The number of possible data fields in Address Book often seems endless. Everything from addresses and instant messenger screen names to the names of a contact’s brother or assistant are possible. One of the fields that I have only recently started playing around with is the Related Names field. This field allows you to link contacts together based on their relationships. You can add as many related names as you want to a contact. Once you have added a related name, you can open the related contact’s card by clicking on the field descriptor to the left of their name and selecting “Show [Name].”
While most features in any Apple program work completely intuitively and intelligently, one part of the Related Names field is not. It is actually quite stupid. If you want to set up a relationship like husband and wife or mother and child, you have to manually edit both of the contacts and set up the Related Names field! This flaw really cripples this feature in Address Book, but luckily, tl.software has a great freeware plug-in for the application that solves the issue.
This plug-in is Relationship Completer, a great tool that does exactly what it says: it completes relationships. Once you install Relationship Completer by placing the plug-in file in ~/Library/Address Book Plug-ins and restarting Address Book, the plug-in will add another item to the contextual menu that pops up when you click on the field title to the left of the related name. Clicking the new item will add automate adding the Related Names field to the related contact in the appropriate format (brother to sibling, father to child, spouse to spouse). Hopefully OS X 10.6 or OS 11 will include an improved Address Book which automatically does this, but Relationship Completer is the best solution at the moment.
I have always been a big fan of Address Book and all its related plug-ins. Most of its features and a handful of plug-ins were covered in Get the Most Out of Address Book, and we also have a few articles on integrating Address Book with Mutt and with Adium. Hawk Wings also has a large archive of Address Book tips worth looking at. (That’s where I found Relationship Completer!)
[Via Hawk Wings]
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