Hi, friends.
As you know, I use a Macintosh computer.
As you don’t know but could probably guess, my mother uses a Windows computer. She does not want to switch computers, OS’s, or make big drastic changes to her computing platform.
For security reasons (ie: nobody thinks it’s secure), she is not permitted to install Outlook Express.
Mom would like to upgrade her address book from “un-sortable document in Microsoft Word” to… well, something else.
She would not like something that requires her to be logged into the Internet to work.
Names, phone numbers, email addresses, mailing addresses– this is what she needs, and she needs it to run as a standalone application on her computer. Also, it would be really nice if it was not scriptable by any little piece of virus or malware in the world.
What do you recommend?
SITUATION: Users want phone list application.
TECHNICAL THUG: Writes RDBMS in perl and Smalltalk. Users give up and go back to post-it notes.
ADMINISTRATIVE FASCIST: Oracle. Users give up and go back to post-it notes.
MANIAC: Tells the users to use flat files and grep, the way God meant man to keep track of phone numbers. Users give up and go back to post-it notes.
IDIOT:
% dd ibs=80 if=/dev/rdisk001s7 | grep “Fred”
– A field guide to sysad
Oh, Jessica! You are the win!
I can’t imagine the blushing if I told my mother to “grep” someone named Fred! I was impressed with her leetness when she used “control alt delete” in a sentence!
Try Mozilla Thunderbird. You manage your contacts offline and can send/receive emails when connected to internet.
Or try Yahoo or Gmail – any addresses you create can be exported to CSV or other formats for offline use.
I am thinking gmail as well. You can enable offline mode which should give access to the address book while offline. There is also google docs, where you can save a copy to your hard drive and then have the file in 2 places. Honestly I’m thinking a paper address book might be a better option. At least it can’t be hacked!