Tim’s
Bandwagon

Mark Pilgrim just posted LazyWeb request for some Address Book Features. Well, I’ve been messing around with the Address Book in MacOS X recently. We needed something to store a load of addresses and also add some sort of annotations to them (last contacted on xxxx-xx-xx:xx:xx:xx etc.) We also needed something with a simple UI for inputing data and syncing to PalmOS devices. It’s not ideal, but Address Book and Applescript seem a good start. I’ve not looked at Applescript for a few years but within 15 minutes my feeble brain came up with this script:

on listAddressBook()
  set resultText to ""
  tell application "Address Book"
    repeat with groupIndex from 1 to the count of groups
      set theGroup to group groupIndex
      set resultText to resultText & the name of theGroup & return
      repeat with x from 1 to the count of people of theGroup
        set thePerson to person x of theGroup
        set resultText to resultText & my getLink(the name of thePerson, the id of thePerson) & return
      end repeat
    end repeat
  end tell
  return resultText
end listAddressBook

on getLink(linkText, href)
  return "<a href="" & href & "">" & linkText & "</a>"
end getLink

on showResult(theString)
  tell application "BBEdit"
    make new window
    set selection of window 1 to theString
  end tell
end showResult

showResult(listAddressBook())

It’s just a proof-of-concept to make sure we weren’t wasting time entering into Address Book. It should be easy to massage the data for many different purposes.

Published at 1:20 am on March 14th, 2003.
Topics: Mac Software