I am an avid user of the XING business network, an online community much like LikedIn. When you have an account there, you can also export vCard files from your online address book to import contacts into your local Mac OS X Address Book.
Unfortunately Address Book will not display the corresponding contact pictures of imported XING vCards. But Christian Aust wrote an excellent free Python script to successfully convert the downloaded vCards, so that the contact pictures are shown in Address Book after import!
Now, we all know that most Mac users love convenience and do not want to touch the Terminal more than necessary. And that’s why I simply wrote an AppleScript wrapper for Christian’s tool to make life a bit easier:
The script requires Mac OS X 10.4 or higher and an active internet connection, as the Python script has to access the contact pictures located on the XING servers.
You can use the XING vCard Utility in two different ways:
Just drag and drop unconverted XING vCards onto the script (droplet).
Open the script with a double-click. Now you are asked to choose a folder containing unconverted vCard files.
I recommend to use the XING vCard Utility as a toolbar script. This way you can conveniently drag and drop unconverted vCard files onto it from any Finder window:
The script saves a converted vCard file in the parent folder of the original vCard file and uses the following naming scheme:
*.vcf → -conv.vcf
Examples:
Original vCard file is located on the desktop: /Users/martin/Desktop/vcard-Steve-Jobs.vcf
Converted vCard file is saved here: /Users/martin/Desktop/vcard-Steve-Jobs-conv.vcf
But I don’t like the standard icon. So I made a humble attempt in creating a better icon, but don’t know how to put it here. Is there a way I can upload the icon?
If you control-click on the script’s icon in the Finder and choose the menu item Show package contents, you can find an icon file named droplet.icns in this directory:
this is great work, i have been searching for a solution like that for month. One more question: XING is also writing some information in the notes field like “24.07.2009, 16:31 - XING - http://www.xing.com
CLASS: PRIVATE”. Is it possible to get rid of this too with yout rool or in any other automatic way?
I realized that my little script was somewhat popular, but wildly outdated. Today I released a complete rewrite of the app, which comes as a proper OSX application (no more fiddling with command line scripts and the like)
Features include:
OSX application
downloads external images - faster
optional cropping of images to square size
removal of additional data that would show up as notes
english and german, OS X 10.5/10.6
The download is available here (sorry, german only for now)
Die Benutzung ist und bleibt kostenlos, wer das Programm nützlich findet, ist herzlich eingeladen, einen Betrag seiner Wahl via Paypal zu spenden. Beste Grüße,
Just send the zipped icon to me via eMail, I’ll then try to update the download as soon as possible.