In a post on his web site , Chris Messina wonders why Apple doesn’t extend its Coverflow technology as a way of “browsing people”.

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 funmail.app, address book, contacts, coverflow, spotlight, apple, leopard

A quick fix for the fields taken out of Leopard’s Address Book template and an even quicker way to get information out of an email into an Address Book card.

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. Address Book, mail.app, apple mail, ical, fields, productivity

Sven-S. Porst has updated his Mailboxer utility, which quickly creates smart mailboxes in Mail.app to match all the emails to and from contacts in your Address Book.

It now comes with options to create smart mailboxes for a particular Address Book Group or for all your contacts, French and German localisations and the ability to enter a customised name for the top-level smart mailbox created in the process.

So, now when I fire it up, I get a dialog that lets me select the Group and name of the smart mailbox:

Because I usually need to find all the emails from only a few of my contacts, I selected my “Favourites” Address Book Group.

Now, I have “persistent” searches for my boss, work colleagues, wife and buddies just a click away.

I know mutt users who have a gazillion physical mail folders, one for each contact, and who file emails religiously (and laboriously, I imagine) away into the appropriate folders.

With Mailboxer they can kiss their folders good-bye, dump everything into one big archive and let the smart mailboxes sort them out.

The app’s Preferences provide further options for sorting the contents of the smart mailboxes:

Mailboxer now also joins the tribe of apps with an auto-update feature.

Of course, if you tire of being so organised, you can just delete the top-level smart mailboxes and you’re back to normal.

It is donation-ware and available from the developer’s web site . mail.app, apple mail, address book, productivity, tips, smart mailboxes, contacts

Four months ago, Nick Kreeger announced the first release of Correo, a new open source email client for Mac — “Mac essence, Gecko powered” — that “blends technology from two popular Mozilla projects, Camino and Thunderbird, to create a polished native Macintosh application”.

The second public beta has just been released. Correo 0.2 adds several nice new features: Keychain support, Address Book integration, the ability to open messages in a separate window, attachment support, better message list support for IMAP accounts and a collapsable message header and attachment view.

Although Nick readily admits it is a work in progress, the interface already shows Camino’s good looks:

Address Book integration is the big leap forward for usability:

Also nice is the “auto-complete feature” in the To: and Cc: fields:

Underneath the polished exterior, it’s all Thunderbird. The account manager and new account dialogs will be instantly familiar to Thunderbird users.

And the rendering is all Gecko too, as the following ironic screenshot of the new “single window” mode illustrates:

Nick hopes to implement features as the app’s development unfolds, including, plugin capability (to allow development of extensions such as PDA synchronization) and a tabbed window interface.

You can download Correo 0.2 from Nick’s web site and keep up-to-date with new builds through his blog .thunderbird, not apple mail, not mail.app, camino, mozilla, gecko, email, address book

Matthew Bookspan (ex-Microsoft?) has written an interesting account of his experience as a switcher for the web site Apple Matters.

Switching back to Macs, he began with high hopes:

I initially tried absorbing every key Mac app to “live the life” of a Mac user. What I found was quite interesting: very task-focused applications designed to do simple things and get them done quickly. These applications include Mail.app, iCal, Address Book, Safari, and more.

But things soon turned sour for him. Address Book and iCal “drove him batty”:

Address Book has too many limitations for the amount of fields you can use and customize. The Address Book Smart Groups are hard to configure unless you have exacting details. For example, it is annoying to create a “Family” smart group when many family members have different last names. Also, the Smart Groups do not work like Smart Playlists in iTunes as they don’t auto-fill the entry field as you type; this requires that you remember the exact spelling of everyone’s name (which renders the feature relatively useless to me). With iCal, I find that it is too limited in defining and updating meeting requests. It seems non-intuitive to define meeting requests in iCal and not in Mail.app. Lastly, the iCal UI is just unattractive, which is surprising given that Apple makes the product.

As a result, he is now using Entourage, which seems more natural to him given his Windows habit of using “monlithic apps” like Outlook. (He tried integration with Daylite, but doesn’t mention if he tried the other “Outlook-like” all-in-one plugins for Mail, iCal and Address Book — CRM4Mac and OD4Contact – now Contactizer Pro).

What I found interesting about this was the realisation that software really plays second fiddle to more ingrained work habits. And old habits die hard. You can hop from one productivity tool or workflow methodology to another, but in the end the resources in your head are more significant for your productivity than the resources on your computer.

This must drive productivity software designers mad.

It makes me think from time to time of going “Back to paper”, in order to fine-tune the resources in my head. I would miss all the whizz-bang “very task-focused applications” and plugins that I have grown to love as ends in themselves rather than as tools to achieve other ends, but that’s the whole point.

Enough editorialising from me. mail.app, apple mail, address book, ical, productivity, tools, unfocussed musing, back to paper

Do It is a very clever little task manager app with almost ever option one could hope for — iCal and Address Book integration, a Quicksilver plugin, syncing, lists for each context, skins and more. (See the extensive review in an earlier Hawk Wings post).

The developer has just released Do It 2.4 which adds localisations for Russian, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Dutch and Traditional Chinese, and a few other tweaks like smarter item sorting in its to-do lists.

Since I last looked at it, other new features have been added, including extra options for handling completed tasks:

This is an application worth checking out. If my heart didn’t already belong to MailTags , I’d be using it myself.

Do It is donationware and available from the developer’s web site .productivity, task manager, to-do lists, ical, address book, quicksilver, syncing, contexts,

David Cleland has written an excellent tutorial on Address Book’s little known ability to send SMS (or text) messages through a mobile (or cell) phone using Bluetooth.

He covers the process of pairing a mobile phone with Address Book over Bluetooth and how to use Address Book’s SMS interface.

Once it is all set up, sending an SMS through Address Book is as easy as right-clicking on the mobile number of an Address Book contact and selecting “Send SMS”.

Address Book offers a simple dialog for entering the message:

It’s a little tricky to set up, but easier to use than trying to type on the cramped keypad of a mobile phone. So frequent texters will reap the greatest benefit.not mail.app, not apple mail, address book, text message, SMS, bluetooth, tips