19.10. Address Book

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19.10. Address Book Address Book is Mac OS X's little-black-book program—an electronic Rolodex where you can stash the names, job titles, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, and Internet chat screen names of all the people in your life

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19.10. Address Book Address Book is Mac OS X's little-black-book program—an electronic Rolodex where you can stash the names, job titles, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, and Internet chat screen names of all the people in your life (Figure 19-23). Address Book can also hold related information, like birthdays, anniversaries, and any other tidbits of personal data you'd like to keep at your fingertips. Once you make Address Book the central repository of all your personal contact information, you can call up this information in a number of convenient ways: • You can launch Address Book and search for a contact by typing just a few letters in the Search box. GEM IN THE ROUGH To Dos and Notes: The Big Sync Whether you edit your To Do list and Notes in your email program (Mail) or your calendar program (iCal), they're always just one sync away from a Palm organizer, a cellphone, or an iPod. You do the iPod syncing in iTunes, of all places. Just connect the iPod to the Mac, select its icon in the source list, and click the Contacts tab. Scroll to the Calendars area and turn on the calendars you want to copy to the iPod. Finally, click the Apply button in the corner of the iTunes window. Once you've synchronized iPod with Mac, you can find your calendars and To Do items on the iPod at iPod Extras Calendars To Dos. And what about the iPhone? If you have that glorious comination of a .Mac account and an iPhone, your To Do items sync right over from your Mac to the iPhone. Find them on the phone in Mail Accounts .Mac Apple Mail To Do. Note: To Dos and Notes from .Mac mail accounts sit in their own little area of the Reminders list in Mail. Control-click the .Mac ones; in the shortcut menu, you'll see options for syncing and editing with your shared calendar. If you check your .Mac mail in a Web browser when you're away from home, you can see (but not edit) the Notes you've created on your Mac.
(Your To Do list, however, doesn't show up in the Web-based version of .Mac mail. Yet, anyway. Perhaps that's on Apple's own To Do list.) • • Regardless of what program you're in, you can use a single keystroke (F12 is the factory setting, or F4 on aluminum keyboards) to summon the Address Book Dashboard widget (Section 5.13.3.2). There, you can search for any contact you want, and hide the widget with the same quick keystroke when you're done. • When you're composing messages in Mail, Address Book automatically fills in email addresses for you when you type the first few letters. Tip: If you choose Window Address Panel (Option- -A) from within Mail, you can browse all of your addresses without even launching the Address Book program. Once you've selected the people you want to contact, just click the "To:" button to address an email to them—or, if you already have a new email message open, to add them to the recipients. Figure 19-23. The big question: Why isn't this program named iContact? With its threepaned view, soft rounded corners, and gradient-gray background, it looks like a close cousin of iPhoto, iCal, and iTunes. • When you use iChat to exchange instant messages with people in your Address Book, the pictures you've stored of them automatically appear in chat windows. • If you've bought a subscription to the .Mac service (Section 18.6), you can synchronize your contacts to the Web, so you can see them while you're away from your Mac (Section 6.6). You can also share Address Books with fellow .Mac members: Choose Address Book Preferences Sharing,click the box for "Share your address book," and then click the + button to add the .Mac pals you want to share with. You can even send them an invitation to come share your contact list. If you get an invitation yourself, open your own Address Book program and choose Edit Subscribe to Address Book. • Address Book can send its information to an iPod or an iPhone, giving you a "little black book" that fits in your shirt pocket, can be operated one-handed, and comes
