Before we begin this week, a bit of a disclaimer. In M. Night Shyamalan’s film, The Village, the residents of (what appears to be) a nineteenth-century country hamlet live in fear of creatures lurking in the forest surrounding them. In fact, the Villagers don’t even whisper the creatures’ name. They refer to them as “those we do not speak of”. It’s a fascinating film, with a great plot twist at the end.

Anyway, last week I promised not to mention a certain popular new telecommunications device for “awhile”, and the week before I promised that I keep around 75% of my promises. However, current events require that I continue to at least refer to that popular new telecommunications device. So, in an attempt to improve my promises kept percentage, this week we’ll refer to that popular new telecommunications device as the “Phone We Do Not Speak Of”, or the “PWDNSO”. There. I’ve done my part. If you are, say, reading this article aloud to kids at the Library, and you slip and say the actual name of the PWDNSO, my conscience is clear. Good. Let’s move on to some non-PWDNSO material.

While the Mac certainly comes loaded with excellent applications that blow anything loaded on Windows (Vista, XP, doesn’t matter) out of the water, there are many applications that either enhance the capabilities of the Mac’s bundled software or extend them. Here’s two of my favorites.

For many, many years, since the early days of Mac OS 9, I’ve used Now Contact to manage my address book. Way back when, I chose Now Contact over other applications, including Apple’s aptly-named Address Book, for two reasons. One, Now Contact has very powerful and customizable printing capabilities, especially for printing labels. However, due to the rise of the internet I haven’t printed labels in at least five years.

Two, Now Contact places an icon in the menu bar that presents drop-down lists of contacts from which you can access quick information without having to open Now Contact itself. Information like phone numbers, addresses, email, etc. It’s very handy, and nicely customizable.

However, my new PWDNSO only syncs with Apple’s built-in Address Book, and Apple’s Mail and other applications work seamlessly with it. So, I’ve decided to go exclusively with Address Book over Now Contact.

But what about the easy-access menu bar drop-down contact list? To replace that I’ve found an excellent shareware utility called JABMenu. Clicking on the JABMenu icon in the menu bar presents a customizable list of your contacts – alphabetical, by company, by group, or recently used, for example. Moving through the nested lists takes you to each contact, where you can choose to view phone numbers, email and postal addresses, web pages, and even Address Book notes.

Further customization can present addresses and phone numbers in huge letters on your display, making it easier to see them when dialing the phone or jotting them down. You can also have JABMenu dial for you, if you’re so configured, or open Google, MapQuest, or some other web-based map service to show you right where people live. A fully-functional but time-limited demo is available at http://www.jonn8.com/jabm/. $15 registers JABMenu.

My other favorite is Cocktail, available at http://www.maintain.se/cocktail/, also $15 shareware. Cocktail is an award-winning general-purpose utility for Mac OS X that manages system maintenance functions with ease. Left to itself (and left on all the time), your Mac will perform certain UNIX maintenance scripts on a daily, weekly, and monthly schedule. As most people don’t leave their Macs on all the time, occasionally running Cocktail’s many cleaning, repairing and optimizing routines will keep your Mac running ship-shape.