TapDex: Instant Access to Address Book Contacts

Address Book has always been a great place to store contact information for all your friends, family acquaintances and coworkers, but it’s not necessarily the best way to easily access all that info. There are tons of solutions, from Quicksilver and Spotlight to the Dashboard widget. TapDex. is yet another way to get at all those phone numbers, email handles and mailing addresses stored in Address Book.

After installing the System Preference pane, the small TapDex application runs in the background, consuming very little system resources, and is ready to spring to action when the user invoke its hotkey (F1 by default). When initiated, the TapDex search window pops to the front, allowing you to type search criteria. Press enter and a list of matching contacts is displayed.

Though TapDex is a snappy way to access your Address Book, in reality, so is the Address Book app itself. With newer Macs, I find Address Book launches in a second or two anyway, fast enough for most users. With Spotlight’s universal robust search, Address Book’s Spotlight-powered instant search and Dashboard’s similarly speedy widget, TapDex seems a bit overkill.

But if you really need to get to your contact info as absolutely, positively, 100% as quickly as possible, the free version of TapDex should suit most people. Yet, users can get the pro version for $4.95, allowing removal of the app’s one-line advertisements and enabling Vonage voiceover-IP dialing.

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