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Address Book Programming Guide

Contents:

Who Should Read This Document ?
Organization of This Document

The Address Book is a centralized database for contact and other personal information for people. Applications that support the Address Book framework share this contact information with other applications, including Mail and iChat. Both Carbon and Cocoa applications can access users’ address books. This topic covers key Address Book framework concepts and some operations you can perform with address books.

The Address Book framework consists of two APIs: one for C, the other for Objective-C. While both API are equally functional, the majority of the code samples in this document are printed in Objective-C only. Where it is appropriate, this document will address fundamental differences between the two API, but will not list sample code in both languages. Both API are similar in syntax and conventions, and mapping the Objective-C sample code to its C counterpart can be done easily using the Address Book Reference for C. Developers using the C API should also refer to “Using Address Book from C.”

Who Should Read This Document ?

This topic is designed for any Cocoa or Carbon developer who wants to leverage the abilities of the Mac OS X Address Book in their application. You will not only be able to access a user’s address book data, but also design and implement your own properties and actions for the data.

It is expected that you are already familiar with Xcode and the basics of either Cocoa or Carbon development.

Organization of This Document

The topic contains the following articles:

• “About the Address Book” describes what’s in the Address Book database and what you can do with it.

• “Managing Address Book Records ” describes how to add and remove people and groups, how to arrange people into groups, and how to find the record for the logged-in user.

• “Accessing Address Book Records” describes how to access data in a person or group record.

• “Searching an Address Book” describes how to perform searches on a user’s address book.

• “Using Address Book Groups as Distribution Lists” describes how to set up a group so you can use it as a mailing list, or other type of distribution list.

• “Adding Properties to Address Book Records” describes how to customize an address book for your own applications by adding properties to it.

• “Creating and Using Address Book Action Plug-ins” describes how to create action plug-ins which allow users to perform custom actions on address book data viewed within the Address Book application.

• “Importing and Exporting Address Book People and Groups” describes how to import and export person records by using the vCard standard.

• “Using Address Book from C” contains special information for those using the Address Book C API.

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