AddressBookQuickEntry is an interface to Address Book that allows for fast entry of contact information.
Hawk Wings has covered it before (three and a half years ago!).
It disappeared for a while. I found myself emailing the app out to readers who asked for it, but now it is back on the Internet, hosted on the Small Steps Forward web site 
.
Nothing has changed. It should still work in Tiger, as it did before, and seems to work fine in Leopard. (UPDATE: Things are not quite as smooth in Leopard as I thought. While it works OK for me, see the comments for some particular quirks.)
You can read about the speed advantages of its interface and its clever tricks in the earlier post. An image of its clean interface gives a hint of the benefits:
AddressBookQuickEntry remains freeware.
Great!
I’ve bug reported the multiple flaws of the Address Book to Apple but problems persist.
Will try ABQE.
The track-back link to this article from the old post point 404!
great to see you back!
do you know somewhere an application that WORKS to coordinate facebook friends and addressbook? there is one, but always crashes and i get no reply from the developer ….
Thanks for posting about this. The thing is, in Leopard I end up using data detection in Mail for 95% of my new entries, and Snow Leopard will make data detection universal. I don’t know that an app like this, while helpful for Tiger and pre-Tiger users, is necessary (or even the most efficient way) for Leopard users.
Welcome back, by the way, Tim.
Doesn’t work for me on Leopard, results in a script error when using certain fields (I did not discover which one, but when I fill every field, it crashes, when I just add a name, everything works fine).
The data fields in AB seems not to work properly when I add a contact on my English GUI but Swedish sorting Leo!
@Ken, HC: Thanks for pointing these problems out. Clearly I didn’t test it rigorously enough!
@Ed: Good to hear from you! You are right, it is not so useful for day-to-day work with contacts as it used to be.
But it’s still useful for particular things. For example, every semester I use it to make email class lists from the hard copy information that gets provided to me. It’s much faster with 30 new entries than Address Book’s own interface.
@Mark: There is one. I remember using it once. But it may have been the same one you are talking about. I’ll hunt around and see if I can claw back which one I used.
@Ed: I wish that data detection worked well enough for me to use it more. For example, my experience is that “add to existing contact” does absolutely nothing. It may be user error, or maybe my system (13″ PowerBook G4), but still – nothing happens.
Tim, thanks for mentioning that ABQE works with Tiger.
I was searching for this the other day on your Plug-ins page. When I couldn’t find it, I looked instead at SBook (also on the Plug ins page), and like this even better.
Though it’s a stand alone address book program, it can synch both ways with AddressBook. It’s *fast*, andcan parse addresses. Now, when someone sends me their address info in an e-mail, I can copy the whole message to SBook, delete the unnecessary text, and save it. No clicking Edit, tabbing to different fields, mousing to find the right labels, etc.
Since the info passes to AddressBook, it’s available to me in Mail, and I can use any plug-ins for AB to access my data.
It’s a great program, even though it’s practically abandonware.
–Liz
@davidj: You may want to try out WhoPaste, which lets you select an address in Mail.app, copy it to the clipboard, and add it to AddressBook, DayLite, and/or Google Address Book. The AI to recognize address fields isn’t perfect, but in my experience, it is better than the data detectors built into Mail.app.
http://whopaste.com/
RonB –
Thanks for the lead on WhoPaste. I went and tried it. As you say, better than the Mail.app data detectors. Still not very good though. This may be because the actual signature blocks I tried it on were too complex.
I also tried SBook, following Liz’ comment. Also better than the built in data detectors, but no real saving in time or effort overall.
Sigh! I live in hope. Go well!
David