When it was introduced, Flexibits’ Fantastical was a totally new interface for iCal on the Mac, bringing natural language recognition and more to your calendar. Now Cobook’s Cobook app (Free) is seeking to do the same for Address Book. Available as a public beta, this software allows you to interact with your contact information in a whole new way, and from what we’re seeing so far, it works quite well.
Cobook lives in your Mac’s menu bar, dropping down with a click to display Address Book’s contents. A persistent text field at the top not only allows you to search through your contacts, but also allows you to enter information that is automatically parsed into contact fields. Put in a phone number and it’ll be recognized as such; type an address and it’ll automatically go to the right place.
On top of that, the app offers integration with Facebook, Twitter, Skype, and LinkedIn. If you expand it to a windowed view, you can even see user profiles without having to open Safari. This particular piece of Cobook’s functionality doesn’t seem perfect quite yet, but given that it’s a beta, we’re pretty impressed with how everything’s coming together.