with built-in musical accompaniment. (To set this up, open iTunes while your iPod or iPhone is connected. Click the iPod/iPhone's icon; on the Contacts or Info tab, turn on "Synchronize Address Book Contacts.") You can find Address Book in your Applications folder or (in a fresh installation of Mac OS X) in the Dock. 19.10.1. Creating Address Cards Each entry in Address Book is called a card—like a paper Rolodex card, with predefined spaces to hold all the standard contact information. To add a new person, choose File New Card, press -N, or click the + button beneath the Name column. Then type in the contact information, pressing the Tab key to move from field to field, as shown in Figure 19-24. Tip: If you find yourself constantly adding the same fields to new cards, check out the Template pane of Address Book's Preferences (Address Book Preferences). There, you can customize exactly which fields appear for new cards. Figure 19-24. If one of your contacts happens to have three office phone extensions, a pager number, two home phone lines, a cellphone, and a couple of fax machines, no problem—you can add as many fields as you need. Click the little green + buttons when editing a card to add more phone, email, chat name, and address fields. (The buttons appear only when the existing fields are filled.) Click a field's name to change its label; you can select one of the standard labels from the pop-up menu (Home, Work, and so on) or make up your own labels by choosing Custom, as seen in the lower portion of this figure. Each card also contains a free-form Notes field at the bottom, where you can type any other random crumbs of information you'd like to store about the person (pet's name, embarrassing nicknames, favorite Chinese restaurant, and so on). 19.10.1.1. Editing an address
When you create a new address card, you're automatically in Edit mode, which means you can add and remove fields and change the information on the card. To switch into Browse Mode (where you can view and copy contact information but not change it), click the Edit button or choose Edit Edit Card ( -L). You can also switch out of Browse Mode in the same ways. Tip: Regardless of which mode you're in—Edit or Browse—you can always type, drag, or paste text into the Notes field of an address card. 19.10.1.2. Adding addresses from Mail You can also make new contacts in the Address Book right in Mail, saving you the trouble of having to type names and email addresses manually. Select a message in Mail, then choose Message Add Sender to Address Book (or press -Y).Presto:Mac OS X adds a new card to the Address Book, with the name and email address fields already filled in. Later, you can edit the card in Address Book to add phone numbers, street addresses, and so on. 19.10.2. Importing Addresses The easiest way to add people to Address Book is to import them from another program like Entourage, Outlook Express, or Palm Desktop. Address Book isn't smart enough to read an Entourage or Outlook Express database—it can only import files in vCard format, the less common LDIF format, or tab-separated database files (described next). Figure 19-25. This example shows three other kinds of fields that you can plug into your address cards. The phonetic first/last name fields (shown at top) let you store phonetic spellings of hard to-pronounce names. The other fields store screen names for instant messaging networks such as Jabber and Yahoo. To add fields like these, choose from the Card Add Field menu.
Still, Mac OS X comes with handy AppleScripts that import addresses automatically from Entourage, Eudora, and tab-separated text files; another Apple Script imports them semi-automatically from Palm Desktop, Outlook Express, Claris Emailer, and Netscape. Choose Address Book Scripts Import Addresses from the Script menu at the top of the screen (Section 7.5.1), and follow the prompts. A minute or two later, you'll have all your old contacts safely transferred into Address Book. Tip: If you've got contacts in the online Yahoo Address Book, you can sync them up with your Mac OS X Address Book—a new feature in Leopard. Choose Address Book Preferences General; turn on Yahoo Address Book. Next, click Configure and type your user name and password. Since Yahoo Address Book lives online, you need to be connected to the Internet to link and sync with it. 19.10.2.1. About vCards Address Book exchanges contact information with other programs primarily through vCards. vCard is short for virtual business card. More and more email programs send and receive these electronic business cards, which you can identify by their .vcf filename extensions (if, that is, you've set your Mac to display these extensions). If you ever receive an email to which a vCard file is attached, drag the .vcf file into your Address Book window to create an instant entry with a complete set of information. You can create vCards of your own, too. Just drag a name out of your Address Book and onto the desktop (or into a piece of outgoing mail). Tip: In addition to letting you create vCards of individual entries, Address Book makes it easy to create vCards that contain several entries. To do so, -click the entries in the Name column that you want included, and drag them to the desktop. There, they'll appear all together as a single vCard. You can even drag an item from the Group column to the desktop to make a vCard that contains all the group's entries.Keep this trick in mind if you ever want to copy all your contacts from an old PC to a new Mac. By creating a single vCard containing all your contacts, you've made it trivial to import them into the copy of Address Book running on your new Mac. 19.10.3. Groups
