Appending country code to all contact numbers
And so I got the LG Optimus One for a family member and transferred over his contacts easily thanks to Mac OS X Address Book’s built-in ability to synchronize with Google Contacts. The Google Android platform certainly has some excellent features not found in the iPhone ‘s iOS – but more of that in another (future) post.
The only problem was that the Optimus One could not seem to identify a caller if his contact entry did not have the country/area code appended. As the family member’s previous phone was an old non-smartphone candy bar type, almost all his contacts did not have the country code! I was dreading the need to spend an entire afternoon doing data entry when I chanced upon an elegant solution on the Apple discussion forums.
Basically you need to launch the Applescript Editor and paste in this code
property myAreaCode : "65 " tell application "Address Book" repeat with aPerson in people set thePhones to phones of aPerson if thePhones is not {} then set errorList to {} repeat with aPhoneNumber in thePhones set theNumber to value of aPhoneNumber if length of (theNumber) is less than 10 then try set value of aPhoneNumber to myAreaCode & value of aPhoneNumber on error copy name of aPerson to end of errorList end try end if end repeat if errorList is not {} then display dialog errorList end if end if end repeat save end tell
Now select the contacts in whose numbers you want to change and click Run in Script Editor. This will add 65 to the front of all phone numbers of all selected people, if their current numbers are less than 10 digits long (the typical phone number in Singapore with country code is 10 digits long – you may need to change this setting).