Tips on integrating Highrise with your iPhone (or any phone that syncs with Address Book)

Citizen Scholar's Randy J. Hunt has planned ahead for Highrise/iPhone interaction without even knowing it. In the piece, he offers a handy template vCard and describes how to use it to set up your iPhone (or any phone that syncs with Address Book) so it plays nice with Highrise.

37signals’ Highrise contact manager has become the scaffolding on which I build most of my daily interactions, both personal and business...

Within days of creating an account I was putting the email-integration features to use. I’ve been using Mail Act-On to quickly forward emails and create tasks from Apple Mail when I’m at my desk.

On the go, however, I needed an equally easy answer...Thankfully, Highrise’s email interfacing makes this dead simple: I just added address book entries for each of the Highrise email options (Dropbox, Task Today, Task Tomorrow, etc.). When I sync the phone with my address book, all of those “contacts” go into my phone, where I use them to start new emails and add to-dos while out and about.

It was just a few days ago as I was using Highrise to plan my iPhone purchase (see end of post), that I realized my mobile solution would work wonders on the iPhone (or admittedly, any email client) too. Since it syncs with address book just like my current phone and Highrise doesn’t care what device the mail comes from, I don’t have to do anything different. So, here’s how to set it up quickly and easily yourself:

Step 1
Grab this template vCard: HighriseTemplate.vcf

Step 2
Import it into your address book and replace “YourDropboxAddress” in each new contact’s email field with the string of numbers found in your Highrise email dropbox tab. (you can also just open it in a text editor first and do a find-replace)

Step 3
Sync up your address book to your mobile device or iPhone and you’re ready to go.

But wait, you ask, isn’t this all a moot point since the iPhone has Safari and I could simply use Highrise there? It’s true, this may be an option, but I’ll still want to forward emails to the system or add to-dos that come to mind when I’m writing an email without switching over to the browser.

Read the full post to learn how Highrise has also been helping Randy plan his transition away from T-Mobile and into AT&T service.