A group is a collection of related address cards, saved under a single descriptive name (as shown in Figure 19-23). POWER USERS' CLINIC The Windows-to-Address-Book Journey Getting names and addresses out of one Mac program and into another is one thing. But what if your contacts are stored on a Windows PC running Microsoft Outlook, the most-used contact manager in the world? Easy: Use Outlook's Export command to create a tab-delimited text file containing all your contacts. Then copy the text file to your Mac. In Address Book, choose File Import Text File (or use the Address Book Import AppleScript described on the facing page), locate the file you exported from Outlook, and click Open. After a short delay, your new contacts appear, ready to go in Address Book. Organizing your contacts into groups can make them much easier to find and use— especially when your database of addresses climbs into the hundreds. For example, if you regularly send out a family newsletter to 35 relatives, you might gather the address cards of all your assorted siblings, cousins, nieces, nephews, uncles, and aunts into a single group called Family. When addressing an outgoing message using Mail, you can type this group name to reach all of your kin at once. A person can be a member of as many different groups as you want. Tip: When you send an email message to a group en masse, how does Mail know which email address to use for each person?Because you've told it. Choose Edit Edit Distribution List. A special dialog box appears, listing everyone in each group, along with each person's complete list of email addresses. (Use the tiny pop-up menu above the list to choose Phone or Address; that way, you can also indicate the preferred phone number and mailing address.) To create a group, click the + button at the bottom of the Group column in the Address Book window, or choose File New Group (Shift- -N.) Type a name for the newly spawned group icon in the Group column, and then populate it with address cards by dragging entries from the Name list into the group. Clicking a group name automatically
locates and displays (in the Names column) all the names that are a part of that group— and hides any that aren't. GEM IN THE ROUGH Cool Group Tricks Dragging cards into and out of groups can be a great way to spend an afternoon, but groups can actually be powerful timesavers. For example, if a card is selected in the Name column, you can quickly highlight all the groups it belongs to by pressing the Option key. If you've created a lot of groups, it can be very difficult to find a specific one— especially because Address Book's Search box looks only for individual cards. To get around this limitation, click in the Group list and then type the first few letters of a group's name. Address Book jumps right to the first matching group. You can even add groups to other groups. You might find it useful to keep a Nieces group and a Nephews group, for example, but to keep both groups inside a master Family group. To do this, you'd -click Nieces and Nephews in the Group list, and then Option-drag them onto the Family group. Now, whenever you select Family, you'll see both groups listed among the rest of the cards; double-click either group to see its members. Also, don't miss the Smart Groups feature of the Address Book. Smart address groups, like smart folders in the Finder, automatically populate themselves with items that match criteria you specify. For example, you might create a smart group called Apple Employees that lists all your contacts with "apple.com" in their email addresses. To create a smart group, choose File New Smart Group (Option- -N). Then use the resulting dialog box (which looks a lot like Mail's smart mailbox dialog box) to specify how you'd like the smart group to fill itself. Once you're done, you can use your new smart group much like you'd use a regular group. You can't add contacts to a smart group yourself, of course, but you can still send an email to all the members of a smart group, for example, or drag one to the Finder to create a composite vCard. Tip: To turn a set of address cards into a group very quickly, select multiple entries from the Names column—by either Shift-clicking the names (to make contiguous selections)
