The macosxhints Rating:

[Score: 8 out of 10]

• Developer: Yellow Mug Software/ Product page
• Price: Free / $4.95

TapDex is a System Preferences panel that lets you work with Address Book contacts without launching Address Book. Press a definable hotkey, and a floating search box appears. Enter some portion of a contact's name and or company, and you'll see a list of matches along with detailed info for each match -- you can cycle between the matches by using the mouse or arrow keys.

Once you've selected a contact, you can do quite a few things with their information. Click on the contact's name to open their record directly in Address Book; click on phone numbers or addresses to display those records in large type; click on an email address and your default email client will open a new message to that address. You can also control-click on the label next to the values to do other things -- for addresses, you can select Copy, Map Of, Copy Map Link, or Large Type. For other data fields, you can choose Copy or Large Type. If you've paid the $4.95 for the Pro version of the app, you can also dial phone numbers via Vonage (but not Skype) via the contextual menu.

The free version includes an unobtrusive (one line of text) advertisement for Yellow Mug Software's other products; pay the $4.95 registration fee, and that ad goes away.

Dan Frakes covered TapDex in this recent Macworld Mac Gems entry. One of his minor issues -- the ability to only see one row of the notes field -- seems to have been addressed, perhaps via a silent upgrade? I'm using the same version of TapDex that Dan covered, and I can see the full notes field for each contact. You can also customize the colors that are used for the large type foreground and background, as well as the color of card headers for contact and company names (and one background color for both).

My main issues with TapDex lie with its interface window. It pops up in a fixed location and can't be moved -- so if it's obscuring something you'd like to see along with the contact information, you have to close TapDex, move the background window, and reopen TapDex. In addition to being able to move the TapDex window within a given screen, I'd like to have the option of having it appear wherever the cursor happens to be -- so if I'm working on my second screen and I activate TapDex, it would appear on the second screen, right under the mouse cursor. Other utility apps (Butler, DejaMenu) work this way, and I find it quite intuitive. My final gripe with the interface is that the window is very transient -- if you run a search, and then accidentally click outside the TapDex window, TapDex vanishes, taking your results with it. To get back to where you were, you have to invoke TapDex again, then repeat your search. I would prefer it if TapDex could remember its window state when it vanished, and just bring that back when it was activated the next time.

But overall, those are relatively minor issues for a well-priced and useful utility program.

Edited: To correct an inaccurate comment regarding Dan's Gems entry, and fix an incorrect reference to Yellow Dog instead of Yellow Mug.