AddressBookQuickEntry: Faster contact entry
AddressBookQuickEntry is a stand-alone app that offers a streamlined and easier-to-use interface for entering contacts into Address Book.
The developer created it after finding that “Address Book’s interfac for creating and entering new information is clunky, accident-prone, and very non-Apple.”
The interface is certainly clean and clear:
Hitting “Add One” will quit AddressBookQuickEntry after creating the card. If you want to add multiple cards, use the “Add” button, then click the “Clear” button to clear the data and do it again.
It’s clever too: If you enter an organization name without a person’s name, the new card will default to a “Company” card.
The developer recommends putting AddressBookQuickEntry into your dock, next to your Address Book icon (although you could just as easily set “ABQE” as a match in QuickSilver).
The only thing I will miss is a URL field.
What I like about this especially is the option to add contacts to a group, something I often forget to do in Address Book’s own entry template. Later when navigating in Address Book by groups, I wonder where the person has gone!
AddressBookQuickEntry is freeware and is was available from the developer’s web site [DEAD LINK]. (UPDATE: 20 June 2009 The app is now available again at a new site 
).
[I read about this in Ed Eubank's article on Address Book]
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Tags: Address Book, catds, contacts, groups, interface, new contact, Quiicksilver, template
January 24th, 2006 at 8:01 am
Woohoo! Finally! The trouble with Apple’s address book interface is that it totally overlooks how most people add details: (1) Copy signature block out of email (2) Paste into notes field of new contact card (3) Cut and paste each individual element into the correct field (4) Clear away left over crap from notes field.
Apple’s contact card template does have a notes field, but something about it (perhaps the fact that it’s borderless and greyed out by default) just doesn’t lend itself to intuitive pasteage of signature blocks. I will enjoy using ABQE.
January 24th, 2006 at 8:51 am
Excellent. I agree.
Once I tried ABQE I found it hard to think how I could go back to Address Book’s own template.
March 21st, 2006 at 10:32 am
I wish AddressBook was as smart at dealing with incoming data as Sbook, Simson Garfinkel’s Address Book, which got its start on the NeXT computer. You can paste a full name and address with phone numbers, emails, and URLs and it will make sense of it all and assign the proper field identifiers to it. It syncs with Address Book pretty well, and has superior envelope printing, and prints a bar code for the zip code.
It doesn’t clutter the view with empty fields – it just gives the proper semantic context to the information you feed it.
http://www.sbook5.com/
March 21st, 2006 at 10:37 am
Thanks for the tip. Looks interesting.
October 12th, 2006 at 7:00 am
Hi,
Any ideas what happened to the ABQE app in this link? The link seems to be dead.
It looks like just what I’m after!
Thanks
October 22nd, 2006 at 9:58 pm
I seem to get a 404 on the developers site.
Anyone know what happened?
October 22nd, 2006 at 10:51 pm
The site’s dead.
December 18th, 2006 at 3:40 pm
Does someone have a copy of the app that they could share with me? The site remains down, but that app looks good!
December 18th, 2006 at 9:13 pm
I have a copy. Get in touch at lee_r_webb@ntlworld.com
March 4th, 2007 at 12:28 pm
It’s still available at the AusMac archive:
http://www.mirrors.ausmac.net/AusMac/auslist.cgi?location=Internet-Buzz/2006-05-May
April 20th, 2007 at 4:31 pm
And available at http://www.smallstepsforward.com/downloads/
May 13th, 2007 at 9:49 am
I keep on getting the error
The command exited with a non-zero status. (-1)
Can anyone assist
May 13th, 2007 at 10:43 am
Hi again
Re-installed and re-started and app worked OK.
Don’t know why the script error occurred.
November 1st, 2007 at 4:18 am
This plug in no longer seems available anywhere. Anyone know why it disappeared? Don’t understand why Apple doesn’t do a few basic tweaks to the Address book that could go a long way to allowing it to be used as a contact manager. I’ve been using Day Lite, which is a little tedious. A cleaner interface, the ability to add more fields, color code and sort by priority and I could drop Day Lite.
At any rate, if anyone knows were to find this plug in, please post!
November 1st, 2007 at 7:57 am
@Peter — Are you still using Tiger?
November 1st, 2007 at 10:12 am
Yes, I’m still using Tiger.
September 9th, 2008 at 1:56 am
Developer hosting link is dead. Here’s a new one.
http://www.smallstepsforward.com/downloads/
June 20th, 2009 at 11:28 pm
[...] Wings has covered it before (three and a half years [...]