Mr. Tall -- A Variety of Things

Responsibility -- Basic OS X Contact Management Software

A Free Interface to Address Book and iCal

I had been using iCal and a combination of note taking programs (VooDoo Pad and Notational Velocity) to try and manage a small volume of potential c ustomers at my job. It wasn't very effective. Address Book had always tempted me, as it seemed to have an ever growing range of funtionality and integration with other apps, but adding information to it was a painful process. So, armed with the desire to learn Applescript and build my own Applescript Studio Program, Responsibility was born: Responsibility Screenshot

How to Be Responsible

The interface is broken into two "boxes", one for the contact information and one for scheduling followup events and todos with that contact.

Contact Information

Responsibility gives the option to create a new contact or modify an existing contact. The first field is where the name of the contact is specified. You can select a current contact, or type in a new name. Note: If you type in a new name it must be in the format 'Firstname Lastname', thems the rules. If a pre existing contact is chosen, the contact fields will be automatically filled out with the existing information. The contact information has two categories: Work Info and Home Inf o. The Work Info / Home Info toggle lets you choose which category of information is updated. The fields that are effected by this toggle are:

  • Phone
  • Email
  • Address, City, State, Zip

When updating information, you have to update the Work Info and the Home Info one at a time. Contact Information The Title, Company, Website, Notes and Mobile Phone options are unaffecte d by the Home/Work toggle. Clicking the little nub buttons to the right of the Website and Email fields will open the website and open an email to that person respectively.

The notes field lets you write anything you want about the contact. If you add notes to the note when you submit the information the current date will be apppended to the note: Series of Note s

The Groups option lets you add the contact to a new group, or choose from a list of current contact groups. At this time Responsibility does not tell you what groups a contact is already in, nor does it let you remove contacts from a group. Responsibi lity is't meant to replace Address Book and iCal, just to make entering and updating contacts, and events associated with those contacts, easier. You still may need to use Address Book and iCal on their own.

Followup Options

If you wish to add an event to iCal with the current contact, the first section of the follow up options gives you that ability. For example, if you wanted to schedule a followup call with Peter Pan in two weeks at 3pm, you would select Peter Pan from the contact list, and in the followup options set up: If you don't want a followup, just leave the 'No Followup' option selected, and no event will be scheduled. Add ing an event without a contact selected will work just fine, the only differnece is that the summary of the event will be set to the first three words of the event description (instead of the followup type and contact name).

To add a Todo item just choose the priority level of the todo that you would like to create, and enter the details for the todo. This is less than perfect in that iCal does not let it's todo notes be set by applescript, so everything goes into the sum mary. If you don't want a Todo, leave the default 'No Todo' option selected. You can add a todo without a selected contact just fine.

Finally if you are adding a Event or Todo, select the calendar that you would like to use, or type the name of a new calendar that you would like to be created.

Refresh Datas & Process Information

Beyond the interface, there are two buttons. The 'Refresh Data' button will refresh the Contact List and Contact Groups from Address Book and the Calendar list from iCal. Good to use if you've made changes directly to Address Book or iCal. The 'Proces s Information' button does just that - it updates or adds the contact information in Address Book, and if necessary adds items to iCal.

Cost & License

Responsibility is free. The application as well as the Xcode project source code, both licensed under the BSD license, are availble for download.

Compatibility & Support

Responsibility will work best on OS X 10.3 (Panther). It is untested on any other version of OS X, and does not work on 10.4 (Tiger).

Send any support questions or feature requests to: responsibility at bigethan dot com. And while the program is named Responsibility, I don't take any responsibility for any damage this program does to your computer. Backups are always a good idea.

Version History

1.0.1 -- Added icon, working help link, upgraded source to Xcode 1.5. August 10, 2004
1.0 -- Initial Release. August 8, 2004

Other Mac CRM Software

  • Daylight - OS X's premier CRM software. Cost ~$150
  • crm4mac - A very similar concept to Responsibility, but with a much larger scope. Cost ~$50
  • OD4Contact - Again, a similar idea (and here I thought I was a genius), with more features. Cost ~$30
green grass