Re: Some remarks on org-contacts

["Sebastien Vauban" <wxhgmqzgwmuf-geNee64TY+gS+FvcfC7Uqw@public.gmane.org>]

Hi Sven and al,

"Sven Bretfeld" wrote:
> After some days of using org-contacts with Gnus, I would like to make
> some comments. I know that this is an early stage of the development,
> but I think some views and suggestions by users could help Julien or
> other developers to decide what could be done in the next steps of their
> work. There seems to be no roadmap on the homepage of the project.
>
> - The buffers displaying the contacts file(s) get the "changed mark"
>   whenever something is done with org-contacts. Even if only a name was
>   searched and no changes have happened at all. Is it a bug or some
>   feature that I don't understand?
>
> - The last-read-mail property is a good idea, but it has the
>   disadvantage of changing the file. People using Dropbox or other
>   synchronization tools have a problem here, because they have to
>   remember to manually save the file before they start to work on
>   another computer. There should be an auto-save-hook or something
>   similar. 
>
> - What I deem most important: For quite a few contacts most people will
>   use to have more than one email address. Org-contacts stores all
>   addresses under the same property with no preference on one of them
>   (unlike BBDB which uses the first entry as a default for completion).
>   It is annoying to hit tab 3 to 4 times before the To-header is
>   complete. It would perhaps be best to have only one address in the
>   EMAIL property and to store alternate addresses in another property
>   (SECONDARY_EMAIL). The SECONDARY_EMAIL could be called by a special
>   function that could be set to a key different from TAB (maybe C-u
>   TAB). Maybe it is even possible to expand to the default address by
>   hitting TAB once, and to give a list of the other addresses by hitting
>   TAB once again.
>
> - What can you do with ICONS? Arte they only for chatting? It would be
>   nice to have a small window automatically opening below an Article
>   buffer in Gnus that displays information about the author including
>   his/her image.
>
> - Email, phone numbers and postal address should be displayed in the
>   Agenda buffer when a name is searched by org-contacts. Maybe it would
>   be possible to display different information by hitting certain keys:
>   "m": mobile-phone, "e": email, "b": birthday, "a": all etc. At the
>   moment one has to switch on follow-mode to display the information. I
>   deem this not very beautiful. For my taste, the look-and-feel of an
>   org-file with lots of property lines is not an aesthetic pleasure. A
>   tabular output (including a picture of the person) would be much
>   nicer.
>
> - There should be a function to sort the entries of the same level in
>   contacts files alphabetically.
>
> Thank you very much for org-contacts.

And the cherry on the cake would be: snarfing data from received email, asking
the user what to do when a new email address is detected for a known contact,
or a new name detected for a known email address...

Having those definitely would make org-contacts more powerful than BBDB --
though, I don't know what's planned in v3 of BBDB.

Best regards,
  Seb

-- 
Sebastien Vauban