Smart Merge review: how to easily find and merge duplicate contacts

By Lory Gil on May 11, 2013

When you sync your desktop contacts with your iOS contacts and then throw your Facebook contacts into the mix, you will inevitably end up with duplicates. Just like a physical address book, every time one of your friends gets a new email address or phone number, you end up with multiples from the same person.

Smart Merge helps you clear out duplicate contacts by fishing out email addresses, phone numbers, and names that are the same. It also comes with a backup feature so you can store a Dav-Card file in your email account, just in case something happens in the future… Read More

 

Addial for Velox lets you add new contacts from the Home screen

By Jeff Benjamin on May 9, 2013

When you have the popular new Velox tweak installed, it opens up a bunch of new interactions with many of the stock iPhone apps. As we highlighted in our initial walkthrough with the tweak, the stock Contacts app benefits by allowing you to access your contact information using a swipe gesture on the app’s icon.

That functionality, while different, was admittedly a little boring. That’s where this new add-on — Addial for Velox — steps in to spice things up a bit. This is an interesting add-on, because it combines the functionality of two tweaks into one — the aforementioned Velox, and another tweak that we reviewed in the past called Addial. Take a look inside for more information. Read More

 

How to backup your iPhone contacts

By Lory Gil on May 1, 2013

Every once in a while, a friend will ask me what to do when some terrible thing has happened to their iPhone. Usually, it involves the device crashing or freezing. And usually, it involves someone who doesn’t back up their data.

Before I move on, let me just say this. If you don’t back up your data, don’t complain when all 975 images of the past year of your baby’s life have suddenly disappeared from your iPhone. Back that sh#@ up! Don’t be a fool.

If you chose not to use iCloud to back up your contacts, but want to secure the phone numbers of all those ladies you will never call back, there is a way to do it and it is just about the easiest thing you could ever do.

In this tutorial, we will show you how to backup your iPhone contacts so you can save them or transfer them to a new iPhone… Read More

 

LinkedIn launches standalone Contacts app

By Christian Zibreg on Apr 25, 2013

Having acquired the popular news reader Pulse, LinkedIn, the social network for people in professional occupations, recently revamped its iPhone and Android application with a focus on updates, content-rich streams and new navigation options. Today, the team announced a standalone Contacts app, now available free on the App Store.

“A smarter way to stay in touch with your most important relationships,” the new Contacts service is also available on LinkedIn.com, bringing all your contacts from your Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and other address books. Additionally, the application integrates with your email accounts and calendars… Read More

 

Google dropping Exchange ActiveSync support for Gmail next month

By Cody Lee on Dec 15, 2012

Brace yourselves, Gmail account syncing is about to get a lot less convenient for iOS and other non-Android devices. The Mountain View company just announced that as part of its ‘Winter Cleaning’ initiative, it will be ditching support for the Exchange ActiveSync protocol next month.

What’s Exchange ActiveSync? Well it’s an XML-based protocol, developed by Microsoft, that allows the synchronization of email, calendar, contacts, and other data between servers and mobile devices. And at this point, it’s the only way to get native Gmail push notifications on your iPhone… Read More

 

Merge is a brilliant jailbreak tweak that combines messages by contact instead of by address

By Jeff Benjamin on Sep 29, 2012

The idea of iMessage is great. It allows you to easily chat with friends and family across all iOS devices and Macs without incurring SMS fees from carriers.

Though iMessage is extremely convenient, it does have plenty of opportunities for improvement, which isn’t surprising, considering it’s only been out for a little over a year. But Apple has been steadily making improvements, for instance, the latest update to OS X, allows Mac users to sync iMessages sent and received from phone numbers.

Another major issue that iMessage runs into is organization. For example, if you’re chatting with a friend that has three separate iMessage ID’s, each chat started with each individual ID will result in a new iMessage thread for that contact. That’s a total of three threads, just to talk to a single contact. This, obviously, can become extremely disconcerting when trying to carry on a conversation. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could easily combine messages by contact, instead of iMessage ID?

