Bonsoir, here’s my vCard
How do you broadcast your vCard to several users at once? Without mailing it? That’s what I asked in February, 2006 in my post “Broadcast vCard”:
I would like to have a meny item under the Airport icon in OS X. It should read: “Broadcast vCard”.
What it does is to listen for other’s sending me their vCards, and also sending out mine. When it finds them, the OS show me a list of who else did this around me, and let me check off which ones I allow to get my card. The others in the room do the same. This is to prevent anyone else around to get all our vCards without our permission. Like this:
Now, R. Tyler Ballance has made Bonsoir, an app that halfway does what I would like it to do, and also adds in some new features.
What it does, is to broadcast your vCard to other people on the same local network. Now, I’m not sure how that works if you’re on the same 802.11 network? Will all the other’s on that same wireless network find your vCard when you broadcast it with Bonsoir?
I didn’t have anyone else to test with here, so I’m not sure.
Bonsoir takes advantage of Cocoa Distributed Objects, Bonjour, and the Address Book API for allowing the quick and easy sharing of vCards on a local network.
Bonsoir also adds some extra preferences: Adding your del.icio.us username and skype name. I guess these are distributed with the vCard? (Apple: When are you going to add a “skype” usename in Addressbook?).
This kind of functionality should be integrated in the OS, both Mac OS X 10.5 and Windows Vista, in a simple and clean way. For now, running Bonsoir when on conferences is a great alternative. Unless you’re on Windows, that is…
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“What it does, is to broadcast your vCard to other people on the same local network. Now, I’m not sure how that works if you’re on the same 802.11 network? Will all the other’s on that same wireless network find your vCard when you broadcast it with Bonsoir?”
Yes it will
How Bonjour works is that everybody on your local subnet will receive the Bonjour “messages” (in technical terms, your multicast DNS service advertisements). What Bonsoir does, is both a server and a client in one tiny application. It will “listen” for Bonsoir messages, and it will advertise it’s own messages, meaning somebody else running Bonsoir will see “you” and be able to grab your vCard, and vice versa.
Hope you enjoy! I’m working on finding somebody with an extra parallels license to spare right now, so I can write the Windows version on my intel iMac
Thanks for your quick answer! This makes Bonsoir very useful of course. Again: Nice work, and I think lots of people will use this on tech conferences and other places where lots of people are online with Bonsoir.
People: I would add the URL to Bonsoir in my iChat/AIM status message when on a conference. That way other would see it when they use Bonjour in iChat and download the app. Maybe that could be a feature for Bonsoir 1.1; an option to put the Bonsoir URL in iChat status when you launch it…?