Having done some user testing on my DateList application, I discovered that they (me and my other test subject) expected something to happen when double clicking on an entry. It seems reasonable to me to open the person in Apple’s AddressBook as the action.
There doesn’t seem to be much information on this, however playing around with the birthday calendar (Tiger iCal feature), there is a URL that seems to work:
addressbook://E15E4D1E-AAE1-4AC2-85DB-98BB906EE988:ABPerson
Passing this to the open shell command opens the appropriate person in AddressBook.
The better question is how to construct one of these. To query an
AddressBook entry, we first need to find one. AddressBook has a special
reference for the current user called me.
>>> from AddressBook import *
>>> book = ABAddressBook.sharedAddressBook()
>>> book<ABAddressBook: 0x1133d80>
>>> me = book.me()
>>> type(me)
<objective-c class ABPerson at 0xa4ac3034>
Now that we have a ABPerson, we can determine the UID. The UID property is actually on the base class, ABRecord.
>>> myUID = me.valueForProperty_(kABUIDProperty)
>>> myUID
u'E15E4D1E-AAE1-4AC2-85DB-98BB906EE988:ABPerson'
To open a URL, we need to construct a NSURL:
>>> from Foundation import *
>>> url = NSURL.URLWithString_('addressbook://' + myUID)
>>> url
addressbook://E15E4D1E-AAE1-4AC2-85DB-98BB906EE988:ABPerson
Finally, we pass the NSURL to the openURL_ method of the shared workspace. You get one shared workspace per application, and it can be used for useful things like opening urls, files, applications and some other services such as tracking changes.
>>> from AppKit import *
>>> ws = NSWorkspace.sharedWorkspace()
>>> ws
<NSWorkspace: 0x1134910>
>>> ws.openURL_(url)
1
>>>
openURL_ returns YES (1) if the URL was successfully opened, NO (0)
otherwise. At this point AddressBook should open and have selected the
entry that you have tagged as you.