I may be in the minority, but I don’t want a Verizon iPhone.

You see, I cheered when Apple chose AT&T for the iPhone. I had been a Verizon customer and was happy to leave. Why? Let’s not forget some of these things:

• Verizon is the company that has removed Bluetooth features from phones. They disabled syncing and file transfer so they could limit photo transfers to over the air where they could charge for each one.
• Verizon also blocked GPS features so 3rd party software or Web apps couldn’t compete with their VZ Navigator and monthly fee. Although they were forced to enable GPS features through a class action lawsuit, the important aGPS data still remains locked for all but VZ Navigator.
• Verizon has blocked transferring ringtones to your phone unless you purchased them through Verizon.
• Verizon is the company famous for lousy customer service and quietly renewing your contract every time you make any little change to your service.
• Verizon’s CEO is known for making boneheaded and customer-unfriendly statements.
• Verizon advertised unlimited data plans with no disclaimer then canceled customer’s accounts without warning for using too much. They were eventually forced to add an asterisk and fine print to their advertising.
• Verizon has a habit of selling personal customer data.
• Verizon has charged customers usage minutes for browsing Verizon’s own Get it Now store.

Now I don’t know how many of these practices still stand today, but they were all in place when I got my iPhone. I always felt like I was fighting my service provider to do the things that seemed natural to do.

Apple changed the game with the iPhone by requiring these kinds of features to just work as part of the package. Photos, ringtones, Web surfing, GPS, music, movies, etc. all work and sync as you would expect. AT&T was willing to play by the new rules and that has spurred the innovation we have today.

Sure, AT&T has experienced growing pains with the influx of iPhone customers. Any network would.

Cell coverage really depends on where you happen to be. It sometimes flip flops between which carrier has the best signal in particular locations, but most of the time I notice all carriers having some of the same trouble spots.

We do have a few areas around here where Verizon coverage is marginally better. But my AT&T coverage is good too and has improved immensely over the last couple years even though I’m not in a major city. We have 3G all over the area and I know AT&T has added towers, replaced antennas, and tuned signal directions. I’ve also seen them change to lower frequencies in some areas to better penetrate through trees and buildings.

The bottom line is that my iPhone has changed the way I do things for the better and the Apple / AT&T partnership has contributed to that experience. My shiny new iPhone 4 is scheduled to arrive tomorrow. It requires renewing my contract for a couple more years and I’m happy to do so.

This is a multi-part tutorial series on using Gravatar from AppleScript to update your Mac Address Book pictures automatically. These pictures then sync to your iPhone for Gravatar goodness on the go.

I’ve had some AppleScripts to work with Gravatars and Address Book hanging around in rough form for quite a while. But I was recently prompted to clean them up and write these tutorials when Matt Mullenweg posted about Gravatar on his blog saying that “we need a better way to get Gravatars into your Apple address book / iPhone.” I hope that the documentation and tools from this project will be used for other creative Gravatar integration projects.

We’re about to put all of what we learned in part 1, part 2, and part 3 together to make our working script. Be sure to check out the previous parts for the details of how it all works.

Here is the process the script will be doing:

1. Get a list of only the selected contacts from Address Book. This way we can control which contacts get their pictures updated if we don’t want them all.
2. Ask the user if we should overwrite any existing pictures or skip those contacts.
3. Step through each of those contacts and get all of the e-mail addresses associated with each.
4. Step through each e-mail address and download its Gravatar to a temporary file. If there is more than one address with a Gravatar we’ll keep it simple and just let it set each one in turn and we’ll end up with last one found. This could be improved in the future to favor a particular one if needed.
5. Update the Address Book picture, delete the temporary file, then repeat the process with the next contact.

Here’s the script: (Open in Script Editor)

-- Set selected Address Book contact pictures from Gravatar.
-- Released under GPL.
-- by Doug Smith, http://smithsrus.com
 
 
-- Grab the selected records and see how many there are.
tell application "Address Book"
	set selected_contacts to selection
	set count_selected to number of items in selected_contacts
 
	-- Bail out if there are no records selected. Otherwise ask about how to deal 
	-- with contacts having existing pictures.
	if count_selected < 1 then
		tell me to display dialog "You must first select some Address Book contacts." buttons {"Cancel"} default button 1 cancel button 1
	else
		if count_selected = 1 then
			set plural to ""
		else
			set plural to "s"
		end if
		tell me to set user_result to display dialog "We're about to try updating " & count_selected & " selected Address Book contact picture" & plural & " from Gravatar. Would you like to overwrite existing pictures or skip those contacts?" buttons {"Cancel", "Overwrite Existing", "Skip Existing"} cancel button 1 default button 1 with icon caution
		set overwrite to (button returned of user_result contains "Overwrite")
	end if
 
	-- Step through each contact and find Gravatars.
	with timeout of 600 seconds
		repeat with one_contact in selected_contacts
			if not ((image of one_contact exists) and not overwrite) then
 
				-- Step through the contact's e-mail addresses.
				set all_emails to emails of one_contact
				repeat with one_email_record in all_emails
					set one_email_address to value of one_email_record
 
					set grav_file to (my get_gravatar(my trim_email(one_email_address)))
 
