on Google’s overly complex method of administering email, so tools like Streak are of limited use to us.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. To best understand how you can build an effective CRM system on the Mac, you need to know the strengths of apps I use to manage each aspect of list creation and maintenance:
Assumptions
This article assumes you’re running a business using your Mac. It also deals with the need to achieve a very important objective: to separate your personal contacts from your business contacts.
You might, for example, want to keep certain business contacts in your Contacts because it syncs with your iPhone. But if you have thousands of business contacts, you don’t really want them all in your iPhone contacts because that makes finding a certain individual in your iPhone list an arduous task.
As business people who work in realtime we have to deal with a lot of these types of mundane problems. To help you understand the role of each software component used, we have created another list at the end of this article to help you understand how each component fits into the Mac CRM process.
Contacts (free)
As maligned at it is, Mac users rely on Contacts because Apple Mail and a host of other programs seamlessly sync with it, allowing you to instantly call up names for easy emailing but also to be able to store your personal database on iCloud for syncing with an iPhone or iPad.
Mountain Lion thankfully adds the three-pane view back to Address Book, which was renamed Contacts in this newest OS release to match its iPhone counterpart.
By right-clicking an email address in Apple Mail, you can quickly add a contact to Contacts. Apart from this nifty integration, Contacts is poor for fast entry and data cleansing. Unfortunately, whenever you use this handy feature, Contacts will label the newly added email address “Other,” which presents numerous challenges when sharing contacts with other applications.
Another irritation: While Contacts allows you to categorize contacts by group, and a single contact can belong to multiple groups, you have to hold down the Option key (in “groups view” in pre-Mountain Lion versions) to see what group(s) a contact belongs to. There is no view that displays all this data at once.
Bento ($30)
Apple’s Filemaker division offers Bento, which can link directly to your Contacts and is able to display your contacts in table view, allowing you to quickly edit multiple contacts and also search on multiple field parameters, both features sadly lacking in Contacts.
Bento not only syncs with Contacts directly but offers a list view that is fully editable and can be searched on multiple parameters as shown above.
Table views are much better for checking data integrity because you can quickly see where the missing gaps are, or which fields were entered incorrectly. Unfortunately, like Contacts, Bento is not able to quickly show you all the groups a contact belongs to. For that you need the following tool, Cobook.
New Tool: Clean Text ($20)
Quite often when transferring files from databases to programs like Panorama Sheets or Direct Mail, you will discover that the file contains non-ASCII text characters, such as accents and em- or en-dashes, that some programs or services will choke on. I have discovered a new tool that allows one to quickly remove these: Clean Text. It works simply, although it has not yet been optimized for Retina displays, but perhaps it doesn’t need to.
Cobook (free)
As we mentioned before, Kaspars Dancis’ Cobook is a godsend for Mac users. Cobook simplifies rapid data entry and searches, rendering the use of Contacts almost unnecessary. Cobook simplifies address entry with smart fields that can detect what type of data you’re entering and automatically enter it into the right fields. This doesn’t always work, of course, but it’s a big plus. Another Cobook feature is the easy way with which it allows you to integrate social media contacts into Contacts.
Cobook shines in the contact editing department, offering users the ability to group edit contacts, like assigning or removing tags, indicated with a “#” (pound or hashtag).
However, you should be careful here. When I started using Cobook and connected my social media accounts, I activated the program’s ability to import all my LinkedIn contacts. Result: my Contacts grew by 800 contacts overnight.
That would be great if these contacts proved helpful but many connected with me after I spoke at an event. Interaction is minimal and there’s no real reason to carry all this extra bulk in my core Contacts.
However, they could be helpful for future business opportunities. That’s why tagging contacts is very important and Cobook simplifies that process. Unlike Contacts and Bento, Cobook actually displays group names, called “tags” by Cobook, in each record. You can easily add or remove tags, quickly organizing contacts. And Cobook can do this for single or multiple contacts at once.
Direct Mail (free)
Once you have all your email addresses organized, you need some way to connect with them on a regular basis. You can download Direct Mail, a free app, to email your contact list. Direct Mail lets you import email templates created by other programs or designers, and rapidly create ad-hoc lists or import existing lists to do promotions.
