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Re: Apple's Address Book File Format

I'd like to know why there's a proprietary format here anyway. I thought with the proliferation of XML, we'd at least be able to store something as simple as our contact info in such a format.

As for the fear of having it used by viruses, etc., I'm more fearful of a virus actually *destroying* my data than doing something annoying with it.

-Chilton

On Sunday, December 30, 2001, at 01:32 PM, Brant Vasilieff wrote:

I've been asking for access for over a year now. So far no one from Apple wants to comment. It's a shame really, because, if Apple doesn't make it accessible to developers, I'll be forced to write my own address book. It's not a pretty thought from an end users point of view, as it would be so much nicer to have one centralized location for tracking the people you need to reach.

I can certainly understand any reluctance to have it silently used by viruses and trojan horses, but there are ways to solve that. When an application wants to access the address book, the address book could authenticate the request, and ask the user if it's OK for your calendar or other application to access the data.

You can drag contacts from the address book, they drag as VCards (ABVCardStringPBoardType), and accept the drop in your application, They also supply a record ID as one of the drag flavors, but I have yet to figure out how to extract data from the address book directly.



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