Scott Little has updated his excellent SignatureProfiler plugin for Leopard Mail.
Veteran Hawk Wings readers will remember how many nifty tweaks and new options this plugin brings to Mail.app’s signature feature (see this previous Hawk Wings post if you are not a veteran reader).
The new version adds support for Leopard Mail and removes it for Panther Mail. You can get the update (1.4.4) from Scott’s web site 
. SignatureProfiler is donation-ware.
A post on theappleblog.com reviews six plugins that enhance Address Book.
It covers Brian Toth’s Google Maps plugin, Quicksilver’s Address Book plugin, Plaxo and Skype, JABMenu (menubar display of Address Book contacts) and how to build an Automator action that will automatically send a happy birthday email to friends.
If you are looking for more ways to make Address Book even smarter, you will find 22 plugins and utilities in the Address Book section of the Hawk Wings Plugins and Addons List.
If they don’t make you happy, check out Sbook5, a complete replacement for Address Book.
For the next twenty hours MacUpdate is offering a 21% discount on BuddyPOP, an excellent “quick look-up” utility for Address Book.
Once installed, pressing a user-definable hotkey pops up a dialog window to search and match your Address Book contacts.
It then displays that contact’s information:
Of course you can do the same thing with Quicksilver, but BuddyPOP has an extra trick up its sleeve. It offers a very quick way to get info out of your Address Book into a Mail.app message (or any other kind of document).
BuddyPOP also handles Skype, X-Lite SIP SoftPhone and Vonage, has support for sending and receiving SMS messages via a Bluetooth-enabled phone.
A steal at USD 9.99. Snap it up from MacUpdate.
macOSXHints is running a tip with a couple of AppleScripts that add Contextul menus for Skype calls to your Address Book.
It includes options for dialing numbers with Skypeout and for using Skypenames.
AppleScript is, of course, excellent. It’s free, built-in and when it works gives your inner geek a nice warm glow. It is also a bit forbidding and has a time-consuming learning curve (despite what the books say).
There are other options. You can find a pre-compiled AppleScript for this in an earlier Hawk Wings post.
If you have more money than time, you might like to try two shareware solutions—BuddyPop and the Address Book menubar utility JABMenu .
A post on the Skype blog describes how to add a dynamic Skype icon to a signature in Mail.app, which lets other know whether you are currently available or not.
It basically follows the same method as you use to insert any HTML signature into Mail.app, or a CSS signature or a rotating FeedBurner signature.
BuddyPop is a small and unobtrusive app that provides quick access to your
Hitting the shortcut brings up a simple search dialog.
Type until you get the matches you are looking for, then BuddyPop extracts the information from your Address Book and displays it in an attractive pop-up like this:
Clicking on the email address starts a new message in
If “Dicko” gives you more than match, you can cycle through the contacts using the left and right arrow keys.
BuddyPop is highly configurable. You can change the default actions for clicking on each field, which fields to display or use as search criteria, the pop-up’s appearance and position on the screen, and the keyboard shortcut that activates it.
All of these settings are available through the app’s preferences pane:
A new version of BuddyPop (2.5.0) was released on Christmas Day, boasting a large number of improvements, including Skype,
Quicksilver handles this well enough for my (unsophisticated) needs. But if I Skyped or iChatted or BlueToothed more, I’d be using this.
BuddyPop is made by Tynsoe, who also make GeekTool and SSH Tunnel Manager. It is shareware (10 Euros) and available from Tynsoe’s web site.
Skype.scpt is a plugin for
It adds a “Call with Skype” option to Address Book’s Contextual menu:
Installation is easy. Just copy the script in your “~/Library/Address Book Plug-ins” folder. You may need to create the folder if it is not already there. Quit and restart Address Book. There it is.
The script is available in a zip file from the developer’s web site.
 |
The Hawk Wings Plug-in and Add-on List |
