Filed under: Software, TUAW Tips
TUAW Tip: Smart Groups in Address Book
To start a Smart Group, go to File > New Smart Group. A dialog will drop down in Address Book for you to start entering criteria for filtering. For example, you could create a group of everyone whose birthday you have in your contacts by choosing the item Birthday from the first drop-down menu item, then adding the menu item "is set." Note that you can't create a list of people with birthdays in June, which is a bummer. But the Smart Groups have a variety of ways to filter, some more useful than others and several are dependent on the data (dates vs. text, for example).
To delete a group you'll have to make a trip to the menus, as no amount of right-clicking or key pressing will do it. Delete is in the Edit menu, under Delete Group.
One more thing: the notes field in Address Book extends the power of Smart Groups just a bit. After returning from WWDC I added the business cards of people I met and added the note "wwdc" to each one. I then made a Smart Group where the Note contains 'wwdc' and now I've got an easy way to see the group of people I met at WWDC. Think of the Notes field as a loose tag field, if you like.
I've also set up my Address Book to add family members based on a list of surnames, but that may only work if you have an oddball last name like mine!
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Scott said 6:31PM on 8-04-2009
Did TUAW get pwn'd?
This is blank, as well as other garbled posts today.
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Grant said 6:00PM on 8-05-2009
I noticed some weirdness today too - earlier today, Google Reader showed me a ton of TUAW posts dated Aug. 4 that only contained titles, and when I went to the actual TUAW site none of these posts were there. This was one of them. Other titles that showed up at titles in GReader but aren't on TUAW yet are "Bodega: App Store for OS X" and "Put Things Off is an iPhone Task Manager Worth Owning". Am I getting a glimpse into the future???
Michael Rose said 8:48PM on 8-05-2009
We, along with other Weblogs sites, had a major server issue that caused unfinished/unpublished posts to show up on the site.
Le Big Mac said 5:55PM on 8-05-2009
Smart groups are nice, but far too limited. You've pointed to one limit (birthdays by month, although you could sort the smart group and then create non-smart groups).
Another limit is the "last updated" field that is inserted in each card. No way to sort out the last updated by certain dates (e.g., long ago or recently)
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bikeham said 6:18PM on 8-05-2009
Smart groups would be more useful if you could have a "recently accessed card"?
JaceFace said 6:17PM on 8-05-2009
Would also be nice if iTunes would allow me to sync my smart address books and playlists to my iPhone.
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adam said 6:37PM on 8-05-2009
+1. Would make my life a whole hell of a lot easier than having to add a duplicate non-smart group to my ever growing list.
JaceFace said 6:45PM on 8-05-2009
lets just go a head at call those 'non-smart' groups, 'dumb' groups. that way we can feel slightly better about this ridiculous limitation.
Thomas Maier said 7:02PM on 8-05-2009
let’s face it: we need native support of smart groups in Address Book. anything with 10.6.0 ? :P
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George said 7:11PM on 8-05-2009
I had an issue with a Smart Group that froze up my Address Book. I believe it was the criteria "Card is not a member of any Group". Which would have been a really handy Smart Group to have…
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Elaine said 10:49PM on 8-05-2009
Great stuff, Smart Groups, but they work only on the computer. They didn't sync onto the Treo 650 I used until my Sprint contract ran out, and they don't sync onto the iPhone. To get grouped contacts onto the iPhone, use the "Copy from Smart to Dumb" applescript by David Bills. Find it at:
http://dfbills.com/display/277
You can also include the script in an Automator function that runs once a day, once a week or whatever. Do the scheduling in iCal. Works great!
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Khalid said 6:30AM on 8-06-2009
Three problems with smart groups:
1- It doesn't sync with iPhone at all.
2- I had to create a rule to match numbers beginning with a prefix but only one number gets matched and it doesn't match the rest if more than one number is associated with a contact.
3- Rule matching is either "All" or "Any" so you can't create a rule to match something like (X & Y) Or (Z & Q) and this specific problem also exists in mail.app when creating smart mailboxes.
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