Comments on: Contact Sync

By: Maintaining Dev Environments Across Multiple Machines | alexking.org

Maintaining Dev Environments Across Multiple Machines | alexking.org — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 18:34:24 +0000

[...] that conflicts can and will happen with Dropbox. I tried putting my Address Book data in Dropbox a while back when I was looking for a solution to sync my contacts across multiple [...]

By: Doug Smith

Doug Smith — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 23:19:39 +0000

You could use an URL field in Address Book to store the user’s Twitter home page URL and set the label to custom “twitter”. Then in AppleScript you can do something like:

set twitterURLs to every url of one_contact whose label is "twitter"

In my case, that would be http://twitter.com/douglsmith. You then grab the username off the end of the URL and pop it into a Twitter API call like this: http://twitter.com/u[...]uglsmith.xml, which returns an XML profile that includes a URL to the profile picture.

Another way to do it might be to use Twitter’s API to grab all of your friends then compare them to what’s in your contacts. That still doesn’t get you e-mail addresses but you could compare the URL in the Twitter profiles to any URLs you have in contact records.

Last I tried, it was actually possible to do a search in Facebook by e-mail if you were logged into the service. It didn’t matter if the person was your friend or not. You could get enough information to retrieve the avatar.

By: Alex

Alex — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 02:05:19 +0000

@Doug – I was thinking it could pull from a “Twitter” custom field in the Address Book – same with Facebook profile photos from a “Facebook URL” field (or similar). What do you think about that approach?

@Corey – The problem is also that I lose data (notes) as it syncs between the Mac and Google.

By: Corey

Corey — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 00:20:36 +0000

BIS 2.8 should address the contact sync issue. No official launch date, but it should be soon.

From RIM:
If subscribers integrate a Google Mailâ„¢ account with their BlackBerryÂ® Internet Service account, they can synchronize contacts between the account and the contacts application on their BlackBerry device. Subscribers can add, change, and delete Google Mail contacts from their device or from their Google Mail account and the BlackBerry Internet Service synchronizes the changes.

http://docs.blackber[...]02166_11.jsp

By: Doug Smith

Doug Smith — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 23:49:44 +0000

FYI, I was going to add Twitter image support to my Gravatar script but Twitter recently removed the ability to search by e-mail address. I don’t think there’s an easy way to get the images without already knowing the Twitter username.