Background

Sometime recently, mac OS and iOS contact birthdays stopped synchronizing with google contacts under various circumstances. It appears those circumstances are when a year is missing from the bday or when Google has not been able to parse a date object from the inputted birthday string.

This code will address that by updating birthdays at contacts.google.com as follows below.

Running

1. Follow the instructions at google People API to enable API access.

2. Set up environment from pipfile

3. Run python contacts.py (nothing will change since k_do_update is False)

4. If you like the changes, then set k_do_update to True in contacts.py

Code details

Background: Birthdays are present either as a date object (year, month, day) or text string Text strings don't behave well with iOS so we want to switch everything to date object that also includes a year

In particular the following changes are made:

• if date obj ({year: , month:, date:}) present then
  • if no year add default year (defaults to k_default_year == 1900)
  • ignore the bday text (todo: we could verify that it matches)
• if only text is present (no date object) then parse the text into a date object
  • if no year, default to k_default_year == 1900
• ALWAYS remove the text object after doing the above
• anytime a given year is the current year, we assume this is because no year was present (rather than that the person was born in current year) and change to the default year