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Attach any information to an Address Book entry Apps
A friend of mine recently asked me how to add multiple photos to Address Book entries. In the end, I came up with a simple solution which makes use of OS X's built-in server. Go to Systems Preferences -> Sharing, and enable Personal Web Sharing, making a note of your personal website, in my case http://10.0.0.8/~myname/. Then open Microsoft Word and make a new Web Page from the Project Gallery (I would have liked to use something more sophisticated, but unfortunately, I know nothing yet about authoring web pages). Insert some pictures or whatever, and save the site as Documentname (as you wish) in your ~myname/sites folder. Then, in Address Book edit mode for your person, make the homepage entry in the format http://10.0.0.8/~myname/Documentname. Exit edit mode.

Now you can click on the homepage link in any Address Book entry and see all the photos or other webthings you want! It's a shame that Address Book only allows one homepage entry in edit mode, so you won't have immediate access to the person's real homepage, but I guess you could just include it as a link in the page you just made. Since the Sites folder is accessible to any user on the machine, other users could use these pages for their Address Book entries, too, if they wished.

[robg adds: If you're worried about the security of your served pages, you'll want to protect them with an .htaccess file There are a couple of hints here which might help, or you can read that section of the manual on Apache's website. Also, while you can't add a second home page field that works as a link, you could add another general field (some type of phone), then click on the arrow next to the new field's name and select Custom from the pop-up -- this will let you rename the newly added field, and you could then store another URL in it.]
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Attach any information to an Address Book entry
Authored by: dmrogers99 on Oct 11, '04 01:14:55PM

There's another way, as usual.

In the Note: field of an Address Book record, simply insert the pathname to the file you wish to link to, with the prefix "file://"

For example:

file:///users/yourusername/Pictures/100_0040.jpg

Then, just highlight the entry and select Open URL from the Services menu. The document will open in whatever application it's normally opened with.

No messing around with Sharing or creating web pages, just link to the file.



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Attach any information to an Address Book entry
Authored by: Pmac on Oct 12, '04 06:08:41AM

dmrogers99,

I'd looked for a solution like yours, but it didn't occur to me to use services. Your answer also opens folders, which is handy, but still involves selecting text, navigating to a menu and clicking. Is there no other way of putting a hyperlink in?



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Attach any information to an Address Book entry
Authored by: karenwallace on Oct 11, '04 01:18:57PM

Best to use http://127.0.0.1/~yourname or http://localhost/~yourname instead of the IP address that Personal Web Sharing gives you. The IP you see in Personal Web Sharing is your current IP and could change at any time if you get it through DHCP or move to a different network. http://localhost and http://127.0.0.1 always point to your computer.



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Attach any information to an Address Book entry
Authored by: Pmac on Oct 12, '04 06:32:01AM

I see. That makes much more sense. I'm behind a router, and didn't think of broader possibilities.



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Attach any information to an Address Book entry
Authored by: grager on Oct 12, '04 03:06:06PM

To attach files to your contacts, you can use OD4Contact (www.objective-decision.com), it uses the AddressBook database.



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