That’s the exact premise behind Merge — a new jailbreak tweak from developers Joshua Tucker, and Andrew Richardson. Take a look inside as we explain how Merge works… Read More

 

iOS 6 can pull someone’s full name and Facebook photo based on a phone number alone

By Christian Zibreg on Sep 27, 2012

I’m risking of stating the obvious with this one, but I’d bet my shirt many of your were unaware of this little trick. As you know, Facebook integration in iOS 6 and OS X Mountain Lion can automagically update photos and user names for all matching contacts. What you may not have known is that Apple only needs a person’s phone number to pull this data.

So if a girl you met at a bar last night left you just her phone number, you can easily get her Facebook profile picture to appear on your iPhone when she happens to call you – even if you’re not friends with her on Facebook and even if her profile is hidden on Facebook. Plus, you’ll get her full name in Contacts. How cool is that? Read More

 

Google enables better iOS contact sync via CardDAV protocol

By Christian Zibreg on Sep 27, 2012

If you wanted to sync your iOS Contacts with Google with changes instantly reflected across devices, Microsoft’s Exchange ActiveSync used to be your only option. As of today, Google announced that “we’re adding CardDAV to that list”, allowing for seamless contact syncing between your Google Account and third-party apps, including iOS devices running iOS 5 or later… Read More

 

These two tweaks make it easier to delete contacts and history items

By Jeff Benjamin on May 17, 2012

For some strange reason Apple has made deleting contacts an overly difficult task; they’ve likewise made deleting individual Safari history items impossible.

Perhaps these hurdles and restrictions exists by design, but that doesn’t change the fact that they’re both incredibly annoying.

If you happen to be jailbroken, two tweaks — OneByOne Safari and OneByOne Contacts — seek to address this lingering issue within iOS. Full video walkthrough inside… Read More

 

Following the iOS debacle, Mountain Lion now asks permission to access contacts too

By Oliver Haslam on Mar 17, 2012

It seems that Apple’s learnings from the Path Contacts debacle have extended to the Mac, too, with the latest Developer Preview of OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion also seeing a Contacts-based new security addition.

Those with reasonable memories will remember that Path, the social networking app that was all the rage not long ago, got itself into some hot water for taking all the details from the iOS Contacts app – names, numbers, email addresses and more – and uploading them to its own servers. This led to all kinds of scaremongering and ultimately, Apple decided to add a warning message to iOS that tells users when an app is requesting access to contact details. Users then have to option of allowing or blocking that access.

Now it appears that Apple has pulled this security feature across from iOS to the Mac, or at least it will in the next version of OS X when it arrives later this year… Read More

 

Smartr Contacts for iPhone: the iOS address book on steroids

By Guest Author on Feb 16, 2012

When iOS 5 was released, the folks at Apple HQ brought with it the ability to add social network support within the stock iOS address book application. Smartr Contacts from Xobni manages to push the bar a whole lot further.

The team behind popular Outlook plugin, Smartr Inbox, have released what is essentially an address book on steroids for your iOS device. This nifty free application promises to create rich profiles for all your contacts, including communication history and updates from Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Smartr works by creating in-depth profiles by aggregating all of your data from the leading social networking sites and your email accounts, storing the information in the ‘Xobni Cloud’. Once a contact’s information has been matched you are presented with a slick profile view of every contact you have ever interacted with from the various portals mentioned above… Read More

 

Apple says apps will now need explicit user permission to access contacts

By Cody Lee on Feb 15, 2012

Ever since the news broke that Path, a popular social network and iOS app, was uploading users’ contact lists without asking for their permission, everyone has been waiting to see how Apple would respond.

After all, it is Apple’s App Store team that is approving these apps that cull private user data without authorization. And today, the Cupertino company finally broke its week-long silence on the subject… Read More

 

ContactPrivacy: a New Jailbreak Tweak That Warns You When Apps Try to Access Your Contacts Data

By Sebastien Page on Feb 8, 2012

Following yesterday’s Path debacle about how the app uploads your entire address book to its servers without your knowledge, jailbreak developer Ryan Petrich decided to do what Apple should have done in the first place: having a notification for when apps try to access your contacts data.

