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

BuddyPop is a small and unobtrusive app that provides quick access to your Address Book contacts in a pop-up which is activated by a user-defined keyboard shortcut.

Hitting the shortcut brings up a simple search dialog.

Type until you get the matches you are looking for, then BuddyPop extracts the information from your Address Book and displays it in an attractive pop-up like this:

Clicking on the email address starts a new message in Mail.app, clicking on the phone number can dial the number or start a call through Skype or Vonage.

If “Dicko” gives you more than match, you can cycle through the contacts using the left and right arrow keys.

BuddyPop is highly configurable. You can change the default actions for clicking on each field, which fields to display or use as search criteria, the pop-up’s appearance and position on the screen, and the keyboard shortcut that activates it.

All of these settings are available through the app’s preferences pane:

A new version of BuddyPop (2.5.0) was released on Christmas Day, boasting a large number of improvements, including Skype, X-Lite SIP SoftPhone and Vonage support, support for sending and receiving SMS messages via a Bluetooth-enabled phone, partial support for Address Book plug-ins and better iChat and IM support.

Quicksilver handles this well enough for my (unsophisticated) needs. But if I Skyped or iChatted or BlueToothed more, I’d be using this.

BuddyPop is made by Tynsoe, who also make GeekTool and SSH Tunnel Manager. It is shareware (10 Euros) and available from Tynsoe’s web site.