Nova Media has released version 2.0 of its Phone plugins software, which restores to Leopard users the lost ability to dial phone numbers and send text messages in Address Book. And not only that, but more widely across a range of apps.

Phone Plugins installs itself as a System Preference pane.

After installation, you need to hook up a mobile phone to your Mac via Bluetooth by following the simple instructions onscreen. It recognised my old Nokia E60 without a problem:

Then, when the connection is established, right-clicking on a contact’s phone number in Address Book produces two new entries in the contextual menu:

The text/SMS interface is nice and simple and gets the job done. It offers a running total of remaining characters and a spell-check option:

Clicking “Dial number with E60″ initiates a call on your mobile/cell (unsurprisingly!).

Both options are available outside Address Book, system-wide in the Services menu. Just highlight the number and select the option you want from Services (or, if you do this a lot, bind it to a keyboard shortcut with an app like Service Scrubber ).

Phone Plugins works with a list of supported phones which Nova Media provides so check that yours is on the list before you try to install it.

Phone Plugins is shareware and features a very robust nag screen.

It costs €9,95 (c. USD 15.50) and a demo version is available from Nova Media’s web site .

For a donation-ware option, take a look at the emitSMS Widget in an earlier Hawk Wings post.address book, dialing, phone numbers, text, sms, contacts, mobile phones, cell phones, leopard, apple

Jonathan Nathan has released an updated version of EntourageABMenu, a menubar utility that offers system-wide access to Entourage’s contacts.

The new version offers geographical menu for sorting contacts by city, state and country.

Also, you can now search your contacts by multiple search terms (that is, search by name and company at once) and define your own settings for how the results are displayed.

Remote lookup performance has been improved and it works faster with large numbers of contacts.

Jonathan also has an Address Book version of this utility, which will be released next week with similar improvements.

By itself, EntourageABMenu costs USD 10, but Jonathan is offering a special bundle deal (USD 20) with Jon’sPhoneTools , his dialler app that can call phone numbers in your Address Book or on a web page with Vonage, CallVantage, Skype, IP phones from Cisco or Snom, softphones from the Gizmo Project and others.

You can get EntourageABMenu by itself or as part of the bundle offer .entourage, contacts, menubar, productivity, dialler, address book, phone numbers

GoogleFill is a plugin for Address Book that allows you to search Google for addresses that match any phone number in your Address Book. If it finds an postal or street address, if offers to add it to the contact’s card.

An updated version (1.2) released today is smarter about sifting Google for info and also understands phone numbers containing periods.

It is most successful in finding this information for American addresses.

GoogleFill is freeware (donations are not refused) and is available from the developer’s web site .address book, plugins, contacts, Google, phone numbers

GoogleFill is a plugin for Address Book that allows you to search Google for addresses that match any phone number in your Address Book.

For example, your mobile / cell phone offers the option to add the phone numbers of callers to your phone’s address book. The next time you sync your phone and Mac OS X Address Book, the number shows up in without any other information.

If you have this plugin installed, you can then right click on the number and select “Autofill from Google for”:

It then heads off to search Google. Wen it finds a match, if offers a confirmation dialog:

An updated version (1.1) released today is smarter about matching the phone numbers and is also a universal binary.

GoogleFill is freeware and is available from the developer’s web site .address book, contacts, phone numbers, addresses, Google, autofill, universal