Re: [O] Some remarks on org-contacts

[Julien Danjou]

On Wed, Jun 01 2011, Sven Bretfeld wrote:

> - 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?

I don't see this behaviour, so I don't think it's related to
org-contacts directly. One of the only thing it changes is the last mail
seen from a user, when used with Gnus. But a search does not do any
modification.

> - 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. 

Sounds dangerous, but you can do it yourself anyhow.

> - 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.

The Emacs completion code is not that nice. But using only the first
address in EMAIL is doable.

> - 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.

This properties has been set to be used in `org-contacts' search.
Problem is the format in `org-contacts' is not changeable because the
way it is written in org.el itself. I've tried to enhance that (there's
a branch in the org repository about that) but it's really too much
work to me right now, so I abandonned for now that part.

> - 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.

That is what was planning, as I stated just above. But this is far from
doable right now and would require a major rewrite of some part of Org
to be done correctly.

-- 
Julien Danjou
❱ http://julien.danjou.info

pgp9FZxVfT7u6.pgp
Description: PGP signature