Filling Mac Address Book Pictures with Gravatars

[This information in this post is out of date. Please see Gravatar, AppleScript, and the OS X Address Book Revisited for more current information.]


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. Continue reading Filling Mac Address Book Pictures with Gravatars

Detecting When Gravatar Has No Image

[This information in this post is out of date. Please see Gravatar, AppleScript, and the OS X Address Book Revisited for more current information.]


We’re on our way to building an AppleScript to update all of the contacts in your Mac Address Book with pictures from the Gravatar service. This is part 3 of the series.

Part 1, Gravatar, AppleScript, and Address Book Pictures, introduced the topic and ended with a short AppleScript to construct a Gravatar URL given an e-mail address.

Then in part 2, Setting an Address Book Picture with AppleScript, we built a script showing how to successfully set a contact photo in Address Book.

Now we need to detect when the Gravatar service does not have an image on file for a given e-mail address. Continue reading Detecting When Gravatar Has No Image

Setting an Address Book Picture with AppleScript

[This information in this post is out of date. Please see Gravatar, AppleScript, and the OS X Address Book Revisited for more current information.]


In part 1, Gravatar, AppleScript, and Address Book Pictures, we covered the basics of getting a Gravatar URL with AppleScript. The end goal is to automatically update all of our Address Book pictures with Gravatars in one fell swoop.

There are a couple tricky things we need to solve to reach our goal. They aren’t difficult; just not well documented, if at all.

In this post I’ll show you how to update a contact picture with AppleScript. Continue reading Setting an Address Book Picture with AppleScript

OS X Leopard, 16 Great Small Touches

Mac OS X Leopard has been running on my primary computer for a week now and I’ve had a chance to put it to the test in my daily activities. Much has been written by others about the some of the larger new features so I won’t bother boring you with more of that. However, Apple has done a wonderful job, as usual, with their attention to some of the little things.

So here are just a few of the smaller OS X Leopard features that stood out to me. I don’t claim they are undiscovered new things. In fact, some are well-documented. But they are nice touches that I’ve found particularly useful. Continue reading OS X Leopard, 16 Great Small Touches