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Freshly Squeezed Reviews: the ol’ rooSwitch-a-roo

Posted by Frank Petrie May 16, 2008 at 5:00pm

OK. The Situation. You have hundreds of addresses in your Address Book that are personal. You have at work an Address Book with hundreds of contacts. Now, you have just purchased a MacBook Air (you lucky dog, you).

Now you could combine the two Address Books and have dozens upon dozens of Mailboxes, but wouldn’t life be easier if you could keep those books separate but within the same app. That is to say tat when you’re home you use your personal book and at work you use your professional book. Unfortunately, Mail won’t let you do that. Lucky for you, rooSwitch from roobaSOFT will.

The Juice

“rooSwitch exists to make it easy for you to create different profiles of almost any application’s data. You then switch amongst the profiles to activate the data you wish to use. It’s like a multi-user environment for just one application.” The lite version (free) allows you to manipulate six apps; Address Book, iTunes, iPhoto, Mail, Safari and stickers. It also has a limited feature set. Whereas, the full version (US$14.95) allows you free reign over all your apps with bonus features.

I used the full version recently with my Address Book. I have a client who has asked me to send out his weekly newsletters for his business. Instead of creating a new group for this purpose I asked him to send me an up-to-date vcard. And when he adds more customers, he can just send me another one. Makes life much easier.

The example provided by roobaSOFT is two sets of stickies on one notebook. You can have your stickies which are specific to your work on your desktop at the job. But home stickies would chew up valuable real estate. So with rooSwitch, you switch the profiles to enable ONLY the work stickies to appear. At home, change to your home stickies so that you view ONLY them.

The Pulp

I had problems during the set up, but that could have been OM (operator malfunction). I wrote to the head of the company and he personally helped me through the process. Seeing as all of you are infinitely brighter than I am, there should be no problem. But support could use a tweak.

The Rind

Nada.

Summary

rooSwitch is another one of those one trick ponies that can help streamline and customize your work flow. It’s not necessarily for everyone, but if you use only one machine rooSwitch can be your best friend.

Next to your dog.

And, of course, your spouse.

System requirements: Mac OS X 10.4 or higher

Macsimum rating : 7 of 10

©2008 Frank Petrie

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