Address Book: Custom Fields and/or Custom Values

Question

Address Book: Custom Fields and/or Custom Values

There are two things I would like to capture in my Address Book contacts....

1. Many contacts have/use Skype and I'd like to save their Skype name in an Instant Messaging field that Address Book provides. But, even after about 3-4 versions of Mac OS X upgrades (10.3-10.6), the only options listed are AIM, ICQ, Jabber, MSN and Yahoo. ***?! Seriously? No Skype? I don't know anyone who uses Jabber and hundreds who use Skype. Yes, I could use Jabber and store only Skype info, but why should I have to use a hack? Is there a way with looking in the Package Contents or another way to either add "Skype" or change "Jabber" to "Skype"?

2. I belong to a social community site (www.glocals.com) and often want to create an Address Book contact for people I know from the site. I'd love to create a field to store their login name or nickname on that site. If I could figure out #1, I'd just do the same for "glocals", but as it's not "Instant Messaging", per se, it doesn't quite fit.

Any thoughts?

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.4)

Posted on Aug 21, 2010 11:07 AM

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Answer 1

Aug 21, 2010 7:09 PM in response to Zonker in Russia

Hi there.

There is something I can think of, not sure if it is what you want to do though.

When in Address Book, and editing a contact, do you notice the red/green +/- buttons. You could just add a custom field there, and add the contact's Skype name or whatever you like. However as you said about changing the field that has AIM/ICQ/Jabber etc in it, as far as I am aware there is no way to modify that (without editing the application itself). But the above would be a reasonable workaround...

Cheers

Taylor

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Answer 2

Camelot

Level 9

54,333 points

Aug 21, 2010 8:24 PM in response to Zonker in Russia

This is entirely possible to do.

As already mentioned, when you edit a person's record you can add additional contact fields by clicking the green + icon. Choose 'custom' from the label menu and you can call it whatever you like - Skype, glocals, whatever.

You can also use Address Book -> Preferences -> Template to setup these custom fields as defaults, so they're available on every person's record that you create.

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Answer 3

Aug 22, 2010 4:25 PM in response to Taylor R Nelson

@taylor thanks for the suggestion, but it's not quite what i had in mind. The red -/green + buttons are used to add/remove more items in the same category, ie., phone numbers, email addresses, URLs, etc. If you finish editing a record and then click on one of these fields, you get a contextual menu with various options.

But, my Skype name is not an email address, nor is it a phone number. It belongs in the IM section of the Contact template, but unlike the "Custom" option for labeling a Phone Number, the IM drop-down menu doesn't have a Custom option, nor a Skype option.

There are several possible workarounds, but that's the point, innit? Skype has been around a long time - there shouldn't be a need for a workaround.

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Answer 4

Aug 26, 2010 1:56 PM in response to Zonker in Russia

When you create custom field names like this, do those custom names get preserved when you export (and later import again) your address book?

For example: You might export all of your contacts out of your Address Book into a vCards file and then put that file away for safe keeping. If you later re-import that file back into Address Book (such as after you've just done a clean install of OS X), will your custom field names still be there?

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Answer 5

Sep 8, 2010 9:00 AM in response to Zonker in Russia

I'm with Zonker on this. I know it seems fussy but I want Skype to be one of the IM choices in the pull down list, which contains Jabber and ICQ yet not the hugely popular choice of Skype. Contacts seems frozen in time on this front. Hey Apple, how about it?

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