BluePhoneElite

The first app I bought for my Mac was BluePhoneElite from reelIntelligence - the one-man software company with the one aforementioned product.

BluePhoneElite is an extraordinary little app which hooks up to your mobile phone via bluetooth, allowing you to manage calls and text messages. It offers a lovely little SMS chat view, whereby you can exchange texts within an IM-like window which is great for keeping abreast of what's going on.

Quite simply, typing texts on my Mac when I'm at my Mac is easier and far more convenient, and for that reason alone BluePhoneElite retained its position on my menu bar for some six months. Now I like to keep my menu bar clean and simple, currently it's just Bluetooth, AirPort, Clock, Power and Spotlight - the default system icons basically. Me keeping BluePhoneElite on my menu bar for that length of time highlights just how important an app it was to me.

So why the past tense, I hear you question.

Well, it got slow. With about two-thousand texts stored in its database, the app was beginning to get annoyingly sluggish, but I persevered. That was until one day when it occurred to me that in my time using BluePhoneElite there had only been maybe a couple of times when I actually needed to access some messages from the past. I figured that I really didn't need to store my texts. Hell, I never did on my phone, why on my Mac? The solution could have been simple; turn off the auto-saving feature which automatically saves all my sent and received messages to the database. But instead I wanted to try something else. I wanted to try Apple's solution.

I knew before I even tried BluePhoneElite that Apple's built in Address Book could manage the sending and receiving of text messages, but at the time I thought I needed some kind of storage solution, which I didn't, so I went for the third-party alternative.

But, as it turns out, Apple's solution works just fine, well, sort of. It's certainly a lot easier to use. I find people in Address Book click their number and select 'Send SMS'. I'm then greeted with a text box to compose my message and a Send button to send it. If my phone receives a text it appears on my Mac's screen and I can hit reply to reply. All very simple and easy to use and exactly what you expect from Apple. My only gripe is that Address Book won't handle multi-SMS messages - messages longer than 160 characters which are sent in more than one SMS and pieced together at the other end. It's a feature which really wouldn't be hard for Apple to implement in the slightest, so if you're listening Apple... pretty please with a cherry on top?

BluePhoneElite is currently sitting on version 1.0.9, and version two was promised a very very very long time ago. A posting to the news section on May 28th was looking to get a beta out in June, but that never materialised. I have to say, I've all but given up hope for a new iteration of BluePhoneElite, which was boasting features like a decent Mail-like interface, the ability to make calls through your mobile over bluetooth via your Mac's mic and speakers (i.e., sit-at-your-Mac-and-talk type thing), and other goodies.

What I'm really hoping for is that Apple will somehow integrate text messaging into Mail - now that would be something to text home about.

[UPDATE] The guy at reelIntelligence has released a beta for BluePhoneElite 2, for which I am signed up. It seems all right, but unusable right now. The interface isn't as clean and mail-like as it could be, and what the fuck's with the preferences being a part of the main window and the fade-upon-window-close? It's trying too hard to be kool, although it does have some pretty promising features too. I'll maybe write up a fuller review some time soon.