The iPod & iTunes Pocket Guide, Second Edition

The iPod & iTunes Pocket Guide138

features by composing, moving, and synchronizing

your contacts, calendars, and notes with your iPod.

Make iContact

The fi rst informational feature to appear on early

iPods was Contacts. Here’s how they work.

Viva vCard

I don’t mean to geek you out with technical jargon,

but to understand how the iPod works its contact

magic, it’s helpful to know that, like your computer,

the iPod supports something called the vCard stan-

dard. This is a scheme concocted a couple of decades

ago that allows contact fi les to be read and created

on a variety of devices—a computer, mobile phone,

or Palm device, for example. The idea is that I can

create a contact with my Mac’s copy of Address

Book and email it to my sister who uses a Windows

PC, and she can view that contact in her copy of

Microsoft Outlook.

Apple designed the iPod so it also supports vCards.

Just plunk a vCard into the right folder on your iPod,

and when you next click your iPod’s Contacts entry,

the rich details of that person, place, or thing will be

revealed. The iPod can display the following items:

• Contact’s picture—an image of the contact

(5G iPods only)

• Contact’s formatted name—Bubba Jones,

for example

Chapter 5: The Informational iPod 139

• Contact’s name—the name as it appears in the

contact (Jones, Bubba, or Dr., for example)

• Contact’s address(es)—the address types

supported by vCard (business, home, mailing,

and parcel)

• Contact’s telephone number(s)—the phone

numbers supported by vCard

• Contact’s email—the email addresses in the

contact

• Contact’s title—Dr., Ms, Mr., and so on

• Contact’s organization—the company name

displayed in the contact

• Contact’s URL—the Internet address contained

in the contact

• Contact’s note—the note fi eld in the contact

vCard support wouldn’t mean much if common

applications didn’t support it. Fortunately, the

universal nature of the standard means that most

information- management and email applications

you’re likely to run across support vCard. As this book

goes to press, vCard support is present on the Mac

in OS X’s Address Book, QUALCOMM’s Eudora, Bare

Bones Software’s Mailsmith, Microsoft’s Entourage

email clients, and Palm’s Palm Desktop 4.x and

Now Software’s Contact information managers. For

Windows, you’ll fi nd vCard supported in such main-

stays as Windows’ Address Book, Microsoft Outlook,

and Palm Desktop.