An updated version of Export Address Book brings support for vCards and Address Book groups.

Export Address Book is an app which exports all the data in your Address Book into an independent data file that you can archive or import elsewhere or use for merges with apps like Word and FileMaker.

In the latest version you can now export your contacts as vCards, either as multiple files or as one vCard with multiple entries. You can select what information from the Address Book record should be included in the vCard.

When you add contacts, you can now specify Group information which will automatically update in any documents you create with its data.

Export Address Book is shareware (12.50 Euros = USD 16) and is available from the developer’s web site .address book, exporting, contacts, vcards, groups, productivity

Sbook5 is a smarter alternative to Mac OS X’s native Address Book.

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 apps

Since Gmail is all the rage, here’s another way of getting your contact information out of Address Book and into Gmail‘s web interface or into Thunderbird.

A Swiss web site offers a web-based utility that will convert vCards dragged out of Address Book into CSV format for Gmail or LDIF format for Thunderbird.

Just drag the cards out of Address Book, and upload them into the converter.

The interface is easy to navigate and understand:

It also offers the option of filtering out contacts without email addresses. A non-Gmail-specific CSV format separated by comma, tab or semi-colon is provided as well.

Of course, you can also use Ken Ferry’s AddressBook2CSV to convert your contacts into a format that Gmail understands.

Now moving over to Thunderbird should be as painless for your contacts as switching from Thunderbird to Mail.app.

Switchers moving over to Mac will want to bring their contacts with them after importing their mail into Apple Mail. I know of three ways to move contacts over:

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