TMO Quick Tip - Address Book: Easy Relationships

by , 7:30 AM EDT, June 9th, 2008

Apple's Address Book application does a perfectly fine job of tracking everyone in your life, and it even lets you create relationships between contacts so that friends or relatives are linked. The problem is that you have to manually create that link on both people's cards -- unless you use Relationship Completer.

Relationship Completer is an Address Book plug-in that completes the process of building a relationship between contacts so that you don't have to duplicate your efforts. You set up the first relationship, and then let Relationship Completer finish the job for the second contact.

The plug-in is free, and you can download it at the tl.software Web site. Install Relationship Completer in Library/Address Book Plug-Ins in your home directory, and then restart Address Book.

Here's how to make Relationship Completer do its magic:

• Launch Address Book, and make sure that you have a contact card for both of the contacts you want to link.
• Now select one of the two contacts you want to link with a relationship.
• Click the Edit button, add the name of the person you want to link to in the Relationship field, and click the Edit button again.
• Command-click on the Relationship field and choose the option to link the two people together.

Control-click on a relationship to link contacts.

For example, let's say I want to link Ford Prefect and Arthur Dent as friends in Address Book. I first add Arthur's name to the relationship field in Ford's contact card as a friend. Then I Command-click on the Friend title and choose Make "Ford Prefect" friend of "Arthur Dent" from the pop-up menu. Ford will automatically be added to Arthur's card as a friend, saving me the trouble of manually adding Ford to the card myself.

Relationship Completer is a great time saver since you don't have to double your data entry just to link two contact cards in Address Book.

Jeff Gamet is TMO's Morning Editor and Reviews Editor. He lectures, teaches and speaks on Mac OS X and design-related topics, and is the author of The Designer's Guide to Mac OS X from Peachpit Press.

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