Direct Mail is an easy-to-use promotional tool that lets you send emails to small or large lists, and features its own built-in address list manager.
When emailing, you have two options. If the number of emails you’re sending is relatively small, say fewer than a 100-200 per month, you can use your own email account to handle the emailing for a one-time $99 fee but you give up tracking “opens.” Direct Mail will also send emails for free, as long as you send no more than 50 emails each month. Unfortunately, the company has added an annoying “Sent with Direct Mail” banner to the bottom of each email making the “free” option largely unusable in a business setting but which, thankfully, can be turned off in the Preferences/Messages settings.
But when email lists get large, it’s better to send them via the e3 Delivery Service built directly into Direct Mail, which charges about $10 per 1,000 emails sent $15 for 500 subscribers each month, or you can buy 5,000 credits for $60 if you don’t want your credit card charged each month. These pre-paid credits are better for those who don’t email frequently.
eMail Extractor ($20)
I like eMail Extractor because it does something unique: it can extract emails from text files. In “Doing CRM the Mac Way,” process described later, I will show you how I use this utility to create highly targeted lists of prospects you have been too busy to add to your Contacts.
eMail Verifier ($30)
The problem with collecting contacts over the years is that people move and many email addresses become outdated resulting in as high as a 20% bounce rate on a typical promotion.
eMail Verifier performs a very useful function — email address verification. This utility will ping addresses to verify their validity.
Email marketing services that charge by the number of emails you send love this of course, because the more email addresses you have the more they charge you. eMail Verifier will test each email address in your list by pinging them without actually sending anything and verify it they’re still valid or not.
That’s not only a money saver but you can also separately save invalid email addresses and let an intern search for them online to update your contacts.
Export Address Book ($3.99; App Store)
Export Address Book deals with a very annoying shortcoming of Contacts: it does not allow you to export email addresses by address group.
Export Address Book is literally a lifesaver if you use Contacts and want to export contacts by category, or only include certain fields in your export file.
What if you wanted to let your suppliers know that you have a new head of accounts payable who will see to it that they never get paid? ;) Export Address Book handles that task beautifully.
MailChimp (free for less than 2,000 email addresses)
MailChimp is one of the most popular emailing services in the business today. Run by the affable Ben Chestnut out of Atlanta, a former graphic designer for Cox Communications, Ben has turned MailChimp into not only the most fully featured email service in the business but one that has a tongue-in-cheek sense of humor that must be experienced.
Most importantly, MailChimp created one of the first APIs to allow third parties to connect directly to your email lists, which comes in handy when you use outside CRM services like BatchBook or Nimble, which both sync to it.
Mail Designer ($70)
From Germany comes a nice program, Mail Designer, that lets you customize company emails by including your logo in the header.
I only mention Mail Designer here because I not only spent $70 for the program but also an additional $40 on their Business Edition stationery pack. This combination might work for you because the designs are nice and once customized to your liking they can be directly installed in Apple Mail to be used quickly.
But I found Mail Designer a little constraining. For example you can’t modify the width of templates and while Mail Designer works with MailChimp, another favorite emailer of mine, they failed to heed MailChimp’s recommendation to make emails no more than 620 pixels wide.
Mail Designer templates are 690 pixels wide, which makes them unwieldy for simple business communications, but great for emailing a Google Maps picture directly in your office directions.
MailSteward ($50)
I have about 160,000 emails stored on my Mac. More than 90,000 are in Mac Mail and additional 70,000 are stored in a separate MailSteward database. MailSteward allows you to archive your old Mac email inbox folders to a standalone database that can be searched quickly using multiple parameters.
In “Doing CRM the Mac Way,” below, I’ll describe how I use MailSteward to resurrect old business development contacts for promotional mailings.
Numbers ($20; App Store)
You often need a spreadsheet to look at files that have been exported by other programs. Apple’s popular spreadsheet Numbers can handle this task. Numbers lets’ you look at exported data in a table to help you clean up your contact list.
One popular use of Numbers is to join two fields for using with an event invitation site like Pingg, which lets you paste two fields, a combined name field and email address, at once to add to your invite list. In Numbers you can combine First Name and Last Name, using this simple trick:
- Start with a sheet that has first names in column A and last names in column B
- Create a new column C and paste in the formula C=A&” “&B.
