That's the way most companies go. None of them ever return.\
Address Book's openness is for freeware and common-sense-over-money-for-nothing shareware.
There is nothing principally difficult to do to implement Address Book integration. If a developer doesn't want to do something because he is afraid, he'd better stop writing programs at all.
By the way, what features do you think Address Book lacks? What makes you use 3rd parties' analogs?
To be honest, I can see their point. A lot of developers have been burned over the years by Apple, back when they were trying any old thing and then dropping it later. (OpenDoc? HyperCard? *Newton*?) Entire companies whose livelihoods depended on these technologies were shut down overnight with no recourse.
However.
They already have a database implementation they rolled themselves. They keep that technology as a backup, ready to be used if things go wrong, and instead hitch to the central database to increase interoperability. (It's called refactoring for abstraction... good tool to have.)
Now, if there are actual honest to goodness *technical* reasons why they can't do this (bugs in the framework, lack of something they just plain cannot do without to support their users), then that's something else, and they need to work with Apple to fix it, instead of just taking their ball and going home.
Too bad, the UI doesn't look half bad, but syncing is a stop-gap hack, no matter how much effort they put into it. It's a nice gesture, but ultimately it's not what's needed.
By the way, what features do you think Address Book lacks? What makes you use 3rd parties' analogs?
Daylite is a contact management app that links people to projects, tracks progress, links notes, etc. It isn't a replacement for AddressBook, it is an app that could take advantage of AddressBook. Unfortunately, it falls short in this area.
And ironically, at this time they are trying to assist me as to why Daylite, after syncing with my AddressBook, does not bring all of my contacts into their app. Out of 1400 contacts, it seems to miss about 120 of them. Oops!
Wouldn't it be nice if Entourage supported MacOS X Address Book? Wouldn't it be nice if Word supported MacOS X long file names? Haha if they claim it would require major recoding for longer than 32 letter filenames in Word imagine the bitching kcmac recieved in his emial. Thanks anyway kcmac but remember it's Micro$oft. Office is its own OS..
Comments
Address Book's openness is for freeware and common-sense-over-money-for-nothing shareware.
There is nothing principally difficult to do to implement Address Book integration. If a developer doesn't want to do something because he is afraid, he'd better stop writing programs at all.
By the way, what features do you think Address Book lacks? What makes you use 3rd parties' analogs?
However.
They already have a database implementation they rolled themselves. They keep that technology as a backup, ready to be used if things go wrong, and instead hitch to the central database to increase interoperability. (It's called refactoring for abstraction... good tool to have.)
Now, if there are actual honest to goodness *technical* reasons why they can't do this (bugs in the framework, lack of something they just plain cannot do without to support their users), then that's something else, and they need to work with Apple to fix it, instead of just taking their ball and going home.
Too bad, the UI doesn't look half bad, but syncing is a stop-gap hack, no matter how much effort they put into it. It's a nice gesture, but ultimately it's not what's needed.
By the way, what features do you think Address Book lacks? What makes you use 3rd parties' analogs?
Daylite is a contact management app that links people to projects, tracks progress, links notes, etc. It isn't a replacement for AddressBook, it is an app that could take advantage of AddressBook. Unfortunately, it falls short in this area.
And ironically, at this time they are trying to assist me as to why Daylite, after syncing with my AddressBook, does not bring all of my contacts into their app. Out of 1400 contacts, it seems to miss about 120 of them. Oops!