Comments on: Name that Research Project…

By: The Code Swami

The Code Swami — Tue, 19 Jul 2005 02:40:13 +0000

By: Paul Mison

Paul Mison — Wed, 29 Jun 2005 13:19:51 +0000

ADDs get you some of the way, but pulling out addresses and associating them with people sounds much more like Gnome’s Dashboard (sigh, you have to prefix so much these days), which seems to have evolved into their Beagle search tool. I’m not sure how much of Dashboard made it across, but looking at the screenshots of Beagle, I suspect “not enough”.

http://www.nat.org/dashboard/

Sometimes I think that Apple’s core tools are scriptable enough to let you have a good go at it, but I’ve not quite got it together to really try. (Notifications coming out of Mail might help too. Maybe Growl would be useful?)

By: Gordon

Gordon — Tue, 28 Jun 2005 20:28:40 +0000

There was a public release (as in, for end users) of Data Detectors too. I wrote the manual, which someone has posted online in PDF at . It would have been able to handle the task you’re writing about, and it was extensible so you could write your own detectors if you found the included ones to be lacking.

ADD worked quite well, but didn’t get a lot of attention perhaps because it lacked a whizzy interface and wasn’t very discoverable. (ADD had a control panel, but the detectors themselves were only available via the contextual menu, and only when an appropriate data type was selected.)

By: Jochen Wolters

Jochen Wolters — Tue, 28 Jun 2005 11:24:12 +0000

ADDs present a fabulous concept, and it’s a shame that Apple is not really implementing, let alone advancing, that idea.

A great, although somewhat lengthy, overview of ADD and the LiveDoc technology based on it, is From documents to objects: An overview of LiveDoc by Jim Miller and Thomas Bonura.

Also heavily involved in the development of ADDs was Bruce Horn, one of the fathers of the original Mac. Little more than a year ago, MacThemes.net featured an insightful interview with Bruce, which is well worth the read, and segment two of that interview also addresses LiveDoc.

By: ssp

ssp — Tue, 28 Jun 2005 09:11:12 +0000

ADD were cool.

In a way, getting the Services menu as a replacement in OSX was going a step back (as with ADD you’d only get those items which actually were appropriate, rather than a whole load of junk).

But I don’t think ADD were fully up to what the post you reference suggests. It looks more like a case for an AppleScript… although I doubt that anybody will be able to write code which will recognise addresses reliably in E-Mails as people tend to write them in wildly different ways and there are just so many different kinds of addresses.

By: Daniel J. Wilson

Daniel J. Wilson — Tue, 28 Jun 2005 02:04:40 +0000

Apple Data Detectors. The SDK is still available:

http://developer.apple.com/sdk/