Looking for a bit of spice in your iApps? Cian Walsh’s iLust icon set might be just what you are looking for.

He describes them modestly as “simply an experiment in how much you can run with a theme before it grinds to a complete halt”.

Naturally the ones that interest me the most are the icons for Mail.app (a ‘love letter theme’), iCal (a calendar complete with pin-up girl) and Address Book (a “little black book”, of course):

But the rest of the icons carry on the cheeky theme nicely, from the Martini-decorated iTunes replacement to the DVD in a brown paper bag for iDVD:

The iLust icon set is free and is available from Cian’s web site . icons, mail.app, apple mail, ical, address book, iapps, itunes, a little bit naughty, a little bit nice

Even though there are a truckload of backup solutions for Apple Mail, ranging from Apple’s own Backup software to dedicated apps like Email Backup and many more, the statistics are damning.

During the keynote at WWDC this year, we learnt that only 25% of Mac users perform backups and only 4% of them do it in a fail-safe automated way.

So another option is always welcome.

Doug Blatti has written an applescript that will backup your Mail folder and Address Book quickly, neatly and conveniently.

All you have to do is launch it. It will prompt you to close Mail and Address Book if they are open and go about its business:

It took about 9 minutes to create a zipped up backup of my Mail and Address Book. The zip file ends up at 620.5MB, just right for burning off onto a CD-Rom with some room to spare. (See further, “How the delete key is your best friend”).

That’s great. There’s only one problem. You.

Remember Apple’s high hopes that Time Machine in Leopard will drastically increase the number of people who do backups? As I’ve suggested before, they are kidding themselves:

Will it work? I don’t think so. The current ability to automate backups with Backup 3.0 and the plethora of third-party automated backup options haven’t brought large numbers of users to the party. This won’t either. It’s not the technical ability that’s missing; it’s the personal habit.

The best solution is to automate it with iCal, so that you are set free to develop more interesting and enjoyable personal habits.

It’s easy. Create an all-day event in iCal and under the alarm option, set it to “Open file”. Navigate to wherever you saved MailBackup.app and select it.

Set it to run at a time when you don’t usually use Mail.

I’m setting it to 9 am because I am having great success with the theory that you shouldn’t open your email until an hour or two after you start work (see more on this in “Emailing to live, not living to email”).

That’s the time to stay in control of your own agenda and actually get some stuff done.

Burn the backup file to a CD-Rom and store it somewhere safe. (Did you hear the one about the guy who kept his backup CD in his laptop case? One day his bag was stolen and…)

Now you are free to enjoy your bad habits worry-free. Your emails and contact details are safe.

NB: This script does not backup your Apple Mail preferences file, com.apple.mail.plist, which lives in your ~/Library/Preferences folder. Is it important? Ask Tim Bray .

You can find some more backup apps in the Hawk Wings Plug-in and Add-on List and in the Related posts section below.mail.app, apple mail, backup, ical, applescript, data security, automation, address book

I feel a bit sorry for Address Book. It sits in the background, chugging away and serving up contact details, but seldom gets the attention it deserves.

It doesn’t have a special day as iCal does (Wikipedia ). It doesn’t have a blog dedicated to it. Steve Jobs doesn’t wax lyrical about spending his day in it as he does with Mail.app.

To celebrate this quiet achiever, I am having a little Address Book Day of my own today.

First, five tips to help Address Book do its work better:

1. Creating iCal appointments from Address Book vCards. A quick drag and drop tip that saves time and typing. And is a clever example of iApp integration to boot.
2. Setting a default email address in Address Book. Help Address Book to know which email address is your preferred one for a particular contact (in a Group—as Yoram rightly points out in the comments).
3. A fistful of Address Book tips from Scott Kelby’s Mac OS X Tiger Killer Tips.
4. Tips on printing Address Book contacts.
5. Ed Eubank’s LowEndMac article on Supercharging Address Book offers some tips, uncovers ‘hidden features’ and suggests some great plugins to help you maximise Address Book’s usefulness.

