Cheap: Speed Dial On Your Mac

What’s not to like about Apple’s famed ecosystem. iPhone users love using their devices so much that the halo effect of new users has helped Mac sales grow.

One of the newest built-in functions to iOS and OS X (soon, macOS Sierra) is the Continuity feature which lets users handoff documents, calls, text messages, Wi-Fi hotspot, and more. Here’s a perfect example of how that Disneyland-like ecosystem works to make a Mac user’s life better. SpeedDial.

Call Me Easy

So, here’s how it works. You’re sitting in front of your Mac, slaving away over some document, staring into the abyss of yet another spreadsheet, marching through the madness of email, or merely browsing an endless array of Apple-oriented websites (like Mac360) and you want to call a friend.

Stop what you’re doing on the Mac, go find your iPhone, open the Phone app or Contacts app, find your friend’s name, press the number to initiate the call. There must be a better way. That’s SpeedDial.

Click the Mac’s Menubar, select the name, and the dialing on your iPhone begins automagically.

If that just sounds too simple and elegant and useful to be true for $1.99, well, it’s not. That’s what the inexpensive SpeedDial app does. It dials, well, speedily. Like a speed dial on a phone. From your Mac.

You’ll need a Mac and iPhone with the Continuity feature (OS X El Capitan, macOS Sierra, and iOS 9.x or iOS 8.x). In FaceTime, enable ‘Calls from iPhone’ in the Preferences. Then, give permission to SpeedDial to access your Contacts app.

That’s it.

To place a call using SpeedDial simply click the Menubar icon, select the name among the favorites on your list, and click. The call is initiated through Continuity to your iPhone (so the iPhone needs to be somewhat nearby).

The SpeedDial pop down menu has options to Edit and Delete the SpeedDial contacts, launch FaceTime so you can see your call history, add a new SpeedDial contact, and even launch Contacts itself to find or add other names and numbers.

Sweet, right?

This is another one of those cleverly designed Mac apps that take advantage of the new technology features that Apple drops into the Mac and iPhone to make them easier to use.