Address Book on OS X has a neato “Find Duplicates” feature. But it doesn’t do everything I need it to.
On a mobile phone (Nokia ones, at least) if you have more than one contact with the same number, it gets confused when one of them calls, and doesn’t know who to display on the caller list.
So, a proper “Find Duplicates” should find the same number, and even further, the equivalent number if using +countryCode numbering, and allow you to choose who gets to keep the number.
This is most noticed at workplaces, although when you have a couple, such as your parents, who have the same home phone number it also manifests. That is, assuming your parents are still living together, anyway.
I might have to knock together an AppleScript to do this. (This entry is a note to self about that).
Hmm, a little more difficult than I’d first assumed. Getting the phone number of a person is easy (once you grasp that you need to get value of phone of person, which is a huge departure from virtually every other AppleScript dictionary), but finding other people with the same phone number isn’t so.
The problem is compounded by the fact that the way numbers is stored is related to how they are entered. For instance, if I enter the phone number as “0487483765″, it is stored as such, even though I have entries set up so it is displayed as “0487 483 765″, and it won’t match up with a phone number entry I have entered in that format.
You might be able to get over it by going through each person, and looking for combinations that match the number, but this would start to take a bit of time.
1 day, 2 hours after the fact.