Relationship Completer v1.1.0 Released

I am pleased to announce that Relationship Completer v1.1.0 has been released.

The changes made in this latest version are:

• Improved name matching algorithm
  Now supports matching names based on a single name
  Now supports matching names that contain prefixes and/or suffixes
• Now Checks for existing relationship before adding a duplicate entry
• Added support for Mac OS X 10.3.9+
• Fixed various crashes and memory leaks
• Added German translation (thanks to Dr. Uwe Werner)

Adding Localization to Relationship Completer

I spent a fair amount of time today trying to figure out how to add multi-langauge support to my Address Book plug-in Relationship Completer. This adventure was started when a few users requested a German version of the plug-in. After reading Apple’s documentation on the matter it seemed like a fairly easy task. My first try, however, didn’t work. Either did my second, third, or fourth.

Relationship Completer v1.0.0 Released

This Address Book plugin was inspired by my previous rant. It is the first of hopefully many plugins and scripts to realize my vision (and make Address Book more useful).

Let’s say you have the two Address Book entries: “John Doe” and “Jane Doe”. If John and Jane are married, you may set the appropriate “Related Name” fields in Address Book to denote this fact. To completely realize the relationship you will need to add a spouse relationship to both John and Jane’s entry – each pointing to the other. This violates my first law of data entry duplication: don’t do it.

That’s where Relationship Completer comes in. It will add a new menu item for “Related Names” that allows you to automatically complete the relationship by creating the complementary related name entry. Now all you need to do is create one of the spouse entries and have the other one created automatically.

You can find more information and download Relationship Completer from the Software page.

Composite Entries in Address Book

One of the things I really dislike in life is duplication; duplication of data and duplication of effort. I find that it usually pays off in the long run to automate a task rather than justifying not to because the task is so simple/small. I’ve been known to utter the phrase “but what if there where one thousand of them” to coworkers more times than I am willing to admit. Recently I have been frustrated by the Mac Address Book application because is requires me to duplicate both data and effort to organize my contacts the way I would like.