Lookup – A simple Mac utility that wraps ldapsearch
I work on a Mac at work, and it has always been a bit slow searching for other staff members in our global address book. Like other big organisations we have some directory services which we can use LDAP to interrogate. The seemingly standard way for apps to poll these services is asynchronously every second or so, so that you’re getting results back quickly in the background. In reality this can be clunky if your network is slow, or the directory is very big.
I wanted something simpler, and a gui that gave me was suited to my work requirements. Lookup displays glance-able contact details straight away, letting you copy, paste and drag this data around. It also has simple shortcuts like double clicking the contact to start a new email to that person.
Lookup does not poll asynchronously, it does one request per search and just looks through some key attributes. It seems to work very well, and has been customised for my workplace, but is generic enough for someone to tweak it to suit their companies needs.
It wraps ldapsearch, which is a command line app that comes free on your mac. When I say wraps, it’s not a complete wrapper, but wraps enough to create an app of this kind. Ldapsearch app did everything I wanted in search terms, and gave me a chance to use NSTask and NSPipe which I know will be useful in the future.
You can get the source over at Github. Why not try and tweak it to work for your company. You never know, just compiling it and updating the settings in the preferences menu may be enough.
Just to be clear, this app does NOT give you access to the BBC address book, just incase you thought I’d gone mad.
