{"id":187,"date":"2003-06-25T15:13:10","date_gmt":"2003-06-25T19:13:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/wordpress\/i_want_a_button"},"modified":"2003-06-25T15:13:10","modified_gmt":"2003-06-25T19:13:10","slug":"i_want_a_button","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/2003\/06\/i_want_a_button.html","title":{"rendered":"I Want A Button"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I want a button in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.apple.com\/macosx\/panther\/mail.html\">Mail<\/a> that automatically adds contacts to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.apple.com\/macosx\/jaguar\/addressbook.html\">Address Book<\/a>. Right now Mail has an &#8220;Add Sender to Address Book&#8221; function, but all it does is add the email address. I want the street, the city, the zip code, the phone numbers&#8230; everything. <\/p>\n<p>Some emails include an &#8220;electronic business card&#8221; as an attachment, usually in a format such as <code>.vcf<\/code>. Many email applications allow you to drag-and-drop these <code>.vcf<\/code> files directly into your local address book, which is kind of nifty. However, any enthusiasm we might feel for <code>.vcf<\/code> attachments must be tempered by the fact that:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Many people find them to be <a href=\"http:\/\/www.google.com\/search?q=annoying+.vcf+attachments\">annoying<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>They present a <a href=\"http:\/\/vil.nai.com\/vil\/content\/v_99020.htm\">security risk<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>Most people don&#8217;t use them. (I certainly don&#8217;t).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Now, what many people <em>do<\/em> use is a plain text signature:<\/p>\n<pre>\nJames Q. Workerbee\nABC Industries, Inc.\n12345 Lakeside Dr.\nPleasantville, CA 90021\nTel: 888-555-1234 x567\nFax: 888-555-1021\n<\/pre>\n<p>This certainly isn&#8217;t beautifully structured data. It would be a lot easier to retrieve the information if we had standard for, say, passing this information in the email headers or tagging this as XML.<sup><a href=\"#25-1\">1<\/a><\/sup>. That solution would be a lot easier and more fun for the <em>programmers<\/em>.  But this solution depends on:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Deciding on a standard.<\/li>\n<li>Waiting for email applications to implement the standard.<\/li>\n<li>Hoping that users A) notice that this option is available and B) change their behavior in order to make use of the standard.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>Rather than all that, let&#8217;s take advantage of the thing that users do already. This won&#8217;t be easy, because plain text signatures are poorly structured. Still, a phone number looks different from a street number, which looks different from a firstname and lastname, which looks different from arbitrary text, and so on. A cell phone number often starts with <code>c:<\/code>, <code>cell:<\/code>, <code>m:<\/code>, or <code>mobile:<\/code>. We don&#8217;t have <a href=\"http:\/\/diveintomark.org\/archives\/2002\/12\/29\/million_dollar_markup.html\">million-dollar markup<\/a> to go on, but there is <em>some<\/em> structure here.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, back to The Button. When you select the button, the parser makes its best guess at person&#8217;s contact information. An Address Book window appears with the information filled in. You can then save the information, edit it, or dismiss it unsaved (if the parser&#8217;s results are total garbage). As long as the failure rate is low enough, this would be a pretty sweet little feature. Admittedly, it&#8217;s not the easiest application feature to build. But ladies and gentlemen, we <em>can<\/em> build it. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.google.com\/search?q=we+have+the+technology+six+million+dollar+man\">We have the technology<\/a>. Mail.app will be that application.  Better than it was before. Better&#8230; stronger&#8230; faster&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Whoops, got carried away there.<\/p>\n<p><small><a name=\"25-1\"><\/a>1. For all I know there <em>are<\/em> standards for doing this, in which case Step #1 is obviated.<\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Right now Mail has an &#8220;Add Sender to Address Book&#8221; function, but all it does is add the email address. I want the street, the city, the zip code, the phone numbers&#8230; everything.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-187","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=187"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}