Review: Jon’s Phone Tool

• Article 24 of 89
• MacFormat, August 2006

Some people spend most of their life on the phone. It may not be the same phone all the time – sometimes it might be a mobile, sometimes it might be a VoIP service like Skype or Vonage. But the biggest problem faced by the frequent phone user is finding numbers. They can be spread around any number of contact management applications, hidden in web pages, stuck in text clippings: anywhere except the phone itself. Jon’s Phone Tool is the solution to this problem.

Essentially, Jon’s Phone Tool provides a single interface for all your contacts and all your phones. Whatever phone or phone-like system you have, provided there’s some way for your Mac to connect to it, Jon’s Phone Tool can dial it. What’s more, it can suck in just about any phone number from any application you care to mention. If the numbers are in an application like Entourage, Address Book or Now Contact, the program can simply import the numbers on demand, search them, then give you the number you want. Alternatively, you can use one of the provided AppleScripts to dial using JPT from inside your favourite contact management app. If they’re in another app altogether, you can highlight any text and use the contextual menu item to carry the number over to the tool’s dialler.

As if that weren’t enough, there are two system-wide menu extras for accessing your contacts; there’s a Tiger widget, dialling rules for adding prefixes or suffices; logs and call timers for tracking phone usage; and so on.

Jon’s Phone Tool does have a few faults. Bluetooth connection is far too arcane. The interface is a little “too cool for school”, with no helpful tool tips to explain the otherwise abstract buttons. The Widget forces you to launch the program every time your run Dashboard, whether you want to or not. But apart from these few shortcomings, it a must-have for the frequent caller – if it saves you an hour or two of your life searching for numbers, it’ll have paid for itself.