a7p's » project http://a7p.org/blog code, confusion, confessions Tue, 07 Sep 2010 08:54:50 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 Getting Birthdays out of the AppleAddressBook http://a7p.org/blog/2008/10/02/getting-birthdays-out-of-the-appleaddressbook/ http://a7p.org/blog/2008/10/02/getting-birthdays-out-of-the-appleaddressbook/#comments Thu, 02 Oct 2008 09:51:24 +0000 A7P http://a7p.org/blog/2008/10/02/getting-birthdays-out-of-the-appleaddressbook/ Continue reading →]]> 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 release)

birthdaystuff.tar.gz (sourcecode release)

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