The Hawk Wings Plugin and Addon List contains 22 extras, addons and utilities that make Address Book better.

Here are five that I particularly like:

1. BuddyPOP: Quick pop-up access to your Address Book Data. (See also the freeware but less-fully featured TapDex).
2. JABMenu: A menubar quick-access utility for Address Book.
3. Snail Mail: Beautiful envelopes and labels from Address Book.
4. MySync: Sync Address Book to many Macs without .Mac.
5. Plugins to integrate Address Book and Google Calendar.

address book, mail.app, apple mail, google, calendar, ical, contacts, tips, plugins, the little engine that could

Benjamin Harley has updated his applescripted utility ABGMerge which offers true two-way syncing between Address Book and Gmail.

The latest release makes a number of significant improvements.

It has repackaged as an application, and features a ‘Safe Mode’ with the option to restore your Address Book to its initial contents.

User interaction has been streamlined and improved, and the app no longer leaves extraneous data in your Address Book (altough it still leaves “<myABGmerge>” in Gmail notes so you know which ones are synchronized to your Address Book).

It’s also faster: the basic synchronization algorithms are significantly refined.

Benjamin says,

It is still complicated, and probably not for people without some savvy. It doesn’t necessarily handle foreign addresses all that well. And it probably still has some bugs. But it is far more robust now than it was before – and it sure beets doing a one off import / export between the two applications. Address Book is such a good repository for address information, but if you don’t have .mac – Gmail may be the best bet to get at that information when you are at work or away.

You can get ABGMerge from Benjamin’s web site .address book, gmail, google, syncing, contacts, web 2.0, applescript

Unlike the contact lists in other email clients, Mail.app can’t grab nicknames out of Address Book when auto-completing email addresses.

If your heart is set on using them, or if you have switched over from Eudora and never adjusted to their disappearance, here’s three things you could try:

1. Dan Moren has published a work-around on MacUser that involves creating an Address Book Group titled with the nickname and dropping the contact into the group. Mail.app will them find the nickname and auto-complete the email address.
2. Another option is making that contact into a company with the nickname as the company name and placing the person’s real name underneath:
   

3. Grieve the passing of nicknames for an appropriate period and then get over it. After all, most people with nicknames also have first names that Mail.app can easily find and match. It’s not such a big deal.

UPDATE: As Howard explains in the comments, Quicksilver has no problems with nicknames, so you can use it to start an nickname-friendly email:

mail.app, apple mail, address book, contacts, nicknames, tips, workarounds, group, company

Robert Coleman has bravely made a commitment to compile and host the latest builds of Thunderbird with the patch applied that integrates with Address Book.

Many people hope that Thunderbird will one day support Address Book access, but although an Address Book patch has been created, movement on improving it or building into official Thunderbird builds has been slow.

In an email, Robert writes that he is now “hosting more up to date (ideally weekly) Universal Binary builds of trunk Thunderbird with the Address Book patch applied”.

The latest build on his site (3.0a1) was compiled on 6 December.

He also includes on his web page instructions and screenshots (and warnings and caveats) for adding the required preferences to Thunderbird’s pref.js file.

He warns that access to Address Book is currently read-only, that the code is a little unstable and that the build is not an official Mozilla one, so is not packaged with the usual Thunderbird branding.thunderbird, address book, hack, patch, universal build, email, mozilla

Benjamin Harley has written an applescript that merges Gmail and Address Book contacts.

It works by taking a CSV file of your exported Gmail contacts (which you need to create first), and comparing it to the contacts in your Address Book. Any contacts not found in the Address Book are added.

Contacts in Address Book but not in Gmail are added and the merged CSV file is then imported back into Gmail.

All of this and more is explained carefully in a ReadMe file for the script, which you should read before using the script.

As Benjamin explains, the script is a labour of love (he wrote it initially for his girlfriend) and is not widely tested. He welcomes feedback on how it works for you. You’ll find an email address on his web site.

ABGMerge is donation-ware and is available from Benjamin’s web site .mail.app, apple mail, address book, gmail, email, merge, contacts, synchronization, Google