My wife gave birth to our second son, Peter, last week. The proud parents are both iPhone users, so you'd expect us to have an iPhone-based solution for announcing the big news to our friends and family. Although we tried our best, it didn't turn out that way.
Every new father's would like to quickly send the "It's a Boy" or "It's a Girl" email to dozens of family and friends, including a picture of the new baby. (Lots of these people are typically not users of services like Twitter or Facebook, so email attachments are still important.)
You'd think that Mail.app and Contacts.app on the iPhone would support a simple concept like this. They don't because they have no notion of Smart Groups which are commonly used in Mail.app on the Mac for this purpose.
A simple iPhone app called Mail2Group is supposed to fill the feature gap in Mail.app. It costs $1.99 at this writing. Mail2Group allows me to define a list containing email addresses entered manually or selected from the iPhone Address Book. Once the list was defined, I could use Mail2Group to trigger the creation of a message in Mail.app that was pre-addressed with the members of the mailing list.
The Mail2Group solution probably would have worked fine for a plain text email, but I needed to send a photo. Third party applications on the iPhone are not allowed to create documents with attachments, so the solution had to begin in Photos.app.
Mail2Group provides detailed instructions for how to use it in conjunction with Photos.app and Mail.app to send an email containing a photo attachment. The problem with this solution is that it doesn't seem to work on an iPhone where multiple mail accounts are setup.
I think that Mail2Group is a transitional utility that's probably worth $1.99 to someone who has simple needs. But Apple needs to look at use cases like The New Father in the Nursery and realize that Mail.app and Contacts.app could easily handle the job themselves.
Can you think of a solution to my problem? It's too late for me. I used my Mac and a 3G card to send the "It's a Boy" email. But please add a comment so that other new fathers (or mothers) can benefit.
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Actually the Mac Address Book does support this. Just create a group or smart group with the people you want. Then email to the group name.
Oops you're talking iPhone sorry.
Congratulations!
I have a solution, but it is a bit of a kludge, partly due to a lot of strange bugs I found trying this out (I spent an hour and a half writing this comment and researching the steps), and you need a mobileMe account.
1) create an new album on mobileMe with iPhoto. You need to have at least one picture in the album, but that could be a title picture or a picture of a big belly.
2) Before the happy day prepare a message on the MobileMe website and save it in the Draft folder (Unfortunately there appears a bug/feature in Mail on the Mac and messages in your drafts folder doesn't get synchronized to your iPhone. ).
3) include all the email adresses you want to send the announcement to in the To field or the Cc field.
4) in the message include a link to the gallery on the mobileMe website (something like http://gallery.me.com/mare#100008)
4) As said before don't send the message, but save it in your Drafts folder. The MobileMe Drafts folder will be synchronised to your iPhone, and the message with all the receipients will be ready for you.
So far the prep work.
Now on the happy day:
5) snap as many pictures as you want
6) in the Photos app on the iPhone upload the photos to your mobileMe gallery. One by one.
7) when you're done uploading go to Mobile Mail on the iPhone, open the Drafts folder, open the email you prepared earlier, edit/add it ("It's a boy!") and send it off.
8) Okay, another bug, that doesn't work. You can press send but the message never gets send. I'll have to file a bug for this.
9) Kludgy workaround: while in the Drafts folder, press the Edit button and move the message to your Inbox.
10) Move to the Inbox, select your message and do a "Reply to All",
11) Edit your text and send it off. Unfortunately your announcement will appear as a reply to an email and not as a freshly written one. But if you put the cursor on the first letter of the quoted text you can 'unquote' it by pressing the delete key. If you also remove the "on blah blah, x wrote:" part your message is almost new.
That was it! Too late for you, but maybe useful for somebody. Maybe I should write this up as an article with screenshots...
Congratulations to you all.
Firstly Congratulations Dave, a google alert sent me a link to this blog this morning and I found that you had mentioned about Mail2Group. I am Javid Alimohideen, developer of Mail2Group. I am sorry the app was unable to fulfill your needs as I understand how important its for you to share the joy with ur friends and family with a photo of ur new born. I hope to implement this feature of sending pictures to groups in upcoming versions.
Congratulations Once again
Javid
Javid:
I think Mail2Group is a great utility in terms of how it fills a gap in Apple's iPhone software. Developers like you ought to be encouraged to keep coming up with solutions like it.
On the other hand Apple needs to figure out a way to make sending email to groups easier. A task like this should be easily accomplished with an iPhone.
--Dave Aiello
yeah, I wish the best to your family, and yes I have a solution.... usually people on Iphone have an internet connection.... so with Mail2group you can send a message containing a url to your image.
You could upload for example the image on a free image hosting ... and send the given url trought Mail2Group...
I hope I was usefull.
P.S. soon you'll live your first father's day ... so I hope you'll pay attention and you'll write a usefull post about [idea!] ;)
I agree with everything else you just said. Maybe we are not so far apart in our doctrinal views…Peace and Grace to you
ed hardy
I have go agree that Mail2Group is a great app. It is great to see Javid post here. I have come to depend on your app several times a week. Rob
I agree, its a wonderful app, extremely useful on a an everyday basis.
istork
http://www.macworld.com/appguide/app.html?id=132105&expand=false
You could always use Flickr or Photobucket, I know both of them have apps and are accessible via Safari. Cloud hosting is the way of the future as far as data access is concerned. Why bulk up your mobile device or home computer when you can safely store your data somewhere else.
Here's an idea. Don't use your cell phone in a hospital. There are signs everywhere saying it's prohibited.
You don't need an app. You need to L2 read and follow the rules.