JABMenu is a convenient and intuitive way to utilize your Address Book data through a system-wide menu. The application provides quick access to your contacts’ phone numbers, email, postal addresses, URLs, and notes. 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 an online map service. Phone dialing requires the use of additional software such as Jon’s Phone Tool. JABMenu is fully-functional trialware. However, until you register, you are limited to using JABMenu 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 JABMenu 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 JABMenu to your Applications folder (or anywhere, really), and launch. The first time you open JABMenu, the preferences window will also open. On subsequent launches, JABMenu 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 JABMenu it will parse your Address Book 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, and by group—you can optionally enable/disable any of these menus in the preferences). If you are using Mac OS X 10.4+, you can also drag and drop the submenu items to choose the order in which they are displayed. When you browse the menu you can see your contacts’ phone numbers, email addresses, postal addresses, URLs, and notes (again, you can enable/disable any of these items and reorder them to suit your needs). Selecting one of these 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 an online map service, etc. Holding down the Option key when selecting any menu item should open the selected contact in Address Book (you may need to press and hold the option key before you start to browse the menu).

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, addresses, URLs, & notes) for the contact you’ve selected. When using the lookup feature, all of your contacts are searched, even if you have limited the contact source for the main menu to just those contacts in a specific group.

Actions

While it is helpful to simply see all of your contact data in the JABMenu 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, postal address, URL, note, or group). 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 (group or company) with the selection action to create a new email, JABMenu will open a new message with each of the default email addresses (if available) for all group members in the field of your choice (To, Cc, or Bcc as specified in the preferences).

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 are using Mac OS X 10.4+, you can reorder the submenus and the data items simply by dragging and dropping the appropriate items as desired.

If you choose the option to normalize company names then JABMenu 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 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, JABMenu 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

• v1.2.3 - Released June 29, 2007
  • Added phone number formatting that follows the preferences of the Address Book.app.
  • Fixed a Google map bug.
  • Fixed an issue when retrieving Address Book group names on some systems.
  • Many memory & code optimizations.
  • Several minor enhancements.
• v1.2.2 - Released January 29, 2007
  • Improved French localization thanks to Ronald Leroux.
  • Corrected an issue when using the “Speak” action.
  • Minor fixes and enhancements.
• v1.2.1 - Released January 8, 2007
  • Added the ability to disable automatic updates to the AB Numbers menu when changes are detected in the Address Book.
  • Improved handling of extra long menu item titles (they will now word wrap at a maximum line length of 60 characters).
  • Improved registration process.
  • Minor stability improvements.
  • Minor interface updates.
• v1.2 - Released November 22, 2006
  • Added several international Google Maps options.
  • Added feature to select multiple names in the found contacts section. When selecting multiple contacts and then using the action menu, the default email addresses (if available) for the selected contacts will be used to send an email to all group members in the address field specified in the preferences (To, Cc, or Bcc).
  • Added new “Insert Text” action for contact menu items. Selecting this will insert the selected contact data item as text into the frontmost application.
  • Added geographical menus for sorting contacts by city, state/province, and country.
  • Added user-defined sorting to lookup results.
  • Added multiple word searching to lookup (e.g., you can now search on name and company at once) and lookups now consider a contact’s complete record (name, company, notes, addresses, phone numbers, etc.).
  • Added double-click action to display data menu for found contact in lookup.
  • Fixed a bug that prevented launch if you have not designated a contact as your card in the Address Book application.
  • Fixed a bug that prevented launch or menu rebuild if you deleted a contact currently in the Recently Used menu.
  • Minor interface enhancements.
• v1.1 - Released April 26, 2006
  • Added support for contact URLs and notes.
  • Added option to determine inclusion and order of contact data items (phone, email, etc.).
  • Added options for map source (no longer limited to just Google Maps).
  • Added option to determine field for group emails.
  • Added submenu to the groups submenu for contacts that are not members of any group.
  • Fixed bug that prevented copied data from pasting properly in some applications.
  • Fixed a launch error that occurred on some non-US English systems.
  • Improved handling of international postal addresses.
  • Removed arbitrary two postal address limit.
  • Significantly improved the speed of the lookup feature.
  • Improved memory management.
  • Improved launch speed.
  • Many interface enhancements.
• v1.0.1 - Released April 13, 2006
  • Fixed a bug that caused the Groups submenu to show Companies and vice versa.
• v1.0 - Released April 13, 2006
  • Initial public release.

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