More on contacts, Apple's Address Book, and Palm OS 5 ~ teknologi

Posted on Thu - January 22, 2009

More on contacts, Apple's Address Book, and Palm OS 5

Dead people and dead tress. Mostly.

I really like Address Book, but it has taken some adjustment. Of course, making things work with Address Book, The Missing Sync, and my Palm has taken work.

Here's what transfers.

Contact First Name
Contact Last Name
Job Title
Company
The first four phone number fields
the first two email addresses
the first two web addresses
The first two addresses
Notes (but there is a character limit)

Now within that, you can work, but still count on doing most of your prep work at your computer.

The phone fields are your friends, you just have to make sure to start off with a period if you don't want Address Book formating your numbers.

It's a little weird I know, but I have address entries for some dead people, especially the ones I am related to, the ones I admire, or the ones I quote. I always put a "\deceased" after their last name. Usually in the first phone field, I'll put ".lived 28Jan1950 to 01Mar2001"

I don't always have separate entries for spouses and children, that is when I put an asterisk after the name in the Names field. If I have the birthday for that person, I'll stick it there too.

Let me show you how this works.

There's the "\deceased" marker in the name. Instead of a nickname, I've used a notable quote (remember that the Nickname Field doesn't transfer to the Palm). There's the lifespan info in the first phone field, and since I don't celebrate his birthday or passing day, that's the only place where it is. By the way, that Prime Web addy isn't right, the NHF edited most of the biography info out of their site, so I will just fix that now. I'll also delete that "born in 1883" down in the note field, that's a leftover from when I was trying to track birthdays and I will fix that now too. That brings us to all those names.

What's with the ZZAudio and ZZBook stuff, you ask? Well, let's call up one and see.

For books, I put "ZZBook -" before the title in the company name. This sends it to the bottom of the list in my Palm.

Apple's Spotlight won't display company names, but it will display nicknames if there is no name entered in any of the Name Fields. So I don't use the name spaces for the author's name. Instead I put "by Author Name" in the Job Title Field, and I put the author name in the first friend field, I do a custom label to "author."

To make Spotlight displays easier to read for books and articles, be sure to leave the actual name field blank, but put the title in the nickname field. This way you can see what you are actually looking at.

For books, I change the first phone field label to "other" ("work" and "home" will always default to the top positions) and type in ".ISBN" and the number. Note the period so that Address Book doesn't try to reformat the numbers.

For books in the second phone field, I change it to other and put in my Amazon affiliate link code for that item, that way it's there if I want it.

That's pretty much it for my dead contacts, but there are a couple of other minor tweaks.

I don't always have separate entries for spouses and children, that is when I put an asterisk after the name in the Names field. If I have the birthday for that person, I'll stick it there too.

Since categories and groups don't transfer, I've gone to using tags and Smart Groups defined by those tags in Address Book.

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