Introduction

Address Book is a technology that encompasses a centralized database for contact and group information, an application for viewing that information, and a programmatic interface for accessing that information in your own applications. The database contains information such as user names, street addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, and distribution lists. Applications that use the Address Book framework can share this contact information with other applications, including Mail and Messages, or extend it to include application-specific information.

In addition to the Objective-C interface described in this book, the Address Book framework also provides a C interface. This document points out fundamental differences between the two as appropriate, but the majority of the code samples are written in Objective-C only. Developers using the C programming interface should refer to Using the Address Book C API and Address Book C Framework Reference for Mac for information about mapping the Objective-C code to C.

Who Should Read This Document?

This document is designed for anyone who wants to leverage the abilities of the OS X Address Book technology in their application. You should read it to learn how to access a user’s address book, add new properties to the address book database, and create action plug-ins for the Address Book application.

It is expected that you are already familiar with Xcode and the basics of Mac app development.

Organization of This Document

The document contains the following articles:

See Also