or -clicking (for non-contiguous selections)—and then choose File New Group From Selection. You end up with a new group containing all the selected names. 19.10.3.1. Removing someone from a group To take someone out of a group, first click the group name, and then click the person's name in the Name column and press the Delete key. If you want to remove the person from Address Book itself, click Delete in the resulting dialog box. Otherwise, just click "Remove from Group" or press Return. Address Book keeps the card, but removes it from the currently selected group. Note: If you selected All in the Group column, rather than a specific group, you don't get a "Remove from Group" option. Instead, the Mac just asks you to confirm that you do, in fact, want to permanently remove the card. 19.10.4. Adding Pictures You can dress up each Address Book entry with a photo. Whenever you're editing somebody's address book card, drag a digital photo—preferably 64 pixels square, or a multiple of it—onto the empty headshot square; the image shows up as shown in Figure 19-26. Or double-click the picture well; now you can either browse to a picture on your hard drive by clicking Choose, or, if this person is with you, take a new photo by clicking the camera icon. (Don't miss the swirly button next to it, which lets you apply nutty Photo Boothish effects.) At that point, you can enlarge, reposition, and crop the new photo.) You don't necessarily have to use a photo, of course. You could add any graphic that you want to represent someone, even if it's a Bart Simpson face or a skull and crossbones. You can use any standard image file in an address card—a JPEG, GIF, PNG, TIFF, or even a PDF. From now on, if you receive an email from that person, the photo shows up right in the email message. Tip: If you've got snapshots in iPhoto, it's particularly easy to add a picture to any address card. Just drag a picture directly from the main iPhoto window to the picture frame on the address card to insert it. 19.10.4.1. Replacing and removing a picture
To replace a photo on an address card, just drag a new image on top of the old one. If you want to get rid of an existing picture without replacing it, select the card, then choose Card Clear Custom Image (or, in Edit mode, press Delete). 19.10.5. Finding an Address You can search for an Address Book entry inside the currently selected group by typing a few letters of a name (or address, or any other snippet of contact information) in the Search box (Figure 19-26). To search all your contacts instead of just the current group, click All in the Group list. Tip: You can press -F to jump directly to the search field and start typing. Your savings: one mouse click. If Address Book finds more than one matching card, use the and keys, or Return and Shift-Return, to navigate through them. Figure 19-26. With each letter you type, Address Book filters your social circle and displays the number of matches at the bottom. The matching records themselves appear in the Name column, the first of the matching card entries appears in the far-right pane, and the matching text itself appears highlighted in the matching card. Figure 19-27. The options that become available when you click the field labels on an address card vary according to field type. Pop-up menus let you send email, open a Web page, or view a map, depending on the type of field you've clicked. Once you've found the card you're looking for, you can perform some interesting stunts. If you click the label of a phone number ("home" or "office", for example), you see the Large Type option: Address Book displays the number in an absurdly gigantic font that
fills the entire width of your screen, making it possible to read the number as you dial from across the room. You can also click the label of an email address to create a preaddressed email message, or click a home page to launch your Web browser and go to somebody's site. You can also copy and paste (or drag) address card info into another program or convert it into a Sticky Note. Tip: Once you find a street address in your Address Book, you can find those coordinates on a map by Control-clicking (or right-clicking) the address part of the card and choosing "Map Of" from the shortcut menu, as shown in Figure 19-27. Your Web browser obediently leaps up to display the address on a Google map. 19.10.6. Changing the Address Book Display You can't do much to customize Address Book's appearance, but the Preferences pane (Address Book Preferences) gives you at least a couple of options in the General pane that are worth checking out: • Display Order. Choose to have names displayed with the first name followed by the last name, or vice versa. • Sort By. Sort the entries in Address Book by either first or last name. • Font Size. Choose from Regular, Large, or Extra Large. Unfortunately, you can't change anything else about the font used in the Address Book; the color, face, and style are all locked down. 19.10.7. Printing Options When you choose File Print and click the to expand the Print box, the Style pop- up menu offers four ways to print whatever addresses are selected at the moment: • Mailing Labels. This option prints addresses on standard sheets of sticky mailing labels—Avery, for example—that you buy at office-supply stores. Tip: As you manipulate settings, you can see your changes in the preview pane on the left. If the preview is too small for you to see, use the Zoom slider. (It doesn't affect your printout.)If you want to access the traditional Print dialog box (to specify paper type, for example), use the unlabeled pop-up menu in the middle of
