As I'm writing this, it's my birthday and I have received numerous birthday messages from friends that were too funny not to be able to share with other people.  For years now I've been trying to come up with an easy solution to get my voicemail from my phone into some kind of digital format that cane be shared, mp3, mp4, etc.

There is a service called GotVoice that I used to use but found it wasn't as convenient as I'd like.  It basically emails you your voicemail every time you get one.  This was what I wanted, but quite frankly, I only wanted certain voicemails, I didn't want to every single one emailed to me, so I stopped using this service.  Today, after receiving a few voicemails I wanted to share, I tried to reactivate my account but I don't think the service works with iPhones as I kept getting an error.  It wasn't ideal anyway so I kept looking.

The quick solution was right under my nose and I never realized it.  Some of you guys may be familiar with the Mac application PhoneView.  It's a great little app that I got in one of those Mac Bundle specials they do occasionally.  It turns your phone basically into a hard disk, which is nothing new, but it gives you access to everything currently on your iPhone (or iPad) in a very friendly user interface that I've not seen in any other application.

You've got your hard disk which allows you turn your phone into a portable drive to store files on.  You can view all of your contacts with the option to "Send them to your Address Book".  You've got access to all your Notes, your call log, your Messages (displayed in a fairly cool iChat-like style), your web history and bookmarks, and YES, your voicemail too!

You get a nice list of all the voicemails on your phone and can select any of them and choose to "Copy from iPhone" which copies the voicemail, converts it to an mp4 and exports it to your location of choice.  At this point, you can do whatever you want with the file - email to friends, post on your website, etc.  It's pretty nice.

On another side note, but to continue to give props to PhoneView, you also have access to all your media.  This becomes a great solution to grab music off of your friends' phones.  Just plug in their phone to your computer, open PhoneView, and click on their music and all of the music in their iPod library is available to you to either play from right within the application or to copy to your computer.  It's pretty nice.

The only kicker with this is that it's not free.  It's $19.95 but I'd say definitely worth it.  It's a very well made program and they are great about keeping it updated for the latest versions of iOS and any new iOS gadgets that become available (I use it for my iPad too).

Check it out and start sharing your voicemail with friends through email, sms, web posts, etc!

This is a tip for Facebook and Address Book users.  iPhone owners know that Facebook added a neat feature awhile ago to that allows you to sync your friend's profile pictures with your contact information right within the Facebook app.  This way, when a friend calls you, their facebook profile picture displays on your screen.  If you weren't aware, you can go to your friends list within the iPhone app and at the top right is a button called "Sync", tap on that and from there is it pretty self-explanatory.

However, I was looking for this same functionality long before the Facebook dev team added it to their app.  I came across an application called AddressBookSync.  It does essentially the same thing but with some great bonuses Facebook sync doesn't provide.  It scans your Address Book contact list and matches it up against your Facebook friends list and grabs information from Facebook and adds it to your Address Book.  This is all pretty standard, but one cool bonus is that you can also manually link up contacts with their Facebook profiles.  For example, I am on Facebook under my nickname so anyone trying to sync my contact information would have to have me in their phone under my nickname (which most do anyway, but that's besides the point).  If they don't have me in their Address Book under my nickname, no connection is made and none of my information is transferred, so the ability to manually tell Address Book that Matt Kreikemeier and Goon Kreikemeier are the same person is pretty nice.

The other absolute awesome thing is that it grabs your friend's birthday information if they have it listed!  This is such a great feature.  I didn't know it would do that, I wasn't expecting it to do that, but when it did it was a great surprise.  It scans all my friends and anyone that has their birthday listed now shows up in my calendar in iCal or BusyCal under the Birthdays calendar.  You just have to make sure that you are subscribed to the Birthdays calendar within the iCal preferences.   If you need direction on this, just leave a comment and I'll let you know.  Imagine the surprise when I opened up BusyCal and all of the sudden all of my friend's birthdays were scattered about on my calendar.  I have a terrible memory and this has been a great way to remember birthdays without having to go through and add everyone manually.

AddressBookSync is free and you can download it from their website.

This tip is only for MobileMe users, sorry!  If you aren't a MobileMe user, I don't want you to waste your time, no need reading any further.

I've been using Coda for awhile now and I think its my favorite editor.  The only major drawback has been that I can't sync my settings across multiple computers.  I am a "sync" nerd utilizing Dropbox, SugarSync, MobileMe and SVN to keep all of my various files in sync across my work iMac, my work PC, my home iMac, my laptop, my iPad, and my iPhone, and so it drives me crazy that if I add a new project to Coda at work that it doesn't automatically show up on my other machines.  I have to manually add the project and input all of the settings across all of my machines.

However, I found the simplest solution you could ask for simply by accident.  As I said, I have a MobileMe account that I utilize to keep my address book, keychains, textexpander, mail accounts, etc. etc. in sync.  Within MobileMe's settings you can select "Preferences" to sync.  I never realized that selecting this option syncs all of your applications preferences (or at least some of them) across your MobileMe-active machines including Coda and all of its saved settings and projects.

Now I can add a new project at work and when I get home and fire up Coda, the new project and all its settings are there and ready to go accomplishing a full sync of Coda across all my computers.

There are a few caveats to mention though...