					-- If we have a Gravatar image add it to the contact.
					if grav_file is not "" then
						set image of one_contact to my get_pict_data(grav_file)
					end if
				end repeat
			end if
		end repeat
	end timeout
	tell me to display dialog "Done. You may need to select a different record to force Address Book to refresh the screen before changes show." buttons {"Okay"} default button 1
end tell
 
 
-- Trim junk off the end of the e-mail address field. Assume space separated.
on trim_email(email_address)
	set AppleScript's text item delimiters to " "
	return item 1 of email_address
end trim_email
 
 
-- Look up a Gravatar from an e-mail address and save to a file.
on get_gravatar(email_address)
	-- Calculate an MD5 for the e-mail address.
	set md5_email to do shell script "md5 -q -s `echo " & email_address & " | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'`"
 
	-- Construct the Gravatar URL. Max Address Book picture size stored is 218 pixels.
	set grav_url to quoted form of ("http://gravatar.com/avatar/" & md5_email & "?s=218&d=" & "%22%22" as text)
 
	-- Make a file name in which to temporarily save the Gravatar.
	set grav_file to (path to temporary items) & "gravatar" & md5_email & ".jpg" as text
	set grav_POSIX_file to quoted form of POSIX path of grav_file
 
	-- Download the Gravatar image to the temporary file with a timeout of 10 seconds.
	do shell script "curl " & grav_url & " -m 10 -o " & grav_POSIX_file
 
	tell application "System Events"
		if exists file grav_file then
			return grav_file
		else
			return ""
		end if
	end tell
end get_gravatar
 
-- Read the picture data into a variable in TIFF format then delete the file.
on get_pict_data(grav_file)
	tell application "System Events"
		set file_ref to open for access grav_file
		set pict_data to read file_ref as "TIFF"
		close access file_ref
 
		delete file grav_file
		return pict_data
	end tell
end get_pict_data

There you have it. I have some ideas to take it further but I’ll let everyone test what we have and offer feedback before continuing. I’ll also make an easier to use application download for everyone once we’ve done enough testing to work out the kinks.

I’ve always been a fan of adding photos to the people in my Mac Address Book application. It’s a nice personal touch when the photo appears on e-mail messages from people I know. And now that I have an iPhone, those photos sync to the phone and show up in my contacts and when I get calls.

But wouldn’t it be nice if we could add photos to our contacts without doing them all manually? Well, that’s where Gravatar and a little AppleScript will do the job.

For those not familiar with Gravatar, it’s a free avatar service from the nice folks who make WordPress. You register your e-mail address with the service and upload an avatar picture to go with it. Your avatar then automatically shows up on all sorts of blogs and forums where you post or comment, and can be put to use for other services as well.

We should be able to use AppleScript to step through our contacts, grab the e-mail address, retrieve the Gravatar, and add the picture to the contact. The Gravatar implementor’s guide has useage instructions and lots of examples, but nothing for AppleScript. So let’s start with an AppleScript in the same style as the other implementer’s guide examples. (I won’t be covering how Gravatars work since it is so well documented. See How the URL is constructed for details.)

AppleScript doesn’t have built-in commands for calculating md5, converting text to lowercase, and url encoding, which we need. Instead of writing all of that code, we can cheat a little and call the equivalent commands from the OS X shell.

Here’s the basic process:

1. Change the e-mail address to lowercase.
2. md5 encode the e-mail address.
3. url encode the default image URL.
4. Slap it all together to make a Gravatar image URL.

And here is the script to do it: (Open in Script Editor)

-- Make a Gravatar URL from an e-mail address.
-- Released under GPL.
-- by Doug Smith, http://smithsrus.com
 
-- The e-mail address to look up.
set email to "someone@somewhere.com"
 
-- Set a few defaults.
property grav_default : "http://somewhere.com/homestar.jpg"
property grav_size : 40
 
-- Encode the elements as needed.
set md5_email to do shell script "md5 -q -s `echo " & email & " | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'`"
set encode_default to do shell script "echo " & grav_default & " | perl -MURI::Escape -lne 'print uri_escape($_)'"
 
-- Construct the Gravatar URL.
set grav_url to "http://gravatar.com/avatar/" & md5_email & "?d=" & encode_default & "&s=" & grav_size as text

This is getting a bit long so I’m going to break it into multiple parts.

In part 2 I’ll cover how to set an Address Book picture from AppleScript and how to detect if Gravatar doesn’t have an image for an address instead of ending up with a default image we don’t want. Both of those are a little tricky so it will likely fill that post. Part 3 will put it all together to automatically update pictures for the whole address book.

I changed my mind and decided to make the parts into smaller posts covering some of the individual tasks. I’m hoping this will make it easier for others to find these solutions for use in their own projects.

Part 2: Setting an Address Book Picture with AppleScript
Part 3: Detecting When Gravatar Has No Image to Match an E-mail Address
Part 4: Putting it all together with a Script to Update Address Book Contacts with Gravatar Images.

I have some ideas to take it further that may end up in a couple more posts. Please stay tuned and let me know what you think. I’ll construct the remaining posts based on feedback.

It connected to my blog effortlessly and allowed me to easily add categories, tags, and a photo.

Great job WordPress team!

I only have a couple minor gripes that I hope will be addressed later:

1. It would be easier to type if the application supported landscape mode and the wider keyboard that provides.

2. It’s too bad WordPress does not extract and store the GPS information along with the other metadata it grabs from photos.

I would love to hear comments from others who have tried it. How has it worked for you?