Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Second Edition

Address Book

Address Book is Mac OS X’s little-black-book program—an electronic Rolodex where you can conveniently stash the names, job titles, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, and Internet chat screen names of all the people in your life (Figure 19-14). Of course, Address Book can hold other contact information too, such as birthdays and anniversaries, as well as any other scraps and tidbits of personal data you’d like to keep at your fingertips.

Once you make Address Book the central repository of all your personal contact information, you can call up this information in a number of convenient ways:

• You can launch Address Book and search for a contact by typing just a few letters in the Search box.

• When you’re composing messages in Mac OS X’s Mail program, Address Book automatically fills in email addresses for you.

• When you use iChat to exchange instant messages with people in your Address Book, the pictures you’ve stored of them automatically appear in chat windows.

• Address Book can send its information to an iPod, giving you a little white “little black book” that fits in your shirt pocket, can be operated one-handed, and comes with built-in musical accompaniment. (The easiest way is to use iSync, described at the end of Chapter 18.)

• If you have a Bluetooth cell phone, Address Book can exchange information with your phone and even dial it for you. Incoming calls to your phone wirelessly trigger Address Book to display the number or name of the caller. Using the same wireless ...