We would love to add support for Exchange address books. But unfortunately, up until now we haven’t been able to figure out how to get access to this data. Apple’s developer documentation is rather sparse in this regard. Actually, the entire documentation only mentions that Exchange support has been added at the application layer. There is no mention of a developer API. We currently use Apple’s AddressBook.framework API to access the address book data, but obviously this API doesn’t provide access to Exchange address books.

Not seeing my Exchange contacts in LaunchBar has been nagging me for months, but I always assumed I had missed something on the configuration. I finally Googled it tonight, and saw it is a long standing issue. This comment is from November 2009. Hopefully Objective Development can get it figured out, or Apple can expose the right APIs.

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Ok.  Last one (for now at least!).  Here’s the syntax to put in a LaunchBar search template for Twitter’s “Find People” search:

http://twitter.com/search/users?q=*&category=people&source=users

To continue with the recent theme, here’s another quick tip for customizing LaunchBar search templates:

LaunchBar in its initial install includes a lot of search templates that you may not want in your index.  For example, there are default templates for “Amazon Deutschland”, “Google Japan”, “Wikipedia Deutsch”, etc.  These are not all that useful if you are a U.S. resident.

A snippet from my LaunchBar search template index. I've unchecked all of the non-U.S. Amazon entries.

You can prevent them from being shown (as well as any others you don’t want to see) in your index by simply unchecking them in the LaunchBar Index > Search Template window and then saving changes.

I just set up a LaunchBar search template for Twitter.  It is easy.  Just follow the same procedure I outlined in my post on setting up a LaunchBar search template for Gmail, but use the following search string instead:

http://twitter.com/#search?q=*

This just saved me a ton of time!

Of late, I’ve been hunkering down and digging into the depths of Objective Development’s LaunchBar.  It goes without saying that the utilty of the application is amazing.

(Note: If you are not familiar with LaunchBar and want to know what is all about, you should check out this short video or even this longer screencast for an overview).

LaunchBar’s “Search Templates” option provides a configurable interface to easily access the search functions of almost any website and comes with preconfigured search templates for many mainstream websites and search engines such as Google, Amazon, Wikipedia, Wolfram Alpha, and more.  The power of the feature however is that LaunchBar makes it very easy to add custom searches for your own needs.

To give you an example — I realized the other day that LaunchBar does not have a default search template to search Gmail messages, and I was able to create one in about 5 minutes.

1. Within LaunchBar, select Index > Show Index from the menu bar.
2. Click Search Templates (UTF-8)
3. Click Add..

1. Under Name, type “Gmail”
2. Under Details enter the following string (no quotes): “http://mail.google.com/mail/#search/*”

1. Close the window and save the configuration before exiting.

That’s it.  The next time you invoke LaunchBar, type “GM” and you should see an option to invoke a Gmail search template. Click the space bar and you will be presented with a text field to enter your gmail search string.

This template supports full gmail operators, i.e. from:, label:, etc., so give and as long as you are logged into gmail should work like a charm.