In a post on his web site 
, Chris Messina wonders why Apple doesn’t extend its Coverflow technology as a way of “browsing people”.
Formerly a member of the development team for Flock (”The Social Browser”), he once toyed with idea himself.
He has mocked up a vision of how this might look in Address Book:
The possibilities, he suggests, are enormous:
Imagine this kind of view showing up in Mail.app, Adium, iChat… where your friends, family and the rest get to update their own user pictures on a whim, and set their status and contact preferences in a way that visually makes sense.
This is a terrific idea. One of the best things about Mail is its human face.
Pulling the photos from contacts in Address Book and displaying them in their emails makes my day more personal. It humanises the time I spend emailing and reminds me that I am really dealing with the people behind the emails, not just with text. In fact, this was one of the reasons why I switched from PCs to Macs a few years ago.
For the same reason, I really like the iFaces notification utility, which still worked under Tiger but sadly may not work anymore. It sat on the Desktop and displayed the faces of people who had written newly arrived and unread emails (see screenshot on the right).
It’s another small way to give email a human face.
Of course, Chris is talking about something far more adventurous than that. I’m only imagining how good it would to have that contact information to hand in the results of a “Spotlight: Xxxx Xxxx” search from the Contextual Menu in Mail.app. Chris’ vision is more informed and his horizon wider.
UPDATE: As Aaron Harnly points out in the comments, you can get a rough and ready experience of what this might be like, by browsing your ~/Library/Application Support/Address Book/Metadata folder with Coverflow in Finder:
You can even use it to play the “face recognition game” Aaron describes. Hours of fun
the Finder actually allows this (sort of) when you do a spotlight-search for address book contacts without specifying a search term. see my screenshot: http://img214.imageshack.us/my.php?image=bild1sd7.png
Nice idea. I completely agree about how nice it is to see faces in various interfaces. I use Adium for IM and the Dock contact list style means my buddy list looks a lot like iFaces does. I use Quicksilver and with the Bezel interface I see big pictures of contacts. It also helps to differentiate similar names. I never send email to the “wrong” John because I see the face of the person I want.
You can kind of do this if you browse the folder
~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook/Metadata
in CoverFlow mode. However, the names are not displayed…
You can kind of do this if you browse the folder
~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook/Metadata
in CoverFlow mode. However, the names are not displayed, and the folder is sorted in a pretty much random fashion…
Ooh, neat! In combination with QuickLook, this can serve as a kind of “name quiz” if you’re trying to associate faces of classmates or business contacts with names — browse through the folder in CoverFlow, saying peoples’ names to yourself as you go. To check your answer, hit space, and the full address book card will pop up.
It would be nice if Apple had some way to automatically include your picture in your emails. I just tried adding the X-Image-Url header, but that doesn’t appear to work anymore (perhaps due to security concerns?)
Or am I missing something?
Coolest. Idea. Ever!
@aaron — Excellent! Thanks for pointing that out.
Anyone remembering xfaces?
That was a tool for mail notification under X11. There was even a way to submit your own face in the mail header (”X-Face: …”), cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Face
Nowadays, a 48×48 bitmap (i.e. B/W only, no grey, no color) is a bit out of date, of course — but it would be a fine possibility to have a similar standard with today’s 64×64 (or bigger) color portrait thumbnails used in OS X.
Who could forget?! It was before my time actually…
http://www.hawkwings.net/2006/07/12/openstep-the-prehistory-of-mailapp-plugins/
I guess I don’t get it. Who the heck has pictures of people in their address book? Who puts a picture of themselves, um, I don’t even KNOW where you’d put one, so other people get them in their address book?
I don’t have a single picture of anyone’s face in my address book. I don’t know anyone who does. I can’t even think of where I’d put such a picture so that others would happily see it in their address books, even if they wanted to, which I don’t know anyone who does. So let’s say I happen to know someone, somewhere, who does this. I end up with a “Coverflow” view with one or two pictures and a bunch of generic icons. Yeah, great.
@Jeremy: obviously some people have pictures of people in their address book. Functionality like this (and Quicksilver and Adium) make it useful to have pictures in there, and they are rather easy to set.
Since I’ve tagged my photos in iPhoto with everyones name, a quick iPhoto or Spotlight search lets me easily find an up-to-date photo for friends and family.
Adium will automatically update your address book with your contacts’ user pics, which many people set.
My Nokia cell phone syncs with my address book, contact pictures and all.
And lastly, if you set your picture in your own contact card, and send your vCard to someone, they will then have your picture in their address book.
It’s the Mac way – anywhere a contact can be assocaited with an image, they are, and its all centralized around Address Book.