This vault is a super-reduced customer/contacts relationship management tool ("CRM") whose source of truth is Obsidian, and which offers an easy selective sync to Apple Contacts (on macOS) using macOS Shortcuts. The sync'd entries in Apple Contacts contain a link back to their source notes.

This is a proof of concept / MVP¹. I wanted to keep my contacts in an Obsidian vault, notes and all, while still being able to use my macOS address book (Contacts.app) – and therefore iOS, thanks to iCloud.

Let's clearly define the terms used in this project description to minimize confusion.

1. This vault is the source of truth. It contains all the information and notes for all my contacts, one note per person.
2. I do not want all of my contacts in my address book because there are personal ones, customers, clients, etc. – and not all of them are relevant in that context.
3. I only want to sync a subset of the information contained in a CN to its related ABE: basically enough to identify callers, email senders, SMS senders etc. but not much more.
4. An ABE contains a link back to its CN for easy access to the person's details.
5. A CN contains a clickable button that creates/updates the ABE, c/o Apple Shortcuts.

Minimal reliance on community plugins: I've tried to not use any community plugins. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to access the vault name inside of a Bases doc – but since the vault name is required for the both linking & syncing, I've decided to employ to Dataview. (And then I also installed Mononote because I strongly dislike having the same note open in several tabs.)

Unique IDs: The vault uses unique IDs ("UID") for all notes to make linking back from address book to the CN reliable. This means that the vault link in an ABE targets the CN by its UID, not by its title (as names may change). The UID creation is kept deliberately simple, it's just the letter "p" (for "person") + a Unix milliseconds timestamp. (In a real-life vault, I'd use a proper ULID or UUID, but as mentioned above, I've tried to keep the number of 3rd party plugins to a minimum.)

• Data flows from CN to ABE, but not the other way around.
• If I have to add to or edit information, it is done in the CN (source of truth).
• There is no automatic sync. After I edit a CN, I press the button manually. (Since the ABEs are relatively sparse, this would need to be done only when name, company, phone numbers, email address, photo, or URLs have changed.)
• Manual changes made in the ABE are overwritten during sync.

• Name (first, middle, last)
• Photo
• Company
• Birthday
• Street addresses
• Email addresses
• Phone numbers
• URLs

See INSTALLATION.

See USAGE. For an overview of the relevant building blocks of this vault, check Components/ and Templates/.

Carlo Zottmann, https://actions.work/ & https://c.zottmann.dev, [email protected]

MIT License.