Phone Amego tries to use the phone number formats defined in your Address Book. If there is more than one matching format, Phone Amego will use the longest matching prefix to include the country code or "+" if present. By including country codes in your Address Book formats, telephone numbers from different countries or regions will display correctly using the corresponding local convention.

To customize your Address Book formats, navigate to “Address Book -> Preferences -> Phone” and select “Custom” in the Formats popup menu that appears. In Contacts (10.8), Apple removed this transparency so you may need to enter your preferred phone number formats in Phone Amego directly under the Caller ID tab.

If Phone Amego does not find a matching format with the same or more digits, it uses a default format string like this:

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For each digit in the telephone number received, it replaces a "#" in the format string from right to left. To learn more, see Formatting International Phone Numbers in Apple’s Address Book.

User Interface Hints
The Phone Number Formats are displayed in a "ComboBox" control for maintaining a list of entries.

To add an entry to the list, type in a new value and press return or enter.

To change an entry, click on the entry you want to edit in the pull down menu first, and then change its value. If you make the string empty. The previous entry will be deleted. To cancel editing a previously selected entry, open and close the pull down menu without clicking on a menu item.

To move an entry to the top of the list, press Control while you select that entry.

Address Book Matching


Searching for a matching phone number in your Address Book is more subtle than it appears since a phone number is just a string of characters the user can enter in whatever format they choose.

As a first step, the "Dialing Dictionary" specified under the Dialing Options tab is used to remove the country code and national dialing prefix if any as specified.

Next, Phone Amego searches for the last 4-digts of the phone number, and then examines each record more carefully to look for an exact match. If you enter a phone number in your Address Book as "123-1234", and Phone Amego receives a call from "14011231234", it will search for records matching "1234" or "12-34" and then examine each entry by removing the formatting characters and any dialing prefix it recognizes to look for an exact match (or where one string is a suffix of the other).

If you need to bulk edit records in your Address Book, this Macworld article may be helpful.

Since dialing prefixes and formatting conventions can vary in different parts of the world, I welcome your feedback to make Phone Amego work correctly wherever practical.