the dialog box top choose Paper Type or whatever. Return to the Labels or Envelopes panes by choosing Address Book from the same pop-up. • Envelopes. This feature is great if you have bad handwriting; rather than handaddressing your envelopes, you can have Address Book print them out for you. Use the Layout pop-up menu to pick the size of your envelopes—it's usually listed on the outside of the envelope box. Note: Both the Mailing Labels and Envelopes options print only the contacts for which you have, in fact, entered physical mailing addresses. • Lists. If all you want is a paper backup of your Address Book entries, use this setting. In the Attributes list, turn on the checkboxes of the fields you want printed—just name and phone number, for example. • Pocket Address Book. This feature prints out a convenient paperaddress book from your virtual one. If you pick Indexed from the Flip Style pop-up menu, each page's edge will even list the first letters of the last names listed on the page, making it a cinch to find the page with the address you want. (Here again, you can pick which fields you'd like to include—phone numbers, addresses, and so on.) As you fiddle with the options presented here, you get to see a miniature preview, right in the dialog box, that shows what you're going to get. No matter which mode you choose, the only cards that print are the ones that were selected when you chose File Print. If you want to print all your cards, therefore, click All in the Group column before you print. Tip: You can combine the smart-groups feature with the printing features in one clever way: to print yourself a portable phone book when you're heading off for a visit to a different city. That is, set up a smart group that rounds up everyone you know who lives in Chicago, and then print that as a pocket address book. 19.10.8. Address-Book Backups
When you think about it, the contents of your Address Book may represent years of typing and compiling effort. Losing all that information to a corrupted database or a hard drive crash could be devastating. Here are four ways to protect your Address Book data: POWER USERS' CLINIC Automatic Notifications In Address Book, notifying friends and family that your email address has changed is a piece of cake. Choose Address Book Preferences General and turn on "Notify people when my card changes." From now on, whenever you change the information in your own address card (like home address, email address, or phone number), Address Book asks whether you want to send a notification email–a virtual change-of-address card. If you do, click Notify. In the resulting dialog box, choose which groups of people you want to notify, and then personalize the outgoing message. When you click Send, Address Book delivers an email to all the people in the groups you chose, attaching your new vCard (Section 19.10.1.2). When your recipients get the email, they can simply drag the vCard into their own Address Books to update their information about you. (If you ever want to send updates to your contacts manually, just choose File Send Updates.) • Turn on .Mac syncing. As described on Section 6.6, having a .Mac account has its privileges—and one of them is automatic synchronizing with other Macs, or just with the .Mac mothership in the Internet cloud. • Use the Backup command. Periodically choose File Back Up Address Book. If something goes wrong—say, a batch of important contacts gets inadvertently deleted—you can go back to a previously saved version to rescue the data by choosing File Revert to Address Book Backup. • Backup your entire Address Book database.Open your Home Library Application Support folder. Copy the entire Address Book folder to another disk— burn it to a CD, download it to your iPod, or upload it to a file server, for example. Now your contact data is safe even in the event of a hard drive failure.
• Back up your whole Mac with Time Machine. Chapter 6 tells you how. Note: If you've upgraded from Mac OS X Tiger to Leopard, you've probably noticed that the Address Book can no longer communicate wirelessly with Bluetooth cellphones. If you miss that feature terribly, especially the ability to send text messages from Address Book over your phone's Bluetooth connection, consider the emitSMS Dashboard widget.It lets you send off SMS notes to mobile phone numbers right from your Mac. It works with almost any Bluetooth phone and can look up recipients in the Address Book. You can even write missives longer than the standard 160-character limit (although you're still billed for each 160-character chunk)—which is much easier to do from the comfort of your Mac's keyboard anyway. Download emitSMS from this book's "Missing CD" page at www.missingmanuals.com.