Mac.sis making macs and S60 handsets talk

Nokia has just released Map Loader 1.0 for Mac. Previously, preloading your phone with map data for Maps required a PC with Windows; now this great money-saving (if you're paying by the bit) or time-saving (particularly on slow connections) feature is available also for Mac users.

Inspired by a beautiful autumn day last weekend, I took the entire family for a little walk in the nearby forest trails, with the intention of photographing autumn colors (and of course my pride and joy of a daughter) during the outing. I took my trusty old Canon EOS 400D with a 70-300mm Canon lense, and decided that it would be nice to geotag the photos I manage to take.

To my surprise, this worked beautifully, with the toolchain consisting solely of free utilities for S60 and my Mac. Here's what I did:

The Nokia Beta Labs blog contains an article on configuring the Nokia Chat connection for Adium running on a Mac. Just scroll downwards a bit to get to the Adium instruction. As the Nokia Chat protocol seems to follow the XMPP (Jabber) standard, achieving the same with other chat clients should be easy as well.

In the OS X 10.5.3 update dropped by Apple yesterday, the Address Book provides a capability to synchronise your local address book with Google contacts.

If you have an iPhone or an iPod touch, that is.

The FoneLink application for cell phone management for Macs has been updated to version 2.0, and the friendly folks at nova media are offering 5 licenses for Mac.sis readers – the only requirement is that once you try the software out, please provide feedback / review as a reply to this article.

The Google Reader team has updated the mobile interface of the news aggregator to a new version, directed specifically towards "the iPhone and other mobile phones with advanced browsers":

Nokia Beta Labs has made available a Mac version of their Internet Tablet Video Converter. As the name suggests, the application is clearly oriented towards Internet Tablets with 400x240 as the target resolution:

A new version of Nokia Multimedia Transfer is available:

The new release boasts the following improvements:

• Bookmark sync for selected products (see FAQ)
• Support for selected S40 devices (see compatible devices)
• Other improvements and bug fixes

Check the Nokia web pages for more information on NMT.

If you find the limit of 500 characters per TODO description too limited, you can follow this hint at MacOSXHints to increase the length of the description to a more tolerant number.

Note that you may want to back up the Nokia-N95.phoneplugin file before going on a hacking spree to ensure that you have a functional version to fall back on.

I haven't tested this hint myself, as my TODO description fields are rarely more verbose than 3 words. Maximum.

If you belong to the relative minority of RSS junkies that sometimes have to leave the house, for fun or profit, you may have found your habit seriously distracted by the fact that although you may have your feeds all sorted out in the RSS reader of your choice, things get messier when you have to access your RSS lifeline either on the go or on another machine, say, at work.