Developed by Simson Garfinkel of MIT, it is faster, more flexible and smarter than Address Book.

The free-form database that powers it allows for any number of postal addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, photographs and URLs per card which it then parses and sorts.

It presents the ordered information in a contact pane with icons beside each field that launch messages, format addresses for printing on envelopes, load URLs and dial phone numbers:

It also outsmarts Address Book at almost every turn.

SBook5 can automatically tell the difference between an entry that represents a person and one that represents a corporation, and sort the card accordingly.

Adding a card is amazing. If you cut and paste a signature from an email into a blank new card, SBook5 automatically parses the information and determines what’s a postal address, what’s an email address or a phone number.

No need for the tedious tabbing through fields that adding an entry in Address Book entails.

It syncs two ways with Address Book and is really fast. It look less than ten seconds to import and parse the 480 entries in my Address Book.

You can also use it as a de facto contact creator for Address Book. Use the power of SBook5 to parse the information for a contact, and then select the app’s “Push Entry to Apple Address Book” option to create a corresponding card in Address Book.

SBook5 is endlessly customizable and tweakable. You can read more about it and download the app (freeware?) at the developer’s web site .

But be careful; after you use it, you will never look at Address Book so happily again. Why doesn’t it have these features and this kind of flexibility?

[Thanks, Gibbons]Address Book, sbook5, contacts, vcards, productivity, helpful appsSimilar Posts:

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