Not working on Lion. Developer does not answer E-Mail. Sucks!

You know that the Address Book Dashboard widget does pretty much the same thing for absolutely free?

Very nice program. Lightweight presentation of your address book information.

Need to check your address book plugins if any difficulties.

Developer is very responsive.

2.5.5 doesn't work with Tiger (Show big font). 2.5.4 works well. This is one of the best helpers for OS X.

I downloaded this little app yesterday, and have used it fairly extensively for the past 24 hours. This is my first time using an address-book helper, so I can't compare it to any other program -- only on its own merits.

First, let me say that this is the way Apple's Address Book should operate natively. Since it doesn't, programs like BuddyPop will always find a place on the Mac's of people who want address book info close at hand without having to have the app open all the time.

BuddyPop's default hot key wouldn't work for me, so I changed it to control-space, and that seems to be the ticket. Use that hot key, and a little window appears, awaiting your keystrokes. Type in SMITH, hit return, and you get the info for the first Smith in your address book (you can, by the way, define which fields BuddyPop should display). And therein lies BuddyPop's one real flaw. If I type in SMITH, and I've got 17 of them in my address book, I don't want to have to keep hitting the right arrow key in order to cycle through them. What I want instead is a list of all the Smiths so that I can click on the one I want. That's infinitely faster and more efficient.

In my mind, this flaw limits BuddyPop's use for businesses. Say, for example, you want to find contact info for one of your doo-dad suppliers, but can't remember the company name. You could key in SUPPLIER, but you might end up having to cycle through a hundred of them, if you've got that many in your address book, which many businesses will.

This is less of an issue for personal use (where we don't generally use search criteria that applies to a hundred address book entries), although it still exists somewhat.

All in all, I love the way BuddyPop brings my address book info close at hand. My rating indicates how it performs for me, and not how it might perform for a business, which I discussed previously. Obviously, if I used it for my business, I'd rate it considerably lower. But as it stands, it well deserves the high rating I gave it.