Personal information management is a process that no one really ever quite gets completely perfect. Systems are developed and destroyed over and over again. I used Entourage for a while, but ultimately moved to iCal, Address Book, and Mail.app for syncing and integration into other applications.
Web development pro Jeffrey Zeldman moved on from Now Up-To-Date and Contact and Eudora. The reason? One word: iPhone. Having your personal data synced with your phone really is a wonderful thing. In order to experience that with the iPhone, you’ll need to tap into Apple’s databases. Technically, one could still use the latest version of Entourage, but to get the full effect, the bundled apps are the way to go.
So far, he’s actually enjoying the more simplistic software, particularly Mail.app. As time has worn on, I’ve experienced the same thing. That’s not to say that there aren’t features I’d like to see, but Apple’s suite of software prioritizes the things that enable my workflow.
This was one of my deciding factors for purchasing the iPhone. I had a blackberry, but kept getting blank birthday entries on certain days on the phone, because it couldn't sync imported bdays from address book correctly. Very frustrating. I had a palm, which ran good, but the bulk and outdated OS didn't win me over. Apple got it right with the calendar, address book and mail features and to top it all off, it looks amazing. So pretty. I'm one satisfied customer!
I always feel… weird? For having bought Office because of Entourage yet not using it anymore. I mean Office was a particularly expensive product to buy and maintain yet never really use. Just to have - in case, you know?
With my Newton I was able to sync via Palm Desktop. If you scour the web hard enough, you'll find an article I wrote a few years ago still making the rounds in Newton groups to that effect. With my Palm, Entourage synced almost perfectly for me with my round of Palms (III, IIIx, V, and LifeDrive) because MS provided the syncing capabilities with Entourage and Palm.
When Apple provided a simple solution for everyone, I switched over to it and have never turned back. That syncing process has culminated in the oh-so-perfect syncing process of the iPhone. That was probably their goal over the last few years anyways – prepping for the iPhone syncing.
for all of the college age readers out there, there is an app called facebook sync. It will scout your friends profiles for name, phone number, email address ( and screen name, I think) and male a new addres book card for them. You can accept each person as it goes, or deny those people from your freshman dorm that you never talk to anymore
This is dead on. I honestly hadn't used either ical or the address book before I got my iPhone. Now I've ported practically everything over -- I esp love the contact "Groups" that the address book has.
I've done the exact same thing. I let go of the Palm apps once iCal came out, and didn't finally ditch Eudora until they announced it was basically dead and going to reappear as some version of Thunderbird. It took a while to adjust to Mail (I've been using Eudora since I first got online way back when) but the integration of everything is great. Especially if you get yourself an iPhone.
I think Address Book blows! There are so many key strokes, I have to hit "edit" to ever change anything, there's no list view, it doesn't have Entourage's or iPhoto's category or keyword capabilities (and I'm a Mac guy since forever), it doesn't allow multi edit (of categories), it's small, awkward and smart lists don't even synch with the iPhone.
How lame is all that? And how lame is it that even with the iPhone, all the Leopard builds show it looking EXACTLY like it always has in both form and incapable function.
LAME!!!
Mail is fine and iCal is OK (multi-copy would be great), but Address Book is a disaster!!!