The Address Book is a system-wide database of contacts, (both individuals and companies or organizations) that is managed by the Contacts application; for each contact, the database maintains phone numbers, email addresses, postal addresses, and so forth. You enter data into the Address Book database using the Contacts application (in your Applications folder). Many applications, both from Apple & third party applications, share this data, For example, Apple’s Mail application uses it to help address new messages and identify the sender of incoming mail. Dialectic’s Address Book menu presents your Address Book data as a hierarchical menu to both view & act on your data.
To access the Address Book menu, click the Address Book button at the bottom of the main window, or choose “Address Book” from Dialectic’s main menu. Additionally, you can optionally access the Address Book menu as a separate menu in the menu bar (when this is enabled, the Address Book menu is a status menu on the right side of your menu bar available no matter what application is currently active). To enable the separate Address Book menu, see the Address Book menu display options. Many other options can be configured using the Address Book menu preferences.
As the data included in the Address Book menu is pulled directly from your Address Book data (managed by the Contacts application), any errors such as misspellings, out-of-date addresses, etc. can be corrected by editing the contact in Contacts. Any modifications you make to your contacts in Contacts will be instantly reflected in the data displayed in this menu. In order to make sure your Address Book menu is always up-to-date, it does not cache the menu items but, rather, builds its submenus on-the-fly each time you display the menu. Because of this, if you have an unusually large number of contacts in your Address Book (more than 500) it can take several seconds from the time you click on the Address Book menu until the time the menu is actually displayed. If you do have a large number of contacts, it is highly recommended that you limit the Address Book menu to contacts from a specific Group or that you limit the submenus or data items that you include in the menu (see the Address Book menu preferences to adjust these settings).
The Address Book menu is one of Dialectic’s most versatile & powerful features. Not only does it display your Address Book contact data in an attractive, intuitive, compact manner but it allows you to act on your data using actions such as showing postal addresses on a map, creating new email messages or instant messaging sessions, inserting data into the frontmost document, and much more. For a brief overview of the features of the Address Book menu and some of its capabilities, see the Address Book menu tour screencast and see the Address Book menu preferences for further discussion of the capabilities of this feature.
