Well following the big merge of my offline contacts from OS X’s Address Book and all my contacts in Gmail, I was a bit overwhelmed by the load of contacts on my phone. There were a ton of people that I didn’t really need on there, but there’s really no documentation on how to control what’s synced to your phone. If you have multiple calendars, you go to the Google Sync page on your phone’s web browser, and configure the calendars you want to sync, but there’s nothing like this for your contacts. Even in iTunes/Address Book, I had a special phone group that would get synced to my phone rather than the whole address book. So I started poking around.

As it turns out, Gmail has a sort of hidden way to manage this called “My Contacts”. If you switch to the Contacts view in Gmail in your web browser, you should see “My Contacts” near the top left, as well as any groups you might have. Also note “Other Contacts” at the bottom of the contact groups list.

After a bit of experimenting, I determined that “My Contacts” is what gets sync’d over-the-air (aka OTA) to your phone, and “Other Contacts” correlates to “Global Address List”. I went through “My Contacts” in Gmail, and selected all the unnecessary contacts and removed them from that group.

Now on my phone, I have much more manageable list of contacts, and if I need to look for one that was removed, I can do a search in the “Global Address List” (aka GAL). In fact, just like in Apple Mail & Address Book on the desktop, if you start addressing an email on your iPhone, the first hits will be from your local contacts, followed by the hits from the GAL. Easy peasy!

Update: I did finally find this page, after the fact, which talks about “My Contacts” being the group that gets synced to your phone.

Since Leopard was released, I would occasionally google to try to find a solution to this problem, but have never been able to find a fix. Until today, when I had an epiphany. OS X has a command line screen capture tool. “Perhaps I’ll find a clue there,” I thought. Sure enough – pay dirt. Look what I found in the man page…

-o In window capture mode, do not capture the shadow of the window.

That right there tells me that it’s an option, and that there’s at least a workaround. So I coupled this with two other options, interactive mode, and clipboard (rather than save) and voila! It works!

screencapture -ioc

Using the command above, I was immediately presented with Leopard’s screen cap crosshairs, so I then hit the spacebar to switch to element selection mode, moused over the window I wanted to grab, then clicked. This then put the image in my clipboard, so I switched to Preview.app, and opened a new document, which automatically inserts the contents of the clipboard. Without the useless drop shadow.

This is definitely a workaround for now. I’m hoping there’s a preference file somewhere that can be modified to omit the drop shadow from screen caps by default. Until then, I just wrapped the command above in some AppleScript for ease of use:

do shell script "screencapture -ioc"

Saved as an AppleScript app works great because you can invoke it by name via Spotlight.

Have fun, and let me know if you figure out where this default preference resides.