[tkmd]

I hope that this has not been discussed - but if someone emails you and includes a phone number-float your mouse over the number and you get a box indicating whether you would like to include it into your address book! It imports the name, email everything. Never knew this was one of the "300" features! Same thing happens if there is a date but mail will import it into ical. Brilliant.

[nonhuman]

Cool. I love that feature in the iPhone (lets you touch a phone number anywhere to dial it).

[- - e r i k - -]

It's the return of Apple Data Detectors which were developed for Copland/OS 8.

[JKT]

Wasn't this also a feature of NeXTStep that never made the transition to OS X 10.0? Anyway, it is a most welcome addition which meant I was able to finally drop some third party software for doing something similar in earlier versions of OS X (for dates, not phone no.'s).

[- - e r i k - -]

Apple Data Detectors was designed in response to a set of ethnographic studies that identified an important class of problems that people have when doing their everyday work with computers. Documents frequently contain "triggers" for the next steps in work activities: an e-mail message will contain a URL for a web page, which will contain a phone number, and so on. Our goal was to provide a simple interface that would let the user carry out these steps with as little effort as possible.

Information management: Jim Miller / Miramontes Computing