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TICKET ARCHIVE -> Apple AddressBook

corporatemac - Oct 3, 2006 - 8:31 am

I have an AddressBook (apple) that has 6,000 entries for mailing lists. It really slows down my laptop (g4 1.5 ghz, 1 gig ram). Is there a way to run two addressbook applications? And I would like to stick with the apple addressbook as it syncs up with other programs I use, and my treo. I only use the large mailing list entries occasionally. The other 500 or so entries are my main contacts for my business and I need to use those regularly. I would like to keep a second addressbook and not have to import/export all the time (.vcf cards etc...)

Can I duplicate the application without sharing the database files?

Also...when I run my activity monitor to find out why my machine is crawling, AddressBookSync is always using my memory. Is there a way to schedule this less often?

Thanks!

stottm - Oct 4, 2006 - 4:45 am

AddressBook.app stores it's data in a proprietary binary/text format. It's not user friendly and it's not fast for large data sets. Perhaps Apple will change the datastore to SQLite in the future. (they already support SQLite in their Cocoa/Carbon API's). I suspect it's in a form of text format merely for Spotlight easy searching.

The only Addressbook feature for export is VCards. Not everything supports VCards. However, fear not, because Apple did implement an AddressBook.app API (Application Programming Interface). This allows third party software applications to hook into the AddressBook and integrate with the AddressBook.

http://developer.apple.com/reference...Book-date.html

Fortunately, someone released a simple application for free to allow you to export the data from AddressBook.app using this Apple supplied API. As long as you have either the Jaguar, Panther, Tiger release of Mac OS X, this utility will work. (The API first became available in Jaguar).

http://www.gwenhiver.net/address-book-exporter.html

The idea is to export the 6000 mailing list entries and put them somewhere else. It can be obtained in tab delimited format or pre-formated for Entourage, Yahoo, etc.

The utility is not perfect, I would like to see more formats, but it's still valuable and can get you started. You can take that data and put it in Excel and then convert it to comma-delimited, etc. Or edit the data using other tools.

Reducing the AddressBook to a more reasonable size will speed it up considerably. There are many alternative ways to process the raw exported data into a wide variety of systems. i.e. Excel, Entourage, SQLite, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, Sybase, FrontBase, FileMaker, LDAP, etc., etc.

Now what to do with those 6000 records, you were not very specific with your "mailing list" usage. i.e. is this for email distribution or actually mailings like a large mail merge in Word? Are these customer records? Do you still need them inside AddressBook?

If you do need them in AddressBook, then you may need to have someone setup an LDAP server (Apple uses OpenLDAP but they have a specific configuration that OS X server uses called OpenDirectory, I have heard of people doing it on a Linux box but you really need to know LDAP inside and out) or purchase Mac OS X Server where you can set it up easily. Put the 6000 records into the LDAP directory server. That's what that blue icon in AddressBook called Directories is used for. This is how large companies store their employee phone/email books and make it available on the network to multiple users. LDAP is really fast at reading but slow at writing. It's ideal for large corporate phone books or huge contact lists. An earlier directory service from Sun Microsystems was called YellowBook and that idea evolved into today's LDAP. It could also be Microsoft's Active Directory (also based on LDAP) or it could be a Unix OpenLDAP server. Directories are used for employee and customer contact records as well as resources like keeping track of user accounts, authentication across the network and listings of servers and workstations, etc.

If you are a SOHO (small business) and have no IT department then I would have you consider FileMaker as an easy to use database to store these 6000 records. FileMaker is comparable to Microsoft Access which is not available on Mac OS X. I think FileMaker is much better then MS Access. When your business grows you can always move to Mac OS X Server.

I'll leave this open for others to comment...

corporatemac - Oct 6, 2006 - 5:47 am

Thank You! I figure I just have to pare down the list a bit to make it reasonable. It doesn't do too badly on my duo iMac, just my g4 powerbook. Your reply was tremendous. Thanks!