Only 3 days ago we launched the first version of Lustro. Lustro is our little Mac OS X Leopard app to export your Address Book contacts to CSV, tab delimited, hCards and Google Contacts. A week between the beta and the final release, and we fixed and enhanced quite a few things.

Google Contacts export

A few months back making an application that exports your Address Book contacts to GMail sounded like a useful idea. Little did we know that Apple was working on the same thing. A few weeks before we released the beta version Apple came out with their built-in Address Book to Google Contacts export with the release of Mac OS X 10.5.3. We are not good enough to beat Apple, not yet.

We decided to keep the Google export in Lustro for the following reason (copied from Lustro’s Help):

“Address Book also synchronizes with MobileMe, Exchange, Yahoo! and Google if you enable this in the preferences. Lustro still includes the Google Contacts export as the Address Book syncing only works if you have connected an iPhone or iPod Touch before and the syncing mechanism is not perfect at the time of writing (e.g., company cards show an empty name in the GMail contacts list).”

There are a few smaller reasons why you would still use Lustro today, we can add the photo export in the next release as Apple skipped that one.

hCard exports

The other mayor feature is the hCard exports. We couldn't find any hCard exporters for Apple so why not include it? We got some indirect feedback from Chris Messina, Brian Suda, Tantek Çelik, John Allsopp and Jeremy Keith, wow, I’m impressed! In the end I think we released Lustro too late for the GMail export, the buzz was over and lots of GMail exporters started to pop-up, but the hCard export made up for that one.

Brian Suda’s idea for a distributed hCard export sounds great. I don’t think it fits in Lustro as it’s the opposite, but I can see an Address Book plugin that ‘subscribes’ on hCard enabled webpages.