How about RSS feeds in the Address Book?
Lots of my friends and contacts use sites sites like Flickr, Del.icio.us or LiveJournal. They have blogs, Amazon
All this is possible to enter in the Addressbook app in Mac OS X 10.4. As of this version (or was it 10.3?), you can assign as many webpages to a user as you like.
Here’s an example with some of my own links, in the Adressbook app:
Now, checking all my friends and contacts blogs, new pictures, fresh bookmarks etc. takes time. And what better are computers for, than doing the boring stuff that you don’t want to do yourself?
What I would like is to add a RSS button to all of these links. Like this:
Pressing one of these buttons should take you to the page, grab the associated RSS feed of that page, and display it like Safari always does. Here’s how my Del.icio.us bookmarks look as a RSS feed:
Clicking all my contact’s RSS buttons one by one isn’t much better than checking them manually. So the next step would be to add a command to Address Book that checks all links automatically, and then subscribes to the RSS feeds of them. Here’s my photoshopped new version of the file menu in Address Book app:
I have circled my new command; “Get RSS Feeds…”.
Choosing this command would go through every weblink in the Address Book app, find the associated RSS feed for them, and subscribe to them. It probably would be nice if this was somewehere in the preferences, so Address Book did it automatically for you if you wanted it to.
If you then go into the preferences and check the first check box:
You will now get a new “Address book” bookmark folder in your Safari bookmark bar. As you can see from my next pic, clicking this will give you a list of every web link you have put in your Address Book.
Apple need to make this menu a little nicer. Some suggestions:
- Make an small Address Book icon for it, insted of the full name, to save space in the bookmarks bar.
- Group the bookmarks by contact names. This will make the list shorter, and group all bookmarks of a contact in a sub-menu.
If the Address Book app had a functionality like described here, the “Address Book” bookmark folder would get a number behind it, showing how many new posts my friends and contacts have made since last time I viewed the feeds. Just as the “Apple news” bookmarks folder in the pic above has 65 unread articles.
Every time I start Safari, a neat little Address Book icon would display a number, showing how many posts my contacts have made. Wouldn’t that be cool?!
This tip is submitted to Apple Mac OS X feedback.
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Andrew
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Andrew
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http://igav.blogspot.com iGav
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http://igav.blogspot.com iGav
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http://blog.wilsonet.com Daniel J. Wilson
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http://blog.wilsonet.com Daniel J. Wilson
