SBook5: A smarter Address Book
Sbook5 is a smarter alternative to Mac OS X’s native Address Book.
Developed by Simson Garfinkel of MIT, it is faster, more flexible and smarter than Address Book.
The free-form database that powers it allows for any number of postal addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, photographs and URLs per card which it then parses and sorts.
It presents the ordered information in a contact pane with icons beside each field that launch messages, format addresses for printing on envelopes, load URLs and dial phone numbers:
It also outsmarts Address Book at almost every turn.
SBook5 can automatically tell the difference between an entry that represents a person and one that represents a corporation, and sort the card accordingly.
Adding a card is amazing. If you cut and paste a signature from an email into a blank new card, SBook5 automatically parses the information and determines what’s a postal address, what’s an email address or a phone number.
No need for the tedious tabbing through fields that adding an entry in Address Book entails.
It syncs two ways with Address Book and is really fast. It look less than ten seconds to import and parse the 480 entries in my Address Book.
You can also use it as a de facto contact creator for Address Book. Use the power of SBook5 to parse the information for a contact, and then select the app’s “Push Entry to Apple Address Book” option to create a corresponding card in Address Book.
SBook5 is endlessly customizable and tweakable. You can read more about it and download the app (freeware?) at the developer’s web site 
.
But be careful; after you use it, you will never look at Address Book so happily again. Why doesn’t it have these features and this kind of flexibility?
[Thanks, Gibbons]
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Tags: Address Book, contacts, helpful apps, Productivity, sbook5, vcards
March 22nd, 2006 at 5:18 am
Close. Garfinkel.
Not hard to guess who you were thinking of when you typed that. :-)
March 22nd, 2006 at 6:58 am
Guilty as charged :-)
Thanks for pointing it out.
March 22nd, 2006 at 11:12 am
It’s also brilliant for keeping tabs on software registrations and other essential bits of information. I’ve been using it for years and have never had a problem.
Five stars.
March 22nd, 2006 at 10:33 pm
It’s possible to store other data in the Address Book database: that way you wouldn’t have to worry about re-syncing the data. And the original Address Book would still work, as would the integration with all of the other programs.
That would be cool (I tried to write a program to do this, but failed…)
July 16th, 2006 at 9:05 am
Why do I get two displays of the information in Sbook5. One seems to be the contents of file sbook5~.sbok and the other sbook5~~.sbok. I dono’t seem to be able to get rif of the latter (or either for that matter.
July 16th, 2006 at 4:22 pm
Hi Iain. I’m not much of an expert with this app, I’m afraid. Have you emailed the developer directly?
October 20th, 2006 at 9:38 pm
[...] If they don’t make you happy, check out Sbook5, a complete replacement for Address Book. [...]
October 21st, 2006 at 12:03 am
How up to date is the current version of SBook? The bug list and to-dos haven’t been updated since 2003.
October 21st, 2006 at 12:16 pm
Hi Bob. I don’t have any inner mystical insight on this myself. Have you asked the developer?
November 14th, 2006 at 12:09 pm
From http://www.sbook5.com/download.php
SBook5 for OSX: (free and non-expiring!)
February 17th, 2007 at 1:09 pm
I have also loved sbook5 for several years. But, no recent updates?? Spotlight support? There are also bugs in the printing/exporting functions.
It is apparently an abandoned project. Does anyone know if there is hope for future upadtes? I’d pay for this one!
March 14th, 2007 at 1:36 am
I’ve given up on SBook.
June 21st, 2009 at 5:45 am
Will not sync with Leo AB on my setup!
June 21st, 2009 at 5:48 am
Addendum: English language/Swedish sorting!
July 28th, 2009 at 7:15 pm
isn´t there nobody interested in going ahead with SBook5?
its a pity that its not further developed.
in my opinion some of the greatest replacements for these
badly thought-out osx apps got abandoned.
like SBook5, Eudoraor Audion, beside others.
April 15th, 2011 at 4:36 am
Yep. DOA. Just tried it on Snow Leopard and Sbook5 (intel version) just sits there and stares at me. If there’s ever a better replacement for Address Book, please let me know. It’ll be worth whatever they charge.