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.

Tags: Address Book, buddypop, contact, email

This week Address Book and iCal get the lion’s share of the additions to the Hawk Wings Plugin and Addon List.

The following items were added to the Address Book section:

• AddressBookQuickEntry (an alternate entry interface for contact information)
• AusAB (maps, travel directions and Sydney public transport times for Australian addresses)
• iAddressX (Address Book menubar utility)

The following were added to the iCal section:

• DoBeDo (a Dashboard widget for iCal ToDos)
• iCalViewer (“Streaming” desktop iCal events and ToDos)
• MenuCalendarClock (menubar utility for you iCal calendar, clock and ToDo and event information)

Mail.app itself scored two extra entries:

• anentry (AppleScript to email a NetNewsWire headline) in the Integration with other Apps section
• NetShred X (history and cache shredder for Mail.app and browsers) in the Added Functionality section

These additions bring the number of entries on the list to a round 120, all making Mail.app, Address Book and iCal easier, more efficient, more productive and (possibly) more fun to use.

Tags: addon, Address Book, applescript, Australian addresses, calendar, contact, Dashboard, events, iCal, mail.app, maps, menubar, NetNewsWire, plugin, ToDo, utility, widget

Address Book Reports — an app that offers flexible and customizable printing of Address Book contact data — has been updated.

The new version, 2.0.6, fixes the display order of first/last name when Address Book’s “Swap First/Last Name” feature has been used on a contact card and fixes company card display of contact name as first/last in its label printing options.

You can get the updated version from the developer’s web site.

Tags: contact, printing, Reports