Daniel SwartzTiger Features: 6-10
And in my review of the 200 features Tiger has to offer, I now continue on with features 6-10, as listed in the features page on Apple.com:
http://www.apple.com/macosx/newfeatures/over200.html
Address Book
6. Envelope Printing: “Easily print custom-formatted labels and envelopes from your Address Book.”
As I’m sure everyone has a program on their machine to easily print envelopes, Apple surely isn’t ‘pushing the envelope’ in this area (punny, I know…). The thing that makes it nice is that this feature comes from the Address Book itself, expediting the process just a little bit more to perform this task. All you need to do is go to an entry in your address book that contains a mailing address and simply hit ‘print’. A window will come up with a preview of the envelope to be printed with send and return addresses included. You can easily change the font type and size and print it right away. If your address entry in the Address Book contains no address, the envelope in the print preview will simply be blank. That should be a strong enough hint that nothing will print except a picture of a yeti in a heavy snow storm.
7. Pocket Address Book Printing: “Print a handy pocket address book to take with you anywhere.”
I have to say this is a nifty feature to have. You can print a series of addresses/contact info in the form of what Apple calls a ‘little address book’. What it really does is print a series of addresses and whatever information you want there to appear on a single sheet of paper.
There are a number of ways to do this:
- If you have an address group, containing a particular group of people (ie. family, friends, enemies…etc.), simply select the group name in the left hand corner and print. A window will come up, probably containing the envelope preview again as described in the last feature. Towards the top of this window in the ‘Style’ select menu, select ‘Pocket Address Book’ and you’ll then see a preview of your address book. You can choose either ‘Compact’ or ‘Indexed’ in the ‘Flip Style’ select menu. For some reason, the ‘Indexed’ option includes an annoying black column on the left side of the address rows. This goes away in the ‘Compact’ option.
- Instead of printing out a defined Group, you can simply go through your address book and select the addresses yourself. By holding down the command key (apple key) and clicking on the names of the people you want in this address book, simply go to print and repeat the process described int he first bullet point.
Of course, when you are in the print window, you can print the file as a PDF file, which also comes in very handy.
8. Sharing: “Share your Address Book with any .Mac user ‚Äî ideal for family members or assistants.”
Since I am not a .Mac user, there is no way for me to test this feature. I trust it works just fine and is a nice feature to have, but I am not willing to pay money to use the .Mac service.
9. Smart Groups: “Create address book groups that update automatically based on rules you set up, such as upcoming birthdays.”
A rather simple yet nice little feature in the Address Book. In the program, go to the File menu and select ‘New Smart Group…’, which opens up a window where you can set the parameters of the Smart Group. Here you can enter in the name of the group and the rules for the Smart Group. You can set the rules for general card settings as well as for more specific items such as e-mail, names, phone numbers and so on.
You can also set multiple rules by clicking on the ‘+’ symbol at the end of each rule listing.
Nothing complicated here.
10. Spotlight Contact: “Find everything related to a contact in your Address Book with a single click ‚Äî email exchanges, iCal appointments, files, attachments or anything else.”
This is a cool and very simple little feature, yet very powerful. Simply click on the name of an individual in your address book. When you have selected Jane Doe, go to the top left corner of your Address Book window and select the Action pop-up menu (icon is a little crank icon). One of items in the menu will be “Spotlight: “Jane Doe”. After you have selected that, a Spotlight window will open with all the found items of Jane Doe such as documents, mail messages, contacts, images, PDF documents and so on. Simply double click on the items in the Spotlight window, and you will open up the files, messages or images that contain that person’s name.
This is a very nice feature and something that I will certainly use over time when using my Address Book.
I hope you have found this useful. The next five will be up next for inspection.
Daniel
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