Ten steps to a smarter Address Book
Monday, December 11th, 2006
I feel a bit sorry for Address Book. It sits in the background, chugging away and serving up contact details, but seldom gets the attention it deserves.
It doesn’t have a special day as iCal does (Wikipedia 
). It doesn’t have a blog dedicated to it. Steve Jobs doesn’t wax lyrical about spending his day in it as he does with Mail.app.
To celebrate this quiet achiever, I am having a little Address Book Day of my own today.
First, five tips to help Address Book do its work better:
- Creating iCal appointments from Address Book vCards. A quick drag and drop tip that saves time and typing. And is a clever example of iApp integration to boot.
- Setting a default email address in Address Book. Help Address Book to know which email address is your preferred one for a particular contact (in a Group—as Yoram rightly points out in the comments).
- A fistful of Address Book tips from Scott Kelby’s Mac OS X Tiger Killer Tips.
- Tips on printing Address Book contacts.
- Ed Eubank’s LowEndMac article on Supercharging Address Book offers some tips, uncovers ‘hidden features’ and suggests some great plugins to help you maximise Address Book’s usefulness.
The Hawk Wings Plugin and Addon List contains 22 extras, addons and utilities that make Address Book better.
Here are five that I particularly like:
- BuddyPOP: Quick pop-up access to your Address Book Data. (See also the freeware but less-fully featured TapDex).
- JABMenu: A menubar quick-access utility for Address Book.
- Snail Mail: Beautiful envelopes and labels from Address Book.
- MySync: Sync Address Book to many Macs without .Mac.
- Plugins to integrate Address Book and Google Calendar.
