Use iOS Address Book

Recently I have encountered an issue about using iOS Contacts or Apple's Address Book as data source for my application. The AB provides nice detail data structure for contacts, as well as views and APIs for adding, editing and deleting contacts. The issue is how I build a bridge between the AB contacts and my application.

Initially, I thought that the contacts in my app are mainly company contacts. In the AB framework, a contact record can be a person with names such first and last name, or an organization with a name, or both. Actually, when I stand back, my app's contact can be a company or a person. There should be no clear line between them. Therefore, I should not limit my data source to organization or company only.

Then I was puzzled by the issue who to present contacts from AB to my app. I don't mind to present all the contacts, but I would like to provide a convenient way to present a sub-set of contacts. I don't feel that it is good way to divide contacts into persons and companies.

Further exploration on AB framework and studying some example codes, I realized that contacts can be categorized into groups. Groups are defined by user. A group in AB is also record which has only one property kABGroupNameProperty. That opened my eyes. Why not let users to define their contact collection in group? Then my app will use that group as data source. Now I think that it's the best solution.

With this discovery, I find out a very useful and simple application case. By searching for the case in iTunes, I found a couple of apps. The app is very simple. Its main feature is for a user to manage or organize contacts into groups. I could work out a different and simple app. It is not hard to do it. I may get it done in a very short period of time. Sit back and rethink about this struggle period, my past pause and hard time are not a waste. You never know that a bright, wide and smooth pathway will suddenly present to your front when you think you are driving into a no-exit road.