dotMac Menu provides a convenient Menubar interface for .Mac account holders.

It lists handy shortcuts to .Mac’s webmail interface, Address Book, Groups and web pages, keeps track of iDisk usage and offers quick launch links for iSync and Backup. Holding down the Option key switches to a second set of links.

A new version (2.7) released today is a universal binary, adds a “Share with Groups” menu option and the ability quickly to open the web interface to your iDisk.

Another submenu allows you to configure which options to display in the menu.

dotMac Menu is donation-ware (suggested amount USD 5) and is available from the developer’s web site .

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An updated version of Export Address Book brings support for vCards and Address Book groups.

Export Address Book is an app which exports all the data in your Address Book into an independent data file that you can archive or import elsewhere or use for merges with apps like Word and FileMaker.

In the latest version you can now export your contacts as vCards, either as multiple files or as one vCard with multiple entries. You can select what information from the Address Book record should be included in the vCard.

When you add contacts, you can now specify Group information which will automatically update in any documents you create with its data.

Export Address Book is shareware (12.50 Euros = USD 16) and is available from the developer’s web site .

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Merlin Mann has posted a series of iCal tips that will breath new life into your use of Groups and Notes.

He uses Groups to organise his calendars into contexts or “areas of responsiblity”.

The Notes field gets a good working over too. “I use the crap out of iCal’s various extra fields”, he says. You could too.

Merlin also offers some miscellaneous tips, including the use of “dashes”, marking small tasks so that they can be found with a quick search. Clever.

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Hawk Wings reader Leonardo Burci emailed today to tell me something about Address Book and Mail.app that I didn’t know.

He writes:

Create a Group in Address Book. Add people containing valid e-mail addresses plus a person without an e-mail address or with an invalid e-mail address.

Create a new email. Choose your Group as recipient. Send. You get an error saying something like “mail could not be sent using server xyz, etc”. It doesn’t tell you the real reason why the email couldn’t be sent. It should.

Problem: a Group in the Address Book might consist of people and companies with and without e-mail addresses. This group might be used for sending letters, faxes and e-mail. Mail.app should handle such a recipient list intelligently.

Solution: Mail.app should inform the user about missing and invalid e-mail addresses and should give the user a choice whether to send the mail to the recipients with correct e-mail addresses or not. If you do send, it should give the user a list of people and companies that have no or invalid e-mail addresses and that were therefore excluded.

He’s right. This is not the behaviour of an Operating System that “just works”.

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JABMenu is a utility that offers easy and quick access to your Address Book contacts from the menubar.

Selecting each kind of data from the drop-down menu executes a user-specified action — a new email from an email address, a map look-up from a postal address and so on.

An updated version released today offers many improvements, including significantly faster launching and searching.

It now contains support for contact URLs and notes, improved handling of international address formats and more options for handling groups.

It also expands the number of map services you can select by default, offering the choice of Expedia, Google, MapQuest, Maps, MSN or Yahoo.

The Entourage version has also been updated.

JABMenu is shareware (USD 10) and is available from the developer’s web site .

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Take Control Books has joined forces with Apple to offer some good deals for .Mac users.

.Mac users can download two chapters of Joe Kissell’s “Take Control of .Mac”, which has been updated to reflect recent changes at .Mac. The free chapters deal with using .Mac’s web interface for email and the new .Mac Groups feature.

You can also snap up any of Take Control’s ebooks at a 30% discount.

It’s a great time to pick up Joe’s “Take Control of Apple Mail in Tiger” (Hawk Wings’ review here) if you haven’t already.

You can read more about these special deals on .Mac’s Member Central page.

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