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.Address Book, quick entry, contacts, productivity

QuickCal is a widget that allows you to enter appointments into iCal using plain language.

Instead of remembering obscure tags or negotiating a series of check-boxes, you just type your upcoming appointment in normal words. The widget parses your text and creates the appointment for you.

There is a Quicksilver plugin that does something similar, but with the continuing uncertainty over Quicksilver’s future development, some people way be looking for another way to do the same thing.

It is simple to use. All you need to do is type:

(It even copes with the fact that I can’t type “tmorrow” properly!).

Options on the back of the widget allow you set a number of defaults — the calendar in which the appointment should be created and a number of default ways to handle reminders:

It seems quite smart. The developer provides a list that shows the variety of “plain language” it can understand:

It can’t do repeating events or strip out the location of the event and put in iCal’s location field. But the developer is cranking out the updates and improvements, so who knows how much smarter it may become?

QuickCal requires Leopard to work its magic. It’s donation-ware and is available from the developer’s web site .

[With thanks to Dave, a Hawk Wings reader, for the tip-off.]ical, productivity, widgets, plain language

So, I’m thinking about starting Hawk Wings up again.

It’s been a while. I’ve missed it. I wonder, after all this time, if anyone else is still missing it too.

At first, I’ll be busy on the back end. While I’ve been gone WordPress has jumped from 2.5 to 2.8. There are 924 comments backed up in the moderation queue.

But I’ll quietly plug away and posts will soon be appearing again.

I”m looking forward to it.personal, hawkwings, hawk wings, sleeper arise