dive into mark

‣ March 13, 2003 ‣

Address book

OK, LazyWeb, I need an address book. The Address Book.app that comes with Mac OS X is nice for keeping about 10 addresses. We have 100. (We’re planning a wedding here.) Suggestions for a package that either runs on Mac OS X or can be installed as a web app on a Linux/Apache/MySQL/Perl/Python/PHP server. Shareware, freeware, or open source. Must do the following:

Import the addresses we have already entered into Address Book. I can export them as vCards. Or, at the very least, import from a tab-delimited file. I can use Address Book Exporter to create a tab-delimited file.
That implies that it must be able to handle all sorts of weird information, like instant messenger accounts, multiple email addresses, and so forth.
Some other customizeable fields would be nice too.
Group people into various overlapping groups.
Sort. Amazingly, Address Book.app has no sort function. Or if it does, I can’t find it.
Select, say, all the people in a particular state, or all the people in a particular group, or some combination.
Print a list. We’re not going to use it for mailing labels, we just want to print nicely. Or…
Create a customizeable HTML report of, say, everyone in the Wedding group and their email address.

Such a thing must exist. I am not the only person with this problem.

Twenty four comments here (latest comments)

It does not do everything you want, but lots of people like SBook:

http://www.sbook5.com/

— Aaron of Montreal
Wait a month for OSAF/Chandler?

— BillSeitz
Turba from the fine folks of Horde — http://www.horde.org/turba/ — is a PHP webapp which, with some hacking, can do all this. It’s really rather nice.

rOD.

— rODbegbie
Hate to say it, but Entourage does all of that except for the HTML export (you can export as TEXT).

— lunarboy
Re: OSAF / Chandler

It’s true.. Any day now, Chandler will do all you want and more… I hear it will even be your firewall, word processor, router, lava lamp, book to tape converter, long-lost-relative finder, etc etc.. and I even hear it might check your email too.

Yup. Any day now.

— Dylan
Have you considered the Palm Desktop? I believe it’ll do what you want.

-chet at nogators dot com

— Chet
Chet (and Mark, of course :-)

I haven’t tried Palm Desktop for Mac, but the Windows version does a lot but not HTML export (it does vCard, comma- and tab-delimited exports) nor does it support assigning multiple group-belongings to people (unfortunately, as I use it for ~300 contacts of which several are BOTH colleagues, friends and project members on a current or former project). It does sort, it does quick lookups, it does a lot of funky stuff, but not everything on your list. Sorry & good luck!

— Anders Jacobsen
I have to second the recommendation of Microsoft Entourage. It’s PIM functionality is world class.

— Richard K. McPike
Tim's Bandwagon (trackback)
Development Notes (trackback)
I had no idea you were getting married - congratulations. Now, where’s the URL for your wedding?

— Sam Kington
Hehe, two problems here. One, the wedding is the woman’s business. Just nod and veto a decision here or there. That way she thinks you are paying attention, and maybe even care. Two you signed up to manage the list. Get your wife an iBook and Excel. Then goto Vegas with the boys for the Sweet 16. She’ll have it all done by the time you get back. I recommend Cheetah’s.

;)~

— Mike Rogers
Cheetah’s? No way. Olympic Gardens is the way to go. They’re the only major strip club in Las Vegas that *doesn’t* pay cabbies a ‘finder’s fee’, because they don’t have to.

Also, unlike a lot of other clubs, they’ve got a ladies only section, so they get a lot of bachelorette parties too.

My recommendation notwithstanding, bachelor and bachelorette parties at strip clubs are kind of pointless, if the goal is to have a memorable experience. In most cases, people just have a hangover the next day, and only a vague idea of what it was they or anyone else did. If you can’t remember it (and share the memory with your buddies), what’s the point?

Also, I have a feeling Mark wouldn’t want to go anywhere that drinks were being offered to him on a continuous basis.

Now, there are plenty of places to go in Las Vegas that don’t push drinks at you, but none of the strip clubs fall into that category. The remaining places don’t have anything to offer that you can’t find in any other state, with the exception of Nevada’s legal brothels, and I have a feeling that Dora would veto any such excursion.

Summary: Mark can probably just write off the whole ‘bachelor party in Las Vegas’ idea, and not feel like he’s missing anything.

— Michael Bernstein
Why not just bang-out a database in AppleWorks? Course FMP would be better.

— Mark Riley
While I realize you want free/shareware, Power On makes Now Contact that I really really like. Very powerful sorting, etc. If you change your mind on the whole free/open/share kinda thing, that might be the way to go.

— Tom Bridge
Palm Desktop for Mac is a very different beast compared to the Windows version. The Windows version was developed by Palm (I think), while the Mac version is the former Claris Organizer. I don’t know if it supports HTML export, but you could easily transform text into html with, say, an AppleScript.

— LKM
Mark, my wife I used MS Excel when we got married. It wasn’t by any means my ideal solution, but it got the job done. We were able to do mail merge exports to Word for our mailing envelopes and I should be able to—though haven’t yet—import the list straight into my Palm Desktop PIM.

Fun stuff here: http://kennsarah.walker.net/wedding/

:)

— Ken
I use Now Contact from PowerOn Software and I like it. Syncs with a Palm, too. http://www.poweronsoftware.com/

— Luke
I wish Evolution would show up in Fink. I really miss Evolution. It did everything so much better than anything that I’ve seen on Mac OS X so far.

http://www.ximian.com/products/evolution/

— Jace
Why don’t you just set up a LDAP directory ? You can access it with Apple’s Address Book, for example.

— Arnaud
You might try Mozilla. It does most of what you ask .. sorting, searching, importing.

— Anonymous
Yeah, i want one of these too. Looked around a little for a PythonCard solution just now but didn’t find anything(!). Looking forward to Chandler, not that i’m expecting it to do the whole list on first release, but i’m sick of it being vaporware…

— John Abbe
ObUsefulInformation:

Evolution on OS X can be done with fink: see http://saladwithsteve.com/osx/2003_02_01_archive.html#90318817

— John Abbe
Tim's Bandwagon (trackback)

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