Jonathan Nathan has updated his menubar access utility for Address Book, JABMenu.

The newest version (1.2) adds more options for international map services, the ability to compose an email to a group of contacts found through its look-up hotkey, the ability to add contact info into the foremost application (i.e. quickly insert contact details into a mail.app message—very handy!) and more.

Since I don’t have many friends in Desmoines, Iowa or Martha’s Vinyard, the increased number of international mapping options is very welcome.

People can now benefit from a much wider range of country-specific Google Maps services and mapping providers.

It works well too.

Clicking on the postal address of everyone’s favourite company (or at least its Australian outpost) pops up the right result (plus a slightly scary suggestion):

The new group email option is also useful, allowing you to select multiple contacts from a look-up search:

You can read the full changelog on Jonathan’s web site , where you can also download the updated version. It’s shareware (USD 10).address book, menubar, productivity, mail.app, apple mail, plugins, maps, saving time, google

Google Reader Notifier’s developer Troels Bay has been busy. Since I last posted about his menubar utility for Google’s newfeed reader just over a week ago, he’s updated it twice.

The newest version (0.37) released today adds a “Mark all as read” option to the drop-down menu, puts newest articles on the top of the list and adds an icon to show when your connection to Google Reader is lost.

The previous update, earlier in the week, added the ability to turn off the sound notification and the option to display between five and fifty items in the menu.

Google Reader Notifier is free, open-source and avilable from Troels’ web site .google reader, rss, newsfeed, menubar, productivity, news, not apple mail, not mail.app

The third-party Menubar utility for Google’s news reader, Google Reader Notifier, has been updated with a few nifty new features and the removal of a bug in its version check feature.

The new version (0.22) sports a new icon, adds an option to view the number of unread articles in the Menubar, and has a redesigned menu layout that matches the general Gmail Notifier style. It now also makes a sound (“ping!”) when new articles appear just like the Gmail notifier.

At the same time, a bug that prevented it from properly auto-checking for new versions has been fixed.

It’s not enough to tempt me away from the excellence of NetNewsWire , but it might help Google Reader users stay on top of things more efficiently.

Google Reader Notifier is freeware and is available from the developer’s web site .google reader, gmail, news, RSS, menubar, notification, productivity

Troels Bay has just released a menubar notification utility for Google’s RSS Reader which matches the other Google app menubar notification apps for Gmail and Google Calendar.

The drop-down menu offers the ability to jump into the Reader, to preview the subject lines of articles in your Google Reader feed, or to check for updates manually.

Clicking on a previewed subject line takes you to the original web page rather into Google Reader. A nice touch.

A Preference pane lets you set the period for automatic updates and to restrict notification to articles with a particular label.

You can also choose the level of security you are comfortable with:

Google Reader Notifier is a universal binary, freeware and available from Troel’s web site .google reader, RSS, menubar, notification, not apple mail, productivity

Some people like the new Quicksilver Menubar icon, others don’t like it at all. They find it too similar to the Spotlight icon or just not as groovy as the old one, which is the astrological symbol for the planet Mercury .

Help is at hand. You can get the old icon in a zip file from the Blacktree site.

Then Command-Click (or right-click) on Quicksilver in your Applications folder and select “Show Package Contents” from the Contextual menu.

Navigate to the Contents > Resources folder and drop in the contents of the zip file.

If you are a die-hard retro Quicksilver type, I would save the icons somewhere as I imagine that each subsequent release will overwrite the contents of the Resources folder. quicksilver, productivity, hacks, icons, mercury, menubar

Google has expanded and renamed its Gmail Notifier app so that it includes alerts and reminders from Google Calendar.

The revised app, now called Google Notifier, adds two icons to your menubar:

In the Preferences you can set which email client to use for composing messages, whether to display an unread message count and to receive pop-up alerts.

The Gcal pane offers similar options for your calendar events.

The email alerts are elegant and give you the sender, subject and a brief excerpt from each incoming email:

UPDATE: As Arsen points out in the comments, the new app has some rough edges. The endless loop of authentication requests can be short-circuited by turning the Gcal notifications off. Not ideal. Rather defeats the point of the updated app. No doubt a fix is on the way.

Google Notifier is freeware and is available from the Google site .

[Thanks for the prompt, Sander.]gmail, Google, email in general, gcal, notifier, notifications, alerts, menubar

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 .dotmac, .mac, menubar, idisk, groups, plugins, web pages, universal, productivity