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 fun

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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 .

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Mailboxer is a smart little utility that quickly creates a smart mailbox in Mail.app for each of the contacts in your Address Book.

Developer Sven Porst feels that this is a real gap in Mail’s feature set. He really wanted a “smart mailbox per contact” option rather than the hassle of manual filing or endless rules. Then,

I discovered that Mail simply stores all the settings for its smart mailboxes in a single properly list file. And thus the simple idea to just write a little program which grabs the necessary contact information from the address book and updates that file with a bunch of smart mailboxes based on the contact information was born. Far from perfect and a bit hackish. But doing the job and – most importantly – reasonably easy to do.

Mailboxer is the result.

By default, it really does create a smart mailbox for every Address Book contact. In a nice little touch, it makes a backup of your existing smart mailbox settings at the same time (SmartMailboxes Pre Mailboxer.plist) and stores it away in your Mail folder in case something goes drastically wrong.

Each smart mailbox lists all emails sent from and sent to every email address listed for the contact:

This is a real time-saver. Still, for me, a smart mailbox for every contact is too many smart mailboxes. I would make good use of about a dozen, but not 465.

Luckily, Mailboxer saw me coming. If it finds a group in Address Book called Mailboxer, it will only create smart mailboxes for the contacts in that group.

It’s easily done. In a jiffy I created a group containing people whose emails I do need to find quickly and often — important work colleagues, my boss, my boss’s boss, my wife and so on:

Then I ran Mailboxer.

Now I have a manageable number of smart mailboxes that I will use at least ten or fifteen times a day. That’s a lot of typing into Mail’s search field that I have saved myself.

And if I find that I don’t use them as much as I thought, I can just delete the AB folder that contains them all.

Mailboxer is donation-ware and is available from Sven’s web site .

UPDATE: Sven has updated the app to fix a small bug with Company names. You can get the updated version here .

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MacWorld writer Christopher Breen offers three ways to print out contact information from Address Book so that you can take it with you in a day planner (Filofax, Franklin, Day Runner, etc).

Well, two ways really. He covers using Address Book’s own built-in printing option, first through the included settings and then using instructions in a tip in the Apple Discussions forum.

He also suggests using the freeware Palm Desktop for Mac software , which offers more extensive options that are easier to configure than the Apple Discussions tip.

You can add one more option by quickly scanning the Address Book entries in the Hawk Wings Plugin and Addon List.

Address Book Reports (see an earlier Hawk Wings post ) offers many more options than the features built-in to Address Book.

It is shareware (USD 15) but will be money well spent for people with unusual day planners or boutique needs or for people who simply like to have all the options at their finger-tips.

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I feel a bit sorry for Address Book. It sits in the background, chugging away and serving up contact details, but seldom gets the attention it deserves.

It doesn’t have a special day as iCal does (Wikipedia ). It doesn’t have a blog dedicated to it. Steve Jobs doesn’t wax lyrical about spending his day in it as he does with Mail.app.

To celebrate this quiet achiever, I am having a little Address Book Day of my own today.

First, five tips to help Address Book do its work better:

1. Creating iCal appointments from Address Book vCards. A quick drag and drop tip that saves time and typing. And is a clever example of iApp integration to boot.
2. Setting a default email address in Address Book. Help Address Book to know which email address is your preferred one for a particular contact (in a Group—as Yoram rightly points out in the comments).
3. A fistful of Address Book tips from Scott Kelby’s Mac OS X Tiger Killer Tips.
4. Tips on printing Address Book contacts.
5. Ed Eubank’s LowEndMac article on Supercharging Address Book offers some tips, uncovers ‘hidden features’ and suggests some great plugins to help you maximise Address Book’s usefulness.

The Hawk Wings Plugin and Addon List contains 22 extras, addons and utilities that make Address Book better.

Here are five that I particularly like:

1. BuddyPOP: Quick pop-up access to your Address Book Data. (See also the freeware but less-fully featured TapDex).
2. JABMenu: A menubar quick-access utility for Address Book.
3. Snail Mail: Beautiful envelopes and labels from Address Book.
4. MySync: Sync Address Book to many Macs without .Mac.
5. Plugins to integrate Address Book and Google Calendar.

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Benjamin Harley has updated his applescripted utility ABGMerge which offers true two-way syncing between Address Book and Gmail.

The latest release makes a number of significant improvements.

It has repackaged as an application, and features a ‘Safe Mode’ with the option to restore your Address Book to its initial contents.

User interaction has been streamlined and improved, and the app no longer leaves extraneous data in your Address Book (altough it still leaves “<myABGmerge>” in Gmail notes so you know which ones are synchronized to your Address Book).

It’s also faster: the basic synchronization algorithms are significantly refined.

Benjamin says,

It is still complicated, and probably not for people without some savvy. It doesn’t necessarily handle foreign addresses all that well. And it probably still has some bugs. But it is far more robust now than it was before - and it sure beets doing a one off import / export between the two applications. Address Book is such a good repository for address information, but if you don’t have .mac - Gmail may be the best bet to get at that information when you are at work or away.

You can get ABGMerge from Benjamin’s web site .

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