As of JPT v3.5, the Address Book Menu is much more robust. It now incorporates the functionality of JABMenu. With the Address Book menu you can get convenient, intuitive access to all of the contacts stored in your Address Book. In addition to phone numbers, you can access email & postal addresses, URLs, and notes.

When you launch JPT 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, geographically, 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, displaying on a map provided an online map service, or, of course, dialing the phone. 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).

Actions

While it is helpful to simply see all of your contact data in the Address Book menus, the real power of this feature 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,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. Selecting a phone number, of course, will tell JPT to dial that number.

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, JPT 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, and the actions to trigger when selecting data items. 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 JPT 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.

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