MOTUnation.com

A few days ago, an old client called me and I had to look up when I last worked with him. I ended up launching my old, trusty Now Contact. (I can still run it because I'm still on Snow Leopard, but my understanding is it can't make the jump to ML.) Now Software is defunct... the successor to it collapsed under its own weight.

I'm finding that iCal and Address Book really don't cut it for me. I need something more full featured. I loved Now Contact and Now Up-To-Date and it's ability to keep notes on contacts, mail merge, etc. Is there ANYTHING out there in the Mac world to take its place?

I miss NUTD too. The Mac Calendar and Contacts apps are pretty good, IMO, and searchable via Spotlight or 3rd party "find any file" kinds of apps. I've looked for alternatives but can't find anything that appealed to me.

MIDI Life Crisis wrote:I miss NUTD too. The Mac Calendar and Contacts apps are pretty good, IMO, and searchable via Spotlight or 3rd party "find any file" kinds of apps. I've looked for alternatives but can't find anything that appealed to me.

They're good, but they just aren't as powerful or as well integrated. The way it could time-stamp notes, etc and it seemed it was much faster to find something. I miss being able to just quickly call up a client's record when on the phone and have important info (i.e. slow-pay or quick pay... LOL) at my fingertips. I suppose you could try and press Apple's offerings into service somewhat, but it's just not as slick as Now Contact was. Most of all I miss being able to have document templates, etc and have fields populated automatically, etc. Oh well...

No. It's not as good. I hate it when good things away.

You can do all of that in FileMaker. It's why I bought my Mac+ in 1986.

Admittedly it's overkill now but it can be done.

mikehalloran wrote:You can do all of that in FileMaker. It's why I bought my Mac+ in 1986.

Admittedly it's overkill now but it can be done.

I have Bento already. I suppose I might be able to press that into service and get most things. My gripe with Bento is that it's slow doing searches, and I wish they'd lose active search. I find myself trying to type fast for a name, etc before Bento starts automatically searching on the letters I've typed into the search field so far.

PIMs are called CRMs now, and morphed into sales management systems. There are a load of them in the app store. Most of them go some way to integrate Contacts, Mail, Calendar, Reminders, etc. A lot of them assume you are sharing the information with others and host it. Some are free, but you have to buy modules to make them work properly.

Bento has just been discontinued by Apple (FileMaker). Maybe Soho Contacts?

James Steele wrote:

mikehalloran wrote:You can do all of that in FileMaker. It's why I bought my Mac+ in 1986.

Admittedly it's overkill now but it can be done.

I have Bento already. I suppose I might be able to press that into service and get most things. My gripe with Bento is that it's slow doing searches, and I wish they'd lose active search. I find myself trying to type fast for a name, etc before Bento starts automatically searching on the letters I've typed into the search field so far.

Since I built my database from scratch, not an issue for me. It won't do what I don't ask. Likewise, speed is not an issue since I'm not using pre-programmed templates based on what others think I want to do.

I am not recommending others do what I did. The tools are certainly there but it's a lot of work. In 1986 it was a necessity and I just kept it up over the years.

With the advent of IOS, I'm now keeping a separate personal database in Contacts / Calendar for the first time so that I can update something on my iMac / iPhone / iPad and have it update the other two automatically. I haven't explored tyieng that to my Filemaker database and I'm not certain that I want to (yet?).

bdr wrote:Bento has just been discontinued by Apple (FileMaker). Maybe Soho Contacts?

Really? Oh man... that's too bad. It seemed to me that they couldn't improve Bento too much without encroaching on their FileMaker product. Maybe I'll upgrade. I'll look up Soho Contacts.

Mike: I built my own template in Bento and it seems to be working okay. However it is slow. I have over 10,000 records, but searching for a text strong can take a long time. This isn't animation rendering! And if you wish to search all fields for a text string, you must use their active search field which tries to search as you type the search criteria. It's frustratingly slow when you have a large database.

I'll have to take your word for it.

There's this thing called Daylite by MarketCircle.

www.marketcircle.com/daylite/

Used to use it back when I sold macs in Seattle for CSNW. It was a great CRM tool back then (2001) and looks good now.

Damn pricey though.