Dialing the Phone

Guy Friday can help you store and recall phone numbers. If you have a modem attached to your Mac, Guy Friday will dial the phone for you.

The “dial” feature is accessed through the Status Window. Just press the graphical button that looks like a telephone handset.

If no information nugget is currently active, Guy Friday will have no idea who you want to dial. So It will just ask you to type in a number. Admittedly, this isn’t particularly useful, since you might as well pick up the telephone handset and dial the number yourself.

But if you have an info nugget active on the screen when you press the Telephone Button, Guy Friday will look for a telelphone within the active nugget. Because Guy Friday is a free-form information organizer which doesn’t require you to specifically label a phone number as such, the program  uses “intelligence” to determine what information is a phone number and what isn’t.

When Guy Friday finds what it thinks is a phone number, it will hilight it. If this is the number you want to dial, press the Telephone Button again. Guy Friday will dial the phone for you.

On the other hand, perhaps Guy Friday has indeed hilighted a phone number, but the wrong one. Perhaps it has highlighted your friend’s fax number, or voice-mail number. To tell Guy Friday to continue searching for the proper telephone number, hold down the Option key and press the Telephone Button again.

A quick review:

1) To highlight a phone number, press the Telephone Button.
2) If you want to dial it, press the Telephone Button again. Or:
3) If the hilighted number isn’t the proper one, hold down the Option key and press the Telephone Button again.

Proper hardware setup

Obviously you should have a telephone plugged into your modem. This way, once Guy Friday dials your number, you can pick up and talk. Most modems disengage the voice telephone while dialing a number and waiting for a ring or busy signal. Thus, if your party picks up the phone, you’ll probably want to alert the modem that you’ll take care of the call from that point on. Just click the mouse to disengage the modem from the line.

Dialing Intelligence

When Guy Friday dials, it tries to be as intelligent as possible. For example, even if you write your local area code in an info nugget, Guy Friday won’t dial your own area code when you press the telephone button. (Be sure your area code is set properly, though! You can do this through Telephone Preferences...) Similarly, Guy Friday will realize that it should dial a “1” before placing a long distance call, even if it isn't specifically marked in the info nugget.

Redial When Busy

If a number is busy, Guy Friday will re-dial until it rings. To abort this cycle, just click the mouse button.