Benjamin Harley has updated his applescripted utility ABGMerge which offers true two-way syncing between Address Book and Gmail.
The latest release makes a number of significant improvements.
It has repackaged as an application, and features a ‘Safe Mode’ with the option to restore your Address Book to its initial contents.
User interaction has been streamlined and improved, and the app no longer leaves extraneous data in your Address Book (altough it still leaves “<myABGmerge>” in Gmail notes so you know which ones are synchronized to your Address Book).
It’s also faster: the basic synchronization algorithms are significantly refined.
Benjamin says,
It is still complicated, and probably not for people without some savvy. It doesn’t necessarily handle foreign addresses all that well. And it probably still has some bugs. But it is far more robust now than it was before – and it sure beets doing a one off import / export between the two applications. Address Book is such a good repository for address information, but if you don’t have .mac – Gmail may be the best bet to get at that information when you are at work or away.
You can get ABGMerge from Benjamin’s web site 
.
“It has repackaged as an application, and features a ‘Safe Mode’ with the option to restore your Address Kook to its initial contents.”
Address Kook ? :)
Well, I didn’t use the Safe Mode and it mucked up my Address Kook.. er.. Book. Extra fields (phonetic first and last names) were inserted into each Address Book entry, with the email address for each being inserted into the ‘Phonetic Last Name’ field.
A savvy person could have performed some global corrective action, but I had to go through and correct each individual record (~400). (I also should have made a Back Up copy of Address Book before playing with ABGMerge).
Anyway, my Book is again nicely kooked instead of being toasted. :-)
” Address Book is such a good repository for address information, but if you don’t have .mac – Gmail may be the best bet to get at that information when you are at work or away.”
Another way, which works well for me, is to have a PDA which you sync with your home and work computers.
Steve
to steve l. sorry you had to go through it by hand. it is very easy to clean up the phonetic names fields, you can use the email button on my webpage to ask for help. it you try it again – with 400 contacts, the script will be relatively slow – use the safe mode, and you’ll have the option of restoring (if it doesn’t complete for some reason), and verifying all the changes it makes, and when it is all over, run abgmerge again and it will clean up all the extraneous data.
Thanks Benjamin. The mess was to a large degree my fault: I should have had used one of the exit strategies, and I should have asked for help.
I’ll have another crack at it.
SL