Tapdex is a preference pane that enables you to access your Address Book contacts with a user-defined hot key.

A new version (3.0) is now a universal binary and supports the F13-16 function keys.

It’s very easy and quick to use. Hit your hot key and Tapdex’s search window pops up. Type in the name and the search results narrow in real time until you are presented with the contact you are looking for:

Does this screen remind you of anything? That was my first thought too — BuddyPop.

Tapdex is a kind of “Lite” implementation of BuddyPop. It does not have the rich feature list of BuddyPop (support for Skype, X-Lite and Vonage, Bluetooth SMS, etc) but it is free.

With Tapdex you can launch an email in Mail.app by clicking on the contact’s email address, get a phone number in large type or map an address, which might be all you want to do.

Tapdex is freeware (although there is a USD 7 “Pro” version that removes a small advertisement) and is available from the developer’s web site .address book, hotkey, quick access, contacts, buddypop, universal binary, productivity

BuddyPop, a hotkey-activated pop-up search utility for Address Book has been updated.

The new version resolves potential conflicts with Address Book plugins by disabling them when BuddyPop is launched.

It also features some interface improvements and will work with the new iMac’s Intel-based USB modem.

BuddyPop is shareware (10 ?¢‚Äö¬¨, USD 12) and is available from the the developer’s web site .hotkey, search, pop-up, iMac, modem, BuddyPop

A Hawk Wings reader emails to ask:

I’m regularly (as in 2-3 times per day) asked by people to forward someone’s contact information via email. What I’d like to have is a simple way of searching and inserting address book information *from within* mail.app (like you can do in Outlook on a PC).

For example, I get a mail from Ben who asks “could you send me your X’s contact info?”. I would like to be able to stay in mail.app and hit CTRL-Shift-R, type the response and then, without switching to Address Book, hit a keystroke to pop up an address book search pane from which I can interactively search my address book.

When I’ve found the contact, I would like to be able to have the full contact’s info pasted as text (not as a vCard) into my mail message. Do you know of any application that can do this?

I have never felt the need for this myself, but now that I think about it, it ought to be possible and easy.

And it is. BuddyPop, an Address Book search utility, offers a way to get this done.

When you are reading the email in Mail.app, hit the hotkey to bring up the BuddyPop window.

Type the name of the contact you need until BuddyPop finds it:

Command-Click on the BuddyPop window and select “Copy” from the contextual menu. Or use the arrow keys and keyboard shortcuts to copy the info. It’s faster.

Start your reply and paste the info in at the appropriate place:

All done.