On Sunday, March 16, 2008 at 20:06:26, Brett Presnell wrote:
>
> Robert Widhopf-Fenk <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>
> > Different back end storage has been discussed before and it
> > would be a major effort to implement that and probably will
> > slow down BBDB.
>
> Yes, I figured that. But it might help if the fields and
> modifiers/tags (e.g., Work rather than Office, Voice rather than
> Other) were a perfect match for the vcard fields, which seem to be the
> closest thing to a standard that can be read and written by a variety
> of devices. I know that bbdb lets me use whatever fields and
> modifiers/tags I want, but it might be nice if all the defaults were
> vcard compliant, or at least got converted to something that was.
>
> Of course this only matters to the extent that the various device
> manufacturers follow the standards in their own software.
>
> > But vcard syncing might be worth doing ...
>
> vcard does seem like the best way to push this information around, and
> with bluetooth having become fairly universal on cell phones (and with
> usb dongles for the various phones becoming less expensive or even
> being included with the phone), it is more and more feasible.
>
> > I also manually sync BBDB and my cell phone and it is a PITA.
> >
> > How are you doing it?
>
> You are more organized than I am about saving the state of the cell
> phone's vcards -- I should follow your example of saving the vcards as
> written by the phone. At present, I usually just hope that everything
> gets into BBDB, mostly by hand, though I have probably used some
> version(s) of bbdb-vcard or bbdb-vcard-import or bbdb-vcard-snarf at
> one time or another.
>
> I use bbdb-vcard-export.el to dump stuff out of bbdb (not sure what
> you use).
My own version, i.e. `bbdb-vcard-export' from "bbdb-rf" ;-).
It has the bbdb to vcard field mapping hard coded to fit my
needs.
> Then I send a few of the files to my phone (via bluetooth)
> to see what kind of problems I'm going to have, really trial and error
> editing of the vcard files. The last time I did this I ended up
> editing I modified my version of bbdb-vcard-export to use latin-1 by
> default since between times of doing this I typically forget about the
> UTF-16 default and the fact that my phones always seem to choke on it.
> I also added a few things to the bbdb-tranlation table
>
> (defvar bbdb-translation-table
> '(("Mobile" . "CELL")
> ("Office" . "WORK")
> ("Home" . "HOME")
> ("Work" . "WORK")
> ("Voice" . "VOICE")
> )
> "Translations of text items, typically for labels.")
>
> because my current phone (Sony-Ericsson w580i) seemed to want these
> things capitalized, and it doesn't understand "Office", which makes
> sense I guess since I don't think that is in the vcard standard. I
> also changed "begin:vcard\n" to "BEGIN:VCARD\n", "adr;type=" to
> "ADR;TYPE=", "fn:" to "FN:", "org:" to "ORG:", "tel;type=" to
> "TEL;TYPE=", etc.
>
> I think that my wife's phone (LG CU515) was similarly picky about at
> least some of these things (I'm pretty sure about the "WORK" vs
> "OFFICE" thing, but I'm not so sure about the capitalization). My
> memory is hazy on all of this even though I just did it a week ago.
>
> Anyway, at some point I send all the vcards to the phone via
> bluetooth.
What program does the sending?
> If I have to do much hand editing I would usually cat them
> into one file first to speed that up. Once I see what the phone does
> with what I send it, I may have to hand edit the file(s) a bit more or
> modify my bbdb entries and try again.
I usually never have to edit records by hand, but that might
be caused by a habit to make them fit. What annoys me is
the manual merging and my phone which modifies the records
silently, e.g. truncation, removal of special chars ...
Bye
Robert
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