- Replicate the formula down for as many contacts as you have.
- Copy joined column C to Column D, and select “Paste Values” from the Edit menu.
- Now you have a list of joined first and last names, and you can delete columns A, B and C.
Panorama Sheets ($50)
I’m glad to see that James Rea still runs one of the oldest Mac development companies, ProVUE, and continues to publish Panorama Sheets, an offshoot of the original Panorama.
What I like about Panorama is that you can handle big list manipulations very quickly, because Panorama does what few other programs do. For example, it can split database record fields or join them at the blink of an eye.
This is a boon for those of us who need to deal with bonehead disorganized co-workers who store names in a spreadsheet using one field for both First and Last. Panorama lets you split those fields, and a lot more, with ease.
Plaxo ($80)
This is not your old grand daddy’s Plaxo. The reinvented service syncs Contacts and offers an optional Platinum assistant-driven service that actually plies the internet and unmentionable databases to make sure you have the latest and greatest on your database of prospects.
Unfortunately the service went from bad to good and then back to bad again when it comes to eliminating duplicates from your Contacts list. But I feel that the Platinum service is unique enough that you should spend some bucks to see if it meets your needs.
It’s definitely a big help in a world where there’s never enough time to do anything.
WhiteList (App Store; $6)
I was happier than a pig in you-know-what when I found this program. It may seem simple, but believe me, nothing else does what WhiteList does. WhiteList searches though email inboxes and it finds people you emailed most and ranks them by number of emails sent.
In the next section, “Doing CRM, the Mac Way,” I show how to use WhiteList to create a list of your most important business development contacts so you can reach out to them personally.
Doing CRM the Mac Way
I’m going to describe a process that every business executive faces. You have emailed hundreds of business prospects over the past few years, but you were too busy to add most of them to your Contacts each time you engaged.
Now your business development email folder is full of hundreds of emails of people you want to reach out to with an update about your firm or to send them “We just moved” emails. How does one do this?
Well the good news is that it can be done. The bad news: it takes many steps to get it right. Here, I’m going to describe the process flow using the tools mentioned above.
Contacts
Store all your contacts in Apple’s Contacts, since everything, including your iPhone and iPad, lives off this contact list. You will want to add new contacts directly using that handy right click (using the Control key if you don’t have a new trackpad or two-button mouse). Make sure you categorize your contact’s email correctly because most CRM programs will want to import your contact’s “work” email, not other. Also make sure you add each contact to the right group so you can do custom list selections.
Don’t know how to organize your Contacts by category? Here are a few basic categories, or “groups” as Apple calls them, I use that will help you get organized:
- Promo – this is your core business promotion group. All people who are to receive your promotional emails should be on this list, save perhaps for your personal contacts and suppliers, this a group you should definitely create using whatever name you prefer.
- Personal – Put your family members, doctors, and other personal contacts here, so you can avoid sending them unwanted business promotions. Some may be interested, like that dentist who wants to invest in your business, so you can always add them to the Promo group too, because Contacts lets you assign contacts to multiple groups, a powerful feature.
- Restaurants/Bars – You know visitors are going to ask you for personal restaurant recommendations, so keep this group separate from your personal contacts. This list also makes it easier to suggest a place for a business lunch.
- Suppliers – Keep your suppliers or vendors separate so you are able to send them emails no one else wants to read, like “No more 2% cash discount!”
The sky is the limit when it comes to organizing contacts. Some will prefer to split family from the personal group, so they can keep their GFs or BFs separate from their better halves. :D You get the picture. But don’t overdo it. Part of being well-organized is keeping things simple.
Edit and Update with Cobook
You are encouraged to use Cobook to help update and maintain your contact list and avoiding having to use Contacts, which will save you a lot of time.
Parse Mail Inboxes with White List
Use White List to ply through your “Business Development” folder in Mac Mail and filter a list of people you emailed most. Set a cut off of two emails and consider everyone above that as a candidate for your promotional, or promo, list.
