Syncing Gmail Contacts With Apple’s Address Book

After spending the last two days trying to figure out a way to sync my contacts I’ve given up. I just don’t think that there is an easy reliable way to sync Gmail Contacts with Apple’s Address Book. This sort of amazed me because of how seamlessly Google Calendars integrates with Apple’s iCal. I did run across an Apple script that had the potential to do what I wanted. But if tell short. ABG Merge essentially compares the csv file you export from your Gmail contacts with your OS X Address Book. Any contacts not present in the Address Book program are imported. Any contacts in the Address Book, but not in your Gmail contacts are added to the csv file. The updated csv file is then uploaded back to your Gmail account. If only it was that easy…

The whole process was a little dirty. The Apple Script has a ton of windows that pop up throughout the process which gets a bit annoying. I was able to get my contacts imported into the Address Book, but was never able to get any syncing to take place. The Apple Script actually crashed on me two times and I just gave up. I ended up deleting everything in my Address Book to try to find a cleaner method.

Like I said before I couldn’t find anything that would sync Gmail and Apples Address Book. I decided that a simple import would be good enough for now. To accomplish that I busted out Address Book Importer. This neat little piece of software imports csv files into Apple’s Address Book. Additionally, Address Book Importer allows the user to choose how the data in the csv file will be mapped to the fields in Address Book. This worked great! I ran into one small hiccup though. Gmail insists on exporting the first and last name into a single field withing the csv file. Address Book expects the name to be split into first and last names. To fix this I just resorted to manually editing the Address Book entries.

Overall I was bummed that I couldn’t get my contacts to sync. Although its nice having my contacts imported into the Address Book, syncing would have been the optimal solution. I guess that Gmail just doesn’t play well with OS X. If anyone reading this has an eloquent way to sync Gmail and Address Book contacts I’d love to hear about it!