Here’s is a simple tip that was new to me.

There are two ways to add a vCard with your contact information to a Mail.app signature.

An old post on macOSXHints details how to add it as a hyperlink to a remotely-stored vCard file, so that recipients can download it into their Address Books easily.

The end result is nice and clean and saves bandwidth:

If you don’t give two figs about bandwidth, you can simply export your card from Address Book.

Then drag it onto a signature in the Signature pane of Mail’s preferences, and your vCard goes out with every signed email:

Of course, it is possible to share more information than you mean to or more than your recipients want. It might be a good idea to create a special Address Book card for this before exporting it.

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Plaxo, an online contact management service, has released a beta version of its plugin for Address Book.

The Plaxo service allows you to synchronise contact information, to update the information of contacts who are also Plaxo members automatically and to ask for updated contact information from others.

The idea is to keep ahead of the endless changes in phone numbers and email addresses that cause you gradually to lose contact with people.

With the plugin much of the work of keeping your contact information current is made automatic. Its preferences allow you to “set and forget” the synchronisation and update options. It also adds a collapsable pane to each Address Book contact that enables you to manually request an update on contact information and displays a history of your communication with that person (this feature is “coming soon”).

Last year Plaxo struck a deal with AOL to manage the contact information for AOL’s Triton Instant Messaging application. Unlike some other apps, Plaxo has also opened up its API to third-party developers.

Services like this are not for everyone. It’s not for me. Despite Plaxo’s strong privacy policy, I’m not happy loading up my contact information into some third-party’s database.

Oddly, I do almost the same thing hourly with iSync and don’t think twice about it. Somehow I trust Apple more. I’m such a babe-in-the-woods.

But if you are interested in testing out a service like this (you can delete your Plaxo account and all your information entirely if you change your mind), download the beta of Plaxo’s Address Book plugin and give it a try.

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You can’t spend all day in front of your computer. Sometimes you need to go out, but you still need to be able to contact people. Enter Address Book Reports.

This app provides flexible and useful print-outs of the contact information in your Address Book. It offers significant improvements on Address Book’s built-in printing.

Its Card and Phonebook styles are ideal for slipping into a Day planner, Filofax or diary.

Address Book Reports also allows for custom page sizes for the reports, so hipster-wielding retro-tech GTD fans are catered for as well. 3″ x 5″ print outs are just a few clicks away.

The main window allows you to chose which fields to print for each report style and whether to print the lot or just specific groups:

The app can also print envelopes (US and international sizes) and labels (Dymo, Avery, even a POSTNET bar code).

Address Book Reports is shareware (USD 15) and available from the developer’s web site, where you can also check out some sample print-outs.

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