You do have a business development folder, right? If not, make one pronto and use it to store emails of people you want to do business with in the future.
Distill Email Addresses with MailSteward
In our system, we export our Mail’s Business Development folder and import that inbox database into MailSteward. MailSteward will then create a list of all email addresses found in your business development folder.
Use Bioinformatics to Compare Lists
You can compare the list of email addresses generated by MailSteward with the one you created with White List to find the people you corresponded with most. A great list comparison tool is Bioinformatics’ Compare Two Lists. This nifty tool will show you the difference between two lists, their intersection (what they have in common), etc.
Isn’t it amazing that this functionality is not offered by a regular application? I would love to see a utility developed that would be able to do this based not only on a single field, but to compare complete Contacts databases, so you can find out which people are missing from one list to the other.
Test Email Addresses with eMail Verifier
Once you’ve extracted email addresses from a MailSteward database or exported them from Contacts, you can test the validity of email addresses using eMail Verifier, and save only the ones found to be still correct.
Send Targeted Promotions with MailChimp
Export your final list to MailChimp, where you will add them to your “Promo” list. MailChimp also synchronizes with Nimble, the app described below, so use the “Promo” tag to identify the correct list to sync with.
Using a (SaaS) CRM Service: Nimble
One way to deal with promotion lists is to use online services that fundamentally mimic Salesforce.com. Why not Salesforce.com itself? Because as most salespersons will tell you, Salesforce.com is very difficult to use.
If you like what CRM services can do for you, we recommend you look into Nimble. Nimble debuted in 2011 and shines in one regard: it integrates your social media contacts and lets you communicate directly with them via each service’s API. Nimble currently supports direct messaging with Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
The basic version of Nimble is free. If you opt to pay $15/month you can get a few more features, notably that highly desirable syncing with MailChimp.
Turning Your Gmail into a CRM System: Contactually
As we mentioned earlier, we tried using Streak with Google Gmail to create a CRM system, but we found the way Gmail works to be mystifying. Streak only made things worse.
A much better solution that works with both Gmail and IMAP email accounts is Contactually, which will help you follow up on mission-critical customers by letting you organize your contacts by “buckets.” Each morning, or using another interval setting specified by you, you will be reminded to follow up by contact.
You can also specify “Actions” by contact, which can provide greater granularity for tasks required for each business account.
I’m now working with a system hack involving both Nimble and Contactually, backed by Contacts and Cobook, and will reports back in a few months on how well this is working for me.
Google Apps Contacts
Google offers free Google Apps accounts for entities of 10 users or less. A Google Apps account lets you receive email at your own company email address, i.e. john.smith@yourcompany.com, while also receiving the benefits of Google Calendar and Contacts.
But syncing Google Contacts also presented challenges. Didn’t we warn you that managing contacts on the Mac is unnecessarily complicated? We know that many readers use Gmail, so the tools listed below are for you:
- Spanning Sync 3 – We tried using Spanning Sync, a $30/year service, but quickly found out that it had problems syncing with Google Calendar initially, producing a “Google account is over quota” message. Then we discovered that you have to turn off iCloud syncing of your contacts to make it sync with Google Contacts. When we turned iCloud syncing off temporarily, it did the job. What happened when we turned iCloud back on? iCloud wanted to merge local contacts with iCloud contacts. That would have instantly doubled my Contacts, with no promise that de-duping would work. So we had to trash our iCloud database to turn iCloud back on again. Clearly, not a workable solution.
- SyncMate – Another option is SyncMate, which is free. SyncMate can synchronize Google Accounts, and we’re currently testing this option vs. Spanning Sync.
iPhone-only Contact Managers
There are three iOS apps that have recently surfaced:
- Brewster (free) – Brewster was created by Brewster Inc., and is a next-generation contact manager that integrates your social media contacts, including Facebook, Foursquare, LinkedIn and Twitter. The app displays the profile pictures of your contacts and allows you to “favorite” them, so they’re shown at the top. While we like Brewster for what it does, it remains of limited use because it lacks a desktop application.
- Smartr Contacts (free) – Smartr Contacts is made by Xobni Corp., bestknown for its Gmail application Smartr Inbox. Smartr also integrates social media profiles with your contact list. Like Brewster, Smartr lacks a desktop application, although Xobni clearly expects you to use Gmail as your main CRM interface.
