Mac OS X Lion: The Missing Manual

Address Book

Address Book is Mac OS X’s little-black-book program—an electronic Rolodex where you can stash the names, job titles, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, and Internet chat screen names of all the people in your life. Address Book can also hold related information, like birthdays, anniversaries, and any other tidbits of personal data you’d like to keep at your fingertips.

The best part: It’s centralized. This one address list appears everywhere: in Mail, iChat, and so on. And it synchronizes with your iPhone, iPad, and (via iCloud) your other computers.

In Lion, it’s been completely redesigned to look more like (can you guess?) the same program on the iPhone/iPad, as shown in Figure 18-20.

Tip

If you need to see two people’s cards simultaneously, double-click each one in the list. That makes them open into individual windows.

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 open Address Book and then search for a contact by typing just a few letters in the search box.

• Regardless of what program you’re in, you can use a single keystroke (the key on aluminum keyboards) to summon the Address Book Dashboard widget. There you can search for any contact you want. When you’re done, hide the widget with the same quick keystroke.

• When you’re composing messages in ...