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.

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Despite this, developers of third-party Address Book-Gmail syncing apps are soldiering on. Both SpanningSync and Syncman developers point out that 10.5.3 offers this only for Leopard users and, even then, only for Leopard users with an iPhone or iTouch device.

Jeff Nichols, Syncman developer, has just released a new improved version of his sync app, lending credence to his claim that Wateree (his software firm) is a “small and agile company that can adjust quickly to our customers needs and desires”.

Syncman 1.1 can now be configured to run as a menubar utility and to load automatically when you fire up Mac OS X.

Behind the scenes further tweaks have improved the way Google Talk address are mapped to Jabber addresses in Address Book, and improved treatment of how Address Book’s Last Name field is handled.

But the number one request of users was for scheduled syncing, and Syncman delivers on that too.

The Preferences allow you to set the period of the sync and to customise the level of confirmation you want before it makes any changes:

Confirmation is another nice feature of Syncman, that is lacking in Address Book’s default sync option. As Jeff puts it:

Syncman respects the effort you’ve put into maintaining your Address Book, and therefore gets your confirmation before making any changes that could potentially cause you a whole bunch of headache.

So Syncman offers a confirmation dialog displaying potential changes before it makes them:

SpanningSync has also recently launched a 2.0 beta of its software, which is addition to syncing iCal and Google Calendar, will also sync Address Book data, including photos (Syncman is promised to have this feature soon too). The beta is free (but is a beta, so backup!).

SpanningSync costs either USD 25 for a year’s subscription or USD 65 for a once-off, unlimited licence.

Syncman is shareware and costs USD 15 (€9.95). You can get a 30-day free demo from Wateree’s web site.

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Phone Plugins installs itself as a System Preference pane.

After installation, you need to hook up a mobile phone to your Mac via Bluetooth by following the simple instructions onscreen. It recognised my old Nokia E60 without a problem:

Then, when the connection is established, right-clicking on a contact’s phone number in Address Book produces two new entries in the contextual menu:

The text/SMS interface is nice and simple and gets the job done. It offers a running total of remaining characters and a spell-check option:

Clicking “Dial number with E60″ initiates a call on your mobile/cell (unsurprisingly!).

Both options are available outside Address Book, system-wide in the Services menu. Just highlight the number and select the option you want from Services (or, if you do this a lot, bind it to a keyboard shortcut with an app like Service Scrubber ).

Phone Plugins works with a list of supported phones which Nova Media provides so check that yours is on the list before you try to install it.

Phone Plugins is shareware and features a very robust nag screen.

It costs €9,95 (c. USD 15.50) and a demo version is available from Nova Media’s web site .

For a donation-ware option, take a look at the emitSMS Widget in an earlier Hawk Wings post.

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A new widget emitSMS brings back the ability to send text messages from Dashboard, using the Bluetooth connection on many Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, SonyEricsson and other mobile/cell phones.

The back of the widget includes options for searching the mobile phone field of contacts in your Address Book, enabling long messages, including a read receipt and storing the text messages:

For reasons best known to itself, Apple has restricted the Bluetooth functionality of its iPhone to pairing with headsets, so I can’t test this. And I very happily returned my Treo 680 to the IT Department, so I am out of options. But I have a hunch that if I could test this, it would work well.

emitSMS is donation-ware and is available from the developer’s web site

[Via macOSXHints ]

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Normally, in order to create a relationship between two contacts, say Richard Treloar and Leanne Habeeb, you need to go to Leanne’s card, enter “Richard Treloar” as the spouse of Leanne, and then, go to Richard’s card and repeat the procedure, entering Leanne’s name into his spouse field.

It shouldn’t be that hard, and with this plugin it isn’t.

All you need to do is enter the information once, ⌘-click on the field and the plugin creates the reciprocal relationship (assistant/manager, mother/daughter, friend/friend, etc, etc) in the other card:

Relationship Completer is freeware and available from the developer’s web site .

[Thanks, David!]

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It still does a number of useful things though. It can add facebook profile pictures to Address Book contacts who have no photo, also address information.

Fire it up and you are asked to authenticate your facebook account. Then it delivers a list, comparing information about friends in your facebook account with your Address Book contacts, noting the differences:

You can then select sift through the contacts manually to select which Address Book contacts you would like it to update, or use the buttons on the right for a batch job.

It’s very clever. If you are addicted to Mail.app’s ability to display a photo of the author in the top righthand corner of each email, which somehow (for me) turns emails into conversations with real people, you will love it. Finally, I have an Address Book photo for a photo-shy friend! (I could simply have taken it from her facebook profile page but that wouldn’t have been nearly as much fun.)

facebooksync is freeware and and you can get it from the developer’s web site .

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Now at version 2.8.2, changes include a fix to make the Schedule Delivery script work in 10.4 and 10.5, a workaround to fix a possible error in the Schedule Delivery and Send all Drafts scripts caused by the way Leopard Mail fails to report the account of draft message, and a smarter Export Addresses script, which is no longer stumped if a contact has no work address.

Mail Scripts is freeware (donations not refused) and is available from Andreas’ web site .

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Not all of them are equally useful or productivity-boosting, but all of them are interesting, if only because there are sometimes better ways to get these things done.

