Simon Schoeters <p>Today we launched a new website: <a href="http://www.milkcarton.be/" title="Mac OS X applications and frameworks by milkcarton" class="ext" rel="me">milkcarton.be</a>. Last year we started developing a small Cocoa application but got stuck and never got to something &lsquo;release worthy&rsquo;, the half finished program was waiting there to be forgotten. A few months ago we decided to pick up where we left of and fix the design mistakes we made last year. We started from scratch and here we are, releasing our first private beta today!</p> <h3>Lustro</h3> <p>What is this mysterious app? It listens to the name <strong>Lustro</strong> and is a small Address Book exporter for Mac OS X Leopard. It exports all your contacts to <abbr title="Comma-separated values">CSV</abbr>, tab-delimited or hCard files or overwrites your Google Contacts with the ones on your Mac (so that you have access to all your Address Book contacts in GMail). If this sounds like something you could use you can <a href="http://www.milkcarton.be/contact" title="Contact milkcarton" class="ext" rel="me">drop us a note</a> as we are still looking for beta testers. Lustro is free and open source so there is no excuse to chicken out on this one.</p> <h3>milkcarton</h3> <p>We didn't really have a decent home for Lustro so we decided to create a new website to host these little applications, frameworks or other bits of code we designed and will design. That's <a href="http://www.milkcarton.be/" title="Mac OS X applications and frameworks by milkcarton" class="ext" rel="me">milkcarton.be</a>: hop over there to and have a look around.</p> 2008-06-20T18:15:57+02:00 29 1 launching-milkcarton-lustro 2008-06-20T18:15:57+02:00 Simon Schoeters <p>Only 3 days ago we launched the first version of <a href="http://www.milkcarton.be/apps/lustro" title="Lustro, export your Address Book contacts" class="ext">Lustro</a>. It took us a week between the beta testing and the final release and we fixed and enhanced quite a few things. Lustro is our little Mac OS X Leopard app to export your Address Book contacts to <abbr title="Comma-separated values">CSV</abbr>, tab delimited, hCards and Google Contacts.</p> <h3>Google Contacts export</h3> <p>A few months back making an application that exports your Address Book contacts to GMail sounded like a useful idea. Little the we know that Apple was working on the same thing. A few weeks before we released the beta version Apple came out with their built-in Address Book to Google Contacts export with the release of <a href="http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1141" class="ext" title="About the Mac OS X 10.5.3 Update">Mac OS X 10.5.3</a>. We are not good enough to beat Apple... not yet.</p> <p>We decided to keep the Google export in Lustro for the following reason (copied from the Lustro Help):</p> <blockquote>&ldquo;Address Book also synchronizes with MobileMe, Exchange, Yahoo! and Google if you enable this in the preferences. Lustro still includes the Google Contacts export as the Address Book syncing only works if you have connected an iPhone or iPod Touch before and the syncing mechanism is not perfect at the time of writing (e.g. company cards show an empty name in the GMail contacts list).&rdquo;</blockquote> <p>So there are a few smaller reasons why you would still use Lustro today, maybe we can add the photo export in the next release as Apple skipped that one as well.</p> <h3>hCard exports</h3> <p>The other mayor feature are the <a href="http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard" title="hCard - Microformats wiki" class="ext">hCard</a> exports. We couldn't find any hCard exporters for Apple so why not include it? We got some indirect feedback from <span class="vcard"><a href="http://flickr.com/photos/factoryjoe/2625201023/" class="fn ext">Chris Messina</a>, <span class="vcard"><a href="http://flickr.com/photos/factoryjoe/2625201023/comment72157605921180862/" class="fn ext">Brian Suda</a></span>, <span class="vcard"><a href="http://flickr.com/photos/factoryjoe/2625201023/comment72157605908401795/" class="fn ext">Tantek &Ccedil;elik</a></span>, <span class="vcard"><a href="http://microformatique.com/?p=263" class="fn ext">John Allsopp</a></span> and <span class="vcard"><a href="http://ma.gnolia.com/people/adactio/bookmarks/scucuwumuch" class="fn ext">Jeremy Keith</a>, whow, I'm impressed! In the end I think we released Lustro a little too late for the GMail export thing, the buzz was over and lots of GMail exporters started to pop-up but the hCard export made up for that one.</p> <p><span class="vcard"><a href="http://flickr.com/photos/factoryjoe/2625201023/comment72157605921180862/" class="fn ext">Brian Suda</a></span>'s idea for a distributed hCard export sounds great. I don't think it fits in Lustro as it's the opposite way but I can see an Address Book plugin that &lsquo;subscribes&rsquo; on hCard enabled webpages.</p> 2008-07-03T20:02:40+02:00 30 1 lustro-out-now 2009-02-21T22:09:25+01:00