[Bibdesk-users] author design question

[Michael M. <mic...@ma...>]

for much of the last week i've been working on making how BD handles 
authors smarter. I mentioned part of it on my weblog, but i just had a 
flash idea, and i wanted some guidance from you.

I've been doing a thorough literature search lately, and i've been 
using voodoopad to take notes on authors (ie, where they are now, what 
the'yre doing, etc.) it occurred to me that i'd like to be able to 
browse the authors and take notes on them in bibdesk. imagine an 
interface for looking at all the authors in your db, browsing them, 
editing names, and each one had a window that let you see their 
publications, and take notes on them, including storing home pages and 
emails and such...

does that sound as useful to everyone else as it does to me? and if so, 
here's the design question:

a lot of the required information (name, notes, homepage, email, 
etc...) could and arguably should be stored in the os x AddressBook 
database. Are there any arguments against doing that? And further, 
would it be OK to send the user over to that app to edit the data, 
instead of trying to roll my own edit gui?

the interaction would go like this: if you just wanted to browse 
authors or view their publications, you could do that without leaving 
BD. it's only if you wanted to edit information about an author that 
you'd have their record in AddressBook brought forward. is that too 
jarring?

I'm not sure about this, so I'm looking for opinions about every part 
of the plan...

thanks in advance!
-mike