a7p’s

Recently I posted a terrible piece of AppleScript, but I refurbished the whole thing and rewrote it in python.

Basically there are two known ways of accessing the contents of the Apple AddressBook - well, two sane ways.

The first and most simple one is to use SQLite, and that will doubtlessly be the fastest way. But if Apple ever changes the data-schema of the addressbook the script will be useless. Apart from all that, there is another, more interesting way of accessing the addressbook - so I took the long way home *g*.

PyObjC offeres a neat bridge to OSxs’ native methods - these methods are useable in Python. Using pythons datetime classes it is pretty simple to accomplish almost anything concerning dates. This blog-entry was a great help and gave me the idea to use PyObjC - thanks!

Since my OSX does not offer a py2applet (and the macports version does not work properly) I used Platypus to bundle it into an App.

The Growl code I used stays BSD-licensed, my code is GPL3.

Have fun (and post improvements).

showbirthdays.app (clickable releaase)

birthdaystuff.tar.gz (sourcecode release)

I wrote myself a little (apple)script which displays current and upcoming birthdays. It’s not beautiful, it is slow and I am a bit dissatisfied with it - but it’s good enough for now and good enough for me and may be for you.

Feel free to download and improve it - I’d be happy to hear/read about improvments.

The script will might have some issues with people born on 29.2. - but I am to tired to check the behavior of Applescript’s date-class now.

show-birthdays

PS: sorry, I don’t know applescript and I did not want to learn it for this micro project - so if I did some cruel stuff, feel free to correct me, but be kind.

PPS: … and you need Growl to run it.

Since I am currently on a MacOSx trip and as for Linux there exist a lot of Instant Messagers - even GPLed ones.
I did a quick comparism:

• Proteus sadly does not seem to support SSL … after discovering this I dropped it instantly.
• Fire somehow does not want to work with my jabber.ccc.de-account (and does not get continued)
• Adium works perfectly

This comparisme got a lot shorter than planed, but the reasons are obvious I think. If you know any other IM-Client for MacOSx worth trying, please tell me.