The jailbreak tweak is conveniently called ContactPrivacy and is a free download from Cydia. After installing ContactPrivacy on your iPhone, you won’t find any new icon or settings to tweak… Read More

 

RingerX VIP: Control Ringer and Vibrate Behavior for Calls and Messages

By Jeff Benjamin on Jan 31, 2012

Don’t you just hate it when you miss an important call because you forgot to turn your iPhone’s mute switch off? Or what about that one annoying person that always calls at 3 in the morning? Wouldn’t it be nice if you could forever silence their calls?

With RingerX VIP, all of these scenarios feature easy solutions.

This is a jailbreak tweak for those who require fine grained control over how various contacts are treated whenever they call you or message you… Read More

 

Add Calling and Messaging Shortcuts to Your Home Screen with QuickContact

By Oliver Haslam on Jan 17, 2012

The current trend of finding ways to get icons on an iOS device’s Home screen with the intent of creating shortcuts for actions is nothing new. It was originally one of the big jailbreak advantages, and now it’s back. This time, you don’t need to jailbreak anything.

QuickContact is the latest in a long line of apps that offer the user a way to create shortcuts on the Home screen, and now sending SMS messages and making phone calls are the order of the day.

The best part about this is the fact it’s not actually an app at all, but rather a web app. Read More

 

Easily Sync Your iPhone Contacts With Gmail Using “Contacts Sync for Google Gmail”

By Guest Author on Dec 21, 2011

Are you one of the thousands of users who have transitioned their entire online ecosystem into Apple’s iCloud? Did you stop syncing your contacts with Gmail in order to sync with iCloud? Do you want to maintain your address book with iCloud and have the same address book in Google Contacts?

Now you can with a paid application called Contacts Sync For Google Gmail… Read More

 

Ask Jeff: Episode 09 – Back in Action

By Jeff Benjamin on Nov 1, 2011

After a brief hiatus, I’m back with Ask Jeff: Episode 09. In this episode I answer tons of questions ranging from data usage monitoring, to Twitter clients, to possible Siri ports.

A lot has changed since Episode 08. iOS 5 was released, iCloud launched, the iPhone 4S launched, and much, much, more.

Was your question answered? There’s only one way to find out: head inside and tune in to the latest episode… Read More

 

‘FavoriteContacts’ Adds Your Favorites to Notification Center

By Jeff Benjamin on Oct 18, 2011

The Notification Center jailbreak widgets are really starting to pick up steam as of late, and that means that there’s a ton of new and innovative tweaks for us to cover.

The latest tweak, is called FavoriteContacts, and as one might imagine, it pulls in all of your favorites from your Phone app. Doing so, allows you to initiate a call, text, or email right from the convenience of iOS 5′s Notification Center.

We’ve gone hands-on with FavoriteContacts, and we’re happy to report that it rocks. Check inside for the video walkthrough, and for a chance to win one of five (5) free copies… Read More

 

Copic: Add Contact Photos to your Call Lists, Contact Lists, and Text Messages

By Cody Lee on Aug 14, 2011

I love jailbreak utilities that add contact photos to stock iOS apps. It makes your contacts seem more like real people, rather than pieces of data.

Cydia provides a couple of options to pull this off. SMSEnhancer adds contact photos to the Messages app, and IPicMyContacts does the same for your contact list. And then there’s Copic, which actually does what the other two tweaks do, and more…. Read More

 

GroupTones: Assign Ringtones to Your Contact Groups

By Cody Lee on Aug 7, 2011

If you’ve gone through the process of dividing your contacts into groups on your iPhone, you’ll love this next jailbreak utility. Though there’s not a direct way to create groups on your device, you can create them on your Mac or PC and sync them using iTunes.

GroupTones allows you to assign specific ringtones for each of those groups, so you can tell callers apart without looking at your phone. This would help you to instantly identify if the person calling you is a friend, a co-worker, or one of your kid’s playmates… Read More

 
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