Contact Cleaner is a utility that can be used to quickly cleanse your Apple Address Book addresses. Contact Cleaner provides the following convenient features:
For fun and to quench the perfectionist in me and hopefully others.
Contact Cleaner is very easy to use. When you launch Contact Cleaner, it will present the main window and display each contact in your address book that has one or more addresses as shown below.
The toolbar provides convenient access to the most commonly used features via context-sensitive buttons. When you select one or more addresses, you can Standardize them against the USPS database, reformat them to title case or delete them. If you select a contact, you can Add an address.
To standardize one or more addresses, simply select the addresses as shown below and click the Standardize toolbar icon.
Contact Cleaner will replace the address with a complete address that complies to the USPS database as shown below. In this example, it corrected the street address, added the proper city, and state and added the 4-digit zipcode prefix.
The easiest way to Standardize your Address Book addresses is to select them all and click Standardize. Preliminary tests show that Contact Cleaner can standardize 150 addresses in less than 20 seconds on a standard broadband connection because it leverages Mac OS X's multi-threading capability. The screenshot below shows the results after all addresses have been standardized.
Notice that the USPS standardized addresses are formatted as all capital letters. For those of you like me who prefer title case, you can select all address (control-a) and click the Title Case toolbar icon to reformat the addresses with title case as shown below.
Don't forget to save your addresses when you are done.
Contact Cleaner is currently in limited public beta. Please check back later.
Copyright (c) 2003 Bruce B. Lacey. All rights reserved.