Quixotic Bravado by Josh Babetski

So sometime over the past week, when I launched Address Book on my Mac (running Leopard), the application hung. I would either get no Address Book window, a partially rendered window, or it would render but not respond to any selections.

I had been doing some development and testing with Microformats over the past week or so, exporting all manner of malformed hCards into my Address Book; I’d assumed I’d imported a corrupted card and it corrupted the entire SQLite3 file somehow. Either that or the often flakey syncing with Google Contacts hosed something.

My only other clue was an error in the Console app that occurred every time I tried to launch or interact with the Address Book:

[NSCFArray insertObject:atIndex:]: attempt to insert nil

After some hit-and-miss searching I finally came across the culprit and an easy fix. This was a relief over diff’ing a 3 month old back-up and manually retyping the missing entries back in, using my iPhone as my “back-up.” The bug turned out to be from the recent 10.5.5 OS X update. It seems if you have a Smart Group in your Address Book and your rules include “not a member of” “any group,” Address Book will hang and throw that error.

The diagnosis and solution came from one “Jean Christie” on the Apple Support forum thread: “Address Book hangs on open.” Thanks go to them for the fix.

The solution is pretty easy, depending on how buggy Address Book is acting.

1. Open Address Book
2. Right-click the Smart Group with the “not a member of” “any group” rule
3. Change the rules to something like “name contains” “please work!“
4. Re-save the Smart Group (Note: this took me a few tries for the save to actually take)
5. Once the save takes, delete the group
6. Restart Address Book

If you’re having a similar issue and found this searching for a solution. I hope it helps.

Recent links for http://del.icio.us/quixado:

• A half dozen fun undocumented iPhone preferences - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) - Not all preferences appear in your iPhone Settings application. As I discussed rather thoroughly in my Modding Mac OS X book, it’s not that hard to dig through applications and discover undocumented…
• Genfavicon. Free Online Favicon Generator. Icon Generator. - A favicon (short for ‘favorites icon’), are litle icons associated with a particular website or webpage, shown next to the site’s name in the URL bar of most browsers.
• Safari Microformats plugin - The Safari Microformats plugin notifies you when the author of the website has published Microformats and allows you to easily import hCards and hCalendars in Address Book and iCal.
• De-lameify your dock and menubar - Make your Dock be flush against the corner of the desktop, instead of centered vertically or horizontally. Turn off menubar transparency on 10.5.