- VIPorbit – From the co-inventor of Act!, Mike Muhney, comes VIPorbit Lite (free; $10 for the non-nag version) lets you organize contacts by “Orbits.” The program, available for both iPhone and iPad, also syncs with your Calendar so that you don’t have to leave the app to view your schedule. VIPorbit announced a desktop application at SXSW, so stay tuned for a review.
As you can see there are numerous challenges in maintaining contacts and doing email promotion, i.e. CRM, on the Mac. It is our sincere hope that a few smart Mac developers will read this story and be inspired to create a truly awesome solution. Meanwhile, please like us on Facebook and retweet this article if you found it helpful.
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That’s a question we perennially try to answer. It may refer to a product or service that’s slick or innovative. But we also want superior performance, and, in this day and age, it should deliver value, backed by superb customer service. Those requirements are not always met but we sure seek to satisfy them all.
Last week we had a chance to test-drive the new Cadillac ATS, the company’s latest attempt to unseat the BMW 3-series and Mercedes C-class hegemony. There’s no question the Cadillac is a kick to drive but can it play in the major leagues?
The first thing we should acknowledge is that the ATS is not you grand pappy’s Caddy, that’s for sure. Our six-day road test took us from San Francisco to Santa Barbara and the surrounding wine region, including such scenic destinations as Paso Robles and Los Olivos. Our ATS feried us between such fine wineries as Denner, Laetitia, Lone Madrone, Stolpman and Tablas Creek.
Here are our strongest impressions by major feature category:
Engine
Our ATS was equipped with 3.6-liter V-6, delivering an impressive 321 horsepower. Flooring the gas pedal produced a notable growl as the ATS surged forward. And even with four people in the car, very dense highway merges were not a problem. The direct-injection V6 engine purred most of the time but was eager to push the ATS’ 3,461-pound (1,573 kg) frame in any direction.
All-wheel-drive, a near-perfect 50/50 weight balance, Brembo brakes and ZF power steering plus magnetic ride control contributed to an imminently drivable experience.
Access
The remote features our preferred interface method, separate lock and unlock buttons, and trunk unlock plus a remote-start capability, which works from 195 feet (60 m) away — very convenient for getting the AC going in 106-degree Las Vegas weather. The remote also contains a hidden key, which can be used in an emergency. The engine uses a pushbutton start system.
Navigation
Here’s where we ran into our first problems. While the Cadillac CUE navigation system wakes up when your hand approaches the navigation screen, through an innovative haptic interface, keyboard entry on its touchscreen was hit and miss.
Quite often inputing destinations had to be laboriously corrected. Corrections frequently required repositioning the cursor, which was nearly impossible to do precisely. Apple’s iPad has set a very high standard for touchscreen controls and Cadillac will have to go back to the drawing board and significantly improve this feature — it’s too recalcitrant, nay belligerent, to be truly useful.
Bluetooth syncing with a mobile phone was effortless as was the Pandora system, once locked in on our test iPhone. The ATS also is available with a heads-up display but our ATS was not equipped with that feature, although it did occasionally light up a four-segment warning light that suggested something was terribly wrong but the driver information center did not explain why.
The Cadillac ATS uses the Cadillac CUE navigation system, which includes Pandora and OnStar, connected via an external mobile device, plus the usual complement of audio and GPS controls.
Audio
We liked how loud the 10-speaker Bose system could play but our feeling was that the quality of audio reproduction in a car can still stand improvement. The ATS’ audio system includes a SiriusXM satellite radio, a must have these days, plus HD radio. Unfortunately, operating the audio controls located under the navigation screen required using discrete buttons that did not always work as expected. The steering wheel volume buttons were easier to use.
Climate Control
The same idiosyncrasy applied to the buttons controlling the temperature for each zone. Much of the time, these discrete controls had a mind of their own about temperature settings and would end up selecting an unintended temperature. Since these buttons reacted slowly to the touch, we often found ourselves pressing too hard, causing wild temperature swings.