1. Use Quickview for Mail.app attachments

One tip explains that highlighting an attachment in a Mail message and pressing the spacebar opens Quickview.

Not much more useful than using the Quickview button next to the “Save” button under the headers perhaps, but in the comments, another poster points out that pressing ⌘-Y when viewing a message opens all the message’s attachments in a single Quickview window, with arrows to move from one to the next.

2. Adding notes and to-dos to individual emails

Another post details a way to add notes to an individual email using Leopard Mail’s to-do feature. This is a “hack” for Leopard Mail’s inability to attach notes to individual emails.

I hardly need to tell regular Hawk Wings readers that there is a more excellent way .

3. Apply filters to Address Book contact pictures

This was news to me. If you click the “swirly cube” button next to the camera button in Address Book’s contact image editor, you are rewarded with 35 different filters that you can apply to the picture.

In effect, this brings Photobooth (my kids’ favourite Mac app) to all your Address Book contacts. There is a lot of fun to be had here, especially with the photos of contacts that you don’t much care for.

4. Use Drag ‘n’ Drop to replace icons in an item’s Inspector pane

From time to time I like to chance the icon of my Mail.app. After all there are more than 450 options and changing the icon under Tiger was easy.

Now it is even easier. A macOSXHints tip explains how to change an icon not by opening two Inspectors and cutting and pasting between the icon field in each, but simply by dragging and dropping an icon into the icon field of the target app’s Inspector. That’s much quicker.

5. Unlearn words you learnt by mistake

Mac OS X’s spell checker is a wonderful thing, surpassed only by Spell Checker X, now in the process of private Leopard-friendly beta testing and soon to reappear.

But is is possible to learn a word too quickly, a tipster on macOSXHints points out , adding a misspelt word to your dictionary which the spell checker will never again pick up. Now unlearning it is as simple as right-clicking (or “Command-clicking” in the old language) on the offending word and selecting “Unlearn Spelling” from the contextual menu.

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Formerly a member of the development team for Flock (”The Social Browser”), he once toyed with idea himself.

He has mocked up a vision of how this might look in Address Book:

Image shamefacedly nicked without any kind of permission from Chris’ post

The possibilities, he suggests, are enormous:

Imagine this kind of view showing up in Mail.app, Adium, iChat… where your friends, family and the rest get to update their own user pictures on a whim, and set their status and contact preferences in a way that visually makes sense.

This is a terrific idea. One of the best things about Mail is its human face.

Pulling the photos from contacts in Address Book and displaying them in their emails makes my day more personal. It humanises the time I spend emailing and reminds me that I am really dealing with the people behind the emails, not just with text. In fact, this was one of the reasons why I switched from PCs to Macs a few years ago.

For the same reason, I really like the iFaces notification utility, which still worked under Tiger but sadly may not work anymore. It sat on the Desktop and displayed the faces of people who had written newly arrived and unread emails (see screenshot on the right).

It’s another small way to give email a human face.

Of course, Chris is talking about something far more adventurous than that. I’m only imagining how good it would to have that contact information to hand in the results of a “Spotlight: Xxxx Xxxx” search from the Contextual Menu in Mail.app. Chris’ vision is more informed and his horizon wider.

UPDATE: As Aaron Harnly points out in the comments, you can get a rough and ready experience of what this might be like, by browsing your ~/Library/Application Support/Address Book/Metadata folder with Coverflow in Finder:

You can even use it to play the “face recognition game” Aaron describes. Hours of fun

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Restore Address Book’s missing fields

It’s always the little things that rankle the most, isn’t it? Here is the new Address Book in Leopard, with nice new features like built-in Google Maps searches and whatnot.

But I find myself more distressed by the disappearance of the Job Title and URL fields from Address Book’s default card template. In Tiger they were there; now they are gone. Why?

Luckily you don’t need to be a hardcore Terminal-head to get them back. Open up Address Book’s Preferences and select the Template pane. See how they have gone?

Select the Add Field dialog box:

Then select Job Title so that it is ticked (and why not the URL field while you are there?):

Then enjoy carefully distinguishing again within a company between the people whom you need to respect and everyone else:

Quickly add information to a contact

macOSXHints is running a tip on using the new “data detector” in Mail to quickly create iCal events and to-dos. It points out that hovering the mouse over a name or details of an event produces a drop box with the option to add it to Address Book or iCal.

But there is something even smarter lurking here. If you block all a contact’s information before you hover over the name (for example), the data detector pastes all the information into the new contact’s notes field:

Now I have the information I need about Greg Welch’s (developer of the MailRecent and MailFollowUp plugins — soon to be Leopard-ready) in the notes, where I can quickly drag it into the appropriate fields. I can even record his Job Title now that I have added the field to my template!

This way you get the lot in one hit, and don’t need to switch backwards and forwards between Mail and Address Book cutting and pasting.

This is particularly useful for people with non-US friends. The data detector doesn’t always do a good job of picking up address and phone numbers formatted for other countries.

Test how smart the data detector is for yourself. It highlights the fields it has added in green. Compare this with the information now in the notes field to see what kind of job it makes of the challenge.

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