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). 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. 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.
Sorry to go on so long. Basically this is enough of a PITA for me
that I usually just do it every couple of years when I get a new phone
and then hobble along the rest of the time. It would be really great
if one could get closer to real synching in both directions, and if it
was all built into bbdb, and if it just worked (knowing that there is
little that can be done about manufacturers who don't follow the vcard
standards themselves).
--
Brett Presnell
Department of Statistics
University of Florida
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