MacOS Contacts App — How to tell to which address book an entry belongs

You can set up multiple different iCloud accounts in the "Mail, Contacts, and Calendars" preference panel, and also on your iPhone and iPads.

I have accomplished a shared address book with my partner by each of us having a primary iCloud account (me@us.com, her@us.com) - and then a shared iCould account us@us.com.

One annoying downside is that the Lion Address Book app labels both address books as "iCloud" making it a bit hard to distinguish what contacts are where. We solve this by having different contact lists in each address book, so they are distinct.

It seems with just a little bit of work Apple could make this MUCH better, but this is the best solution I have seen so far.

Apparently, Lion’s Automator actions are a bit more finicky about implicit data conversion between actions than Snow Leopard’s. In your case, the issue is the “Get Contact Information” action does not perform a conversion from groups into their contained contacts. This can be solved quite easily by inserting a “Get Selected Address Book Items” action set to “people” after the first one (which retrieves the selected groups) before the “New Text File” action. This will allow you to select groups in Address Book instead of having to select all their constituent members.

As to the encoding issue, that does not seem to have anything to do with the Automator workflow: testing with my iCloud address book (German, with lots of Czech and French contacts) neither your nor my variant produce any issues writing UTF-8 text as long as the “New Text File” action’s file format is set to “text (.txt, convert if necessary)”. If the issue persists on your system when using these settings, possible causes I can think of are

• TextEdit (or your editor of choice) is set to display the file as another encoding than UTF-8; in that case, it would mangle them on display.
• your address book might contain differently encoded characters, possibly from importing from older systems: Address Book is very good at hiding these, but they can cause a number of odd issues. There are a number of utilities out there claiming to fix broken Address Book records, but I have never tested them – YMMV.