Apple’s simple Address Book app (redubbed Contacts in Mountain Lion) can store your contact details, upload them to iCloud, which syncs them to other devices--and that’s about it. But we hate having to launch it to see, edit, or create a contact. Cobook takes that pain away. Plus, you don’t have to re-enter or import existing contacts: Cobook makes full use of Address Book’s database, so anything you modify with Cobook is still available to your other devices using iCloud.
Plus, if you connect your Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts, Cobook attempts to merge the information from them with your Address Book contacts. The process isn’t perfect--more often than not, Cobook won’t realize that James in your Address Book is the same James on Facebook and Twitter, so you end up having to manually make the connections.
Check out what your contacts are saying on social media, right from the menu bar.
But whether you choose to do that or not, Cobook lets you access your contacts directly from the menu bar, or with a keyboard shortcut. The information is available instantly: no need to launch a program. Your Address Book groups are automatically converted to hashtags that you can access and edit from the search field.
As you scroll through your list, each contact’s information is shown in a popup to the left. Click a contact (or press Return) to see details. That view can even show you their social feeds--Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Disqus, Flickr, and a few others.
The bottom line. We do miss Address Book’s ability to drag an email address from an email message and add it to a contact, but Cobook is stable, fast, extremely convenient, and definitely worth a look.
64-bit processor, Mac OS 10.6 or later
Links your contacts to their feeds and lets you access them from the menu bar or as a seperate window. Fast and efficient. Can browse and edit from the menu.
Can't drag email address into contacts. Doesn't help always connect feeds to people.
vitaprimo
May 17, 2013 at 10:23pm
Can this app sync iCloud contacts with Google Contacts?
I use a both an iPhone and an Android phone and I've been looking for an app or way that syncs contacts both ways.
I know I could just switch to Google everything but I really love the Apple/iCloud ecosystem and I only have that one Android device. I don't even have an @gmail.com address, just the Google Account. I want to be able to just borrow someone's computer to access icloud.com and email somebody using the contacts from there, switching to Google Contacts altogether would make me lose that.
Windows Live and Yahoo! also sync with both iOS and Android but I can't find a way to keep them in sync with iCloud. Please don't tell me to switch to Gmail or whatever, I did have a Gmail address in the same account that is very old--when the service was in beta--but I closed it down because I received a lot of junk mail even though I never gave it away.
Thanks a million if you reply.