This really does sync ALL of your preferences including things like the "Remote Path" and "Local Path" that you enter.  This leads to one major drawback.  You have to have the same local path to the files for that site which means you have to have the same username on every computer and keep your files in the exact some place within the file hierarchy on your machines.  For example, the local path for one of my projects is: /Users/Goon/Documents/SVN/clientnamehere.  Because the local path uses my username of "Goon", that will be synced across all of my computers.  If on one computer I have the username "Matt" instead of "Goon", Coda won't know where to access the local files for this project because it will be looking for a user named "Goon".  (I am actually just assuming all of this as I have the same username on all of my machines so I haven't been able to truly test this.  Maybe Coda is smart enough to figure it out and use a different username, but I thought this was worth mentioning just in case.)

If you're anything like me though, you are probably anal about having many things the same, so hopefully you have the same username and keep your project files in the same file structure on all of your machines.

The second caveat is that I don't think it syncs your clips.  I use TextExpander anyway so that isn't too big of a concern for me, but that could prove annoying to some people.  In this case, I'd highly recommend using TextExpander.  You can copy over all of your clips into TextExpander to use the same shortcuts and you can sync TextExpander using either MobileMe or Dropbox.  TextExpander is much more universal anyway allowing you to use it on pretty much any device.

Any other good Coda-syncing tips?  Comment below...

Here are 4 easy steps to get set up to open all the applications you use on a daily basis with one simple click of the mouse.

First: navigate to Applications > AppleScript > Script Editor.  Open Script Editor.  This is where we can write and save a simple AppleScript to open all the apps that we want to open.  You will see a window popup that looks like this:

Second: now we just have to write our script and it couldn’t be easier.  For each application that we want to open we write:

tell application “Mail”
activate
end tell

tell application “Firefox”
activate
end tell

etc. etc. for each application that we want to open.  You can hit ‘Run’ in the toolbar to see your script in action.

Third: Now we want to save our script so we can reuse it every morning.  Go to File > Save and save it as whatever name you would like, but save it to this location: Your_Home_Folder/Library/Scripts.  If a ‘Scripts’ folder does not exist you can go ahead and create one in this location.  This is where you should save all of your AppleScripts.

Fourth: At this point, you are basically up and running, you could just navigate to your scripts folder every morning, double click the script and run it to open your applications, but that doesn’t seem very efficient.  Instead, it would be great to have a button in our main menu bar that we can click to run this script.  Good news, we can do just that!  Navigate to Applications > AppleScript > AppleScript Utility and check ‘Show Script menu in menu bar‘. 

Now we have a little icon that we can click on.  When we click this icon we get a drop down of all our scripts.  At the bottom you should see your script.  Simply click on it to run it!

Bonus Material!

It would be just as great if we could easily quit all of our open applications at the end of the day with just one click.  Good news again, that is even easier to do!

Open up Automator in your Applications folder.  Choose ‘Custom‘ as your starting (this gives you a blank canvas to start with).  Make sure ‘Actions’ is highlighted and click on ‘library’.  In the column to the right of ‘library’, scroll down to ‘Quit All Applications’.  Click on this and drag and drop it into the empty space to the right.

Now all you have to do is save this script. Go to File > Save and name it whatever you like, but remember to save it to Your_Home_Folder/Library/Scripts.  Now, when you click on the AppleScript icon in the menu bar, you will see your ‘quit all applications’ script.  Simply click on it to quit all open applications.

I hope this article has been helpful and please let me know of any questions or other suggestions.

All you have to do is download this great app called Pod to Mac.  It is so easy to use I could probably just stop now, but I will give some quick instructions.

Literally all you have to do is open the application and plug in your iPod or iPhone and it will automatically display all the data on your device so that you can search through and decide what media you would like to transfer to your computer.  The great thing is that it not only transfers music, but can also transfer video and pictures (coming soon) from your iPod or iPhone to your computer.  Just select the files you want to transfer and click ‘Transfer Files”.  It is really that easy.  After you transfer your files, go into your iTunes Music folder and you will see all your files automatically organized nicely and ready to be played in iTunes!

Another great thing is that you don’t have to put your device in ‘Manually manage music and videos’ so you don’t have to worry about messing with any settings at all (this is iPhone and iTouch only I believe, I think for older iPods you do have to put it in ‘manual’ mode).  This allows you to continue to automatically sync your device when you plug it in which I really like.

The only thing you do have to do is make sure that in iTunes, under Preferences > Advanced, both ‘Keepy iTunes music folder organized” and “Copy files to iTunes folder” are checked.  I believe those are checked by default so you should be good to go.

No other program I have tried works as well as Pod to Mac.  I definitely recommend it if you are looking for a quick and easy solution to transferring music from your iPhone or iPod to your computer.

All you have to do is create groups in your Address Book (which I already had).  If you don’t know how to do this, it is very simple.  In your Address Book, just click the plus sign at the bottom left to add a new group.  Name it whatever you would like, ‘Family’ for example.  Then you can go through your contacts and simply drag the contacts that pertain to that group over on top of the group name and drop them.  You will see a plus sign designating that that contact is being added to that group.  Now, if you click on that group name, you will see a list of all the contacts in that group.

Now, the mail part.  In Apple Mail, there is the ‘address book’ icon along the top toolbar (I think it is there by default, but if not, you can go to View > Customize Toolbar and drag the icon to your toolbar), click on that icon and it will bring up a small pop-up of your address book.  Rather than clicking on someone’s name, you simply just double click on a group and Mail will load everyone in that group into the To: line of your message.  It’s as simple as that!

The emails are all separated out too, allowing you to easily go through and remove anyone should you wish not to include them in your email message.

As I said, I feel dumb for not knowing this before, but I hope that others may find this tip helpful!