Steering Wheel Controls
On both sides of the steering wheel is a button that not only slides left and right but also toggles up and down. This took some getting used to as the toggle function was non-intuitive. The indicators were on the steering wheel itself and not on the buttons, causing one to press instead of toggling. Like the dashboard switches, the cruise control often had a mind of its own and would jump from, say, 65 MPH to 70, instead of by one mile as designed. The right-hand toggle was equally difficult to use. We had a very hard time resetting the trip odometer because the toggle switch refused to recognize a downward “select” press.
iDevice Integration
The ATS has two USB plugs, one hidden in a secret compartment under the navigation system and the other in the center console’s storage compartment. The front USB port was not very convenient because charging required closing the secret compartment’s lid, since driving with it open was annoying. And there was no way to figure out how to close the lid without forcing it down. Besides Bluetooth integration, the Cadillac ATS offers USB support for any MP3 player that complies with the USB Mass Storage Class specification (USB MSC), which lets you play your music via the control panel.
User Experience
Seating was comfortable for four adults on a long trip, which took us from San Francisco to Southern California, although our rear-seat companions were not tall. The driver’s seating position is outstanding, even for my 6-foot-2-inch (1.85 cm) height. The leather interior was nicely finished and outside visibility was outstanding. Cadillac did a good job on driver ergonomics, with easy-to-set power mirror controls, lumbar support, voice-assisted controls, etc.
The ATS doors close with a solid thunk, reminiscent of my Mercedes Benz and other luxury cars, proving that American workmanship can deliver a premium experience comparable to global competitors.
Another Cadillac innovation, the Cadillac Safety Alert Seat, which is able to tell a driver whether an object is nearby on the left or right by triggering a pulse on either side, was also not installed on our car, a major letdown. But our ATS did have a lane-departure warning system, which is great for people who like to nap while driving.
Our only other major quibble was fuel economy. While the car is supposed to get 28 mpg on the highway, the best we were able to manage with mostly highway driving was about 20.5 mpg.
My girlfriend, seen in the photo above and a current Porsche Boxster owner, remarked, “this car drives really well, I never thought I would say that about a Cadillac!”
Conclusion
Once Cadillac fixes its touchscreen and dashboard controls, we will highly recommend the Cadillac ATS. It’s a great car, particularly considering that the $48,785-sticker-priced model we drove is about $6,000 less expensive than comparable BMW and Mercedes-Benz cars. And if you like to buy American, you simply can’t go wrong with the ATS. It’s American automotive engineering at its finest.
Performance
ACCELERATION: 0-60 in 5.4 seconds
BRAKING: 70–0 mph in 158 ft
TOP SPEED: 152 mph
POWER: 321 hp (V6)
FUEL ECONOMY: EPA city/highway: 19/28 mpg (est.); 20.5 mpg (observed with mostly highway driving)
LENGTH: 182.8 in (4.64 m)
WEIGHT: 3,561 lb (1573 kg)
PRICE: $48,785 (as tested)
If you’re worried about your luggage full of digital gear, get a GlobaTrac Trakdot ($50, plus one-time $9 activation fee and $13 annual service fee). The Trakdot updates the owner of the luggage’s location via app, SMS, e-mail or Trakdot site.
At CES Samsung debuted a new version of its robot vacuum cleaners, the Samsung Smart Tango Corner Clean ($800). Samsung promises better cleaning and a camera that is 25% better than before. It certainly has a neat Darth Vaderish look about it.
At CES Samsung and LG launched new versions of their robot vacuum cleaners, the LG version is the LG HOM-BOT 2.0, which now requires a WiFi network and includes extended brushes for better corner cleaning plus improved cameras and sensors to avoid obstacles.
The robotics revolution is fully underway. Lego Mindstorms EV3 kit ($350) builds 17 different robots. The Mindstorms EV3 kit adds an infrared sensor to give robots the ability to detect various objects. The system runs on Linux-based firmware and sports USB and SD ports. A 3D virtual instructional guide, designed by Autodesk, is now available for the iPad.
While the digicam field is in a bruising fight with mobile phone cameras, the Canon PowerShot N ($300) shows that innovative design is still possible. This small package features a 2.8-inch flip-up LCD and built-in Wi-Fi.