DayliteABMenu is a convenient and intuitive way to utilize your Daylite address book data through a system-wide menu. The application provides quick access to your contacts’ phone numbers, email, postal addresses, and URLs. Selecting a menu item will trigger an action such as displaying the content in large type, copying it to the clipboard, creating a new email, dialing the phone (accomplished by running a customizable AppleScript), or showing an address on a map using any of several online mapping services. Phone dialing requires the use of additional software such as Jon’s Phone Tool. DayliteABMenu is fully-functional trialware. However, until you register, you are limited to using DayliteABMenu for only 30 minutes at a time and when it is launched you will receive a notice asking you to register and pay the registration fee. If you find DayliteABMenu useful—and I hope you will—please consider paying the nominal registration fee. Once registered, the initial dialog will no longer be displayed and the 30-minute trial period limitation is removed.

Please contact me with any comments, requests, or bugs that you encounter. Your help to make this an even better product is greatly appreciated. This is just one of my many applications available for download—and most of them are free! To see my other work, click here.

Installation

Simply copy DayliteABMenu to your Applications folder (or anywhere, really), and launch. The first time you open DayliteABMenu, the preferences window will also open. On subsequent launches, DayliteABMenu will just open its main menu (and the launch status window if you have kept this option enabled in the preferences).

Usage

When you launch DayliteABMenu it will parse your Daylite contacts and then build a new menu in the menu bar that includes your address book data in a variety of ways (alphabetically, by company, geographically, category, and by keywords—you can optionally enable/disable any of these menus and reorder them in the preferences; reordering requires Mac OS X 10.4+). When you browse the menu you can see your contacts’ phone numbers, email addresses, postal addresses, and URLs (again, you can enable/disable and reorder these items in the preferences). Selecting one of these data items will trigger an action (specified in the preferences) such as displaying the data in a large type window, creating a new email, dialing the phone, displaying on a map provided by an online mapping service (several options are available in the preferences), etc. Holding down the Option key when selecting any menu item should open the selected contact in Daylite.

The initial data load relies on communicating with Daylite via AppleScript and, as such, may take a few minutes depending on the speed of your machine and the amount of data in your address book (it also requires Daylite to be open so, if Daylite isn’t open when DayliteABMenu retrieves the data, it will be launched). For users with extremely large address books (2,000+ contacts), the data load could take several minutes. To minimize the data load delay, on subsequent loads you can limit the data that the application uses to only include contacts in a specific category.

To further minimize the launch time, you can also enable the option to use a data cache. When the cache is enabled, once DayliteABMenu has loaded data from Daylite initially, it will use this original data when building its menus, even when the application is re-launched. If you want to force the data to be re-cached, you can select the option to “Reload Data Now” either from the main menu or from the preferences. When using the data cache, DayliteABMenu will not reload its data automatically and clicking on the category popup menus in the preferences will also use the cached data (when the cache is not enabled, clicking on this menu will query Daylite for the most up-to-date information). Also, when the cache is enabled, DayliteABMenu will not automatically launch Daylite.

You can also disable the launch window so DayliteABMenu will unobtrusively load in the background with only a small spinning progress indicator visible in the menu bar. To stay current with your data, you can have the application rebuild its cache of contact data from Daylite on a recurring schedule.

By default, DayliteABMenu will create several submenus to present your contact data alphabetically, by category, by keyword, by company, geographically, and an uncategorized menu that includes all of your contacts. Using the preferences, you can enable or disable any of these submenus and reorder them (Mac OS X 10.4+). Similarly, you can enable and disable any of the data items (email, phone numbers, postal addresses, and URLs) and reorder them. Note: if you disable all of the submenus and/or all of the data items, of course, DayliteABMenu will have no data with which to work.

You can configure a global hotkey to open a dynamic lookup window. Typing a contact’s name or company in the lookup field will search your data and present you with a menu (emails, phone numbers, URLs, & addresses) for the contact you’ve selected. Note: the data included in the lookup feature will be limited to the data you have requested DayliteABMenu to gather. For instance, if you have set the preferences to limit contacts to a specific category, only contacts in that category will be available to the lookup feature.

Actions

While it is helpful to simply see all of your contact data in the DayliteABMenu menus, the real power of the application comes when you select a contact from a menu and trigger the associated action. You can choose the actions associated with the different data types (main contact item, email, phone number, and postal address). For the most part, the actions should be fairly self-evident. Selecting “Copy to Clipboard” will, of course, copy that data to the clipboard. Choosing “Show in Large Type” will create a large semi-transparent window with the selected data. This window will remain visible until you click on it. For more information about the “Dial with AppleScript” action, please see below.

When selecting the main contact name, if the associated selection action is to create a new email, dial with the phone number AppleScript, or show on map, the default email address, phone number, or postal address (respectively) is used for the action. If the required default data is not available for the contact, selecting the main contact name will do nothing. Similarly, when selecting a group (category or company) with the selection action to create a new email will open a new message with each of the default email addresses (if available) for all group members in the address field specified in the preferences (To, Cc, or Bcc).

Utility Menu

For your convenience, you can use the included utilities menu to create new items (messages, contacts, etc.).

Preferences

You can use the preferences to choose the source of your data, how your data is displayed, the actions to trigger when selecting menu items, and generally configure the behavior of the application. To open the preferences window, simply select the preferences menu option from the main application menu.

If you choose the option to normalize company names then DayliteABMenu will attempt to clean company names so that contacts from the same company will be grouped together even if the company name for multiple contacts may vary slightly in your Daylite address book. For instance, if you do not enable this option and you have a company associated with a contact and it is entered as “company, inc.” and another contact where the company is entered as “Company, Inc.”, then in the companies submenu, there will be different submenus for these two variations on the company name. If you enable the normalize option, both contacts will be grouped in a single company submenu titled “Company, Inc.”. Using the normalization feature can be helpful but may have unintended consequences such as losing inner caps (e.g., “MyCompany” would become “Mycompany”) or other formatting features.

When using the “Dial With AppleScript” selection action with phone numbers, the script you enter in the “Phone Number AppleScript” will be executed using the data from the selected contact. You can enter any AppleScript you want and to access the contact name and number, you must use the data placeholders (%n for the contact name; %# for the contact number). Please be aware when entering these placeholders that the name and number are strings and will need to be quoted in your script to be properly executed. To understand how this works, DayliteABMenu contains several pre-configured scripts for sending the selected phone number to various external dialing applications (Jon’s Phone Tool, Macron Software’s ABDialer, & From Concentrate Software’s MacDialer).

Version History

• v1.1.2 - Released June 29, 2007
  • Fixed a Google map bug.
  • Many memory & code optimizations.
  • Several minor enhancements.
• v1.1.1 - Released January 29, 2007
  • Improved French localization thanks to Ronald Leroux.
  • Corrected an issue when using the “Speak” action.
  • Minor fixes and enhancements.
• v1.1 - Released January 8, 2007
  • Added Keywords menu.
  • Added distinct icon for the contact of the current Daylite user (the “Me card”).
  • Improved registration process.
  • Several minor updates.
• v1.0 - Released December 18, 2006
  • Initial public release.

Copyright © 2007 Jonathan Nathan. All Rights Reserved.
Daylite is a trademark of Marketcircle Inc.
Mac, Macintosh, Mac OS X, and AppleScript are trademarks of Apple, Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries.
All other products mentioned are copyright of their respective owners.
No endorsement of or affiliation with any third-party product or service mentioned is implied.
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