Open source Mac (and Linux) developers: take over SBook5

Great news!

The most amazing address book ever, SBook5 by Simson L. Garfinkle is being released to the community as open source software. I hope someone picks it up, and ports this Mac OS X application to Linux, also. Add a good clip and clipboard recorder to Linux and I am there when my iBook expires. (I hope to see a lot of people taking a path from the wilderness of Windows to the majesty of Mac to the glory of open source...)

It always bothered me that development had stopped on SBook before I found it. But it really is the greatest– and I thought that before I found out today that it has Boolean searching! Use address&book to find only entries with both. Before I thought keywords and phrases had to be sequential, kept in order, to be able to search on both. So I hadn't been using it to its full potential, not even close. Now I will tag with wild abandon.

I have 2,707 entries, many with pastes of way more text than I ought to, and it's still fast.

The whole point of SBook5 is that instead of putting a phone number in one field, and an address in another, and making multiple fields for multiple, and putting variations on a persons name somewhere else, you just put in all the information in one dump, SBook5 knows what an e-mail address and what's a phone number and what's a web site, and you search from one field for whatever you need and it finds in nearly instantaneously– no noticeable time, really. (I find Mac's Spotlight to be very slow, for a point of comparison.)

That's my plug for desktop application programmers to pick up the code for this great software and run with it-- though I'm not sure what else one could want. It already updates Apple's Address Book somehow, not that I really use that feature. This is not just an alternative, SBook has completely replaced Macintosh OS X Address Book for me.

Oh, that's what I want: for SBook to work as a shared application, or share its data, or be able to import its data into CiviCRM. Again, it's already mirroring somehow into Apple's Address Book, so it should be possible.

Now I have to think about implementing this artificial intelligence data mapping capability in Drupal...