[NTLK] [Escale] Groups, Companies & Labels

From: Paul Guyot (pguyot_at_kallisys.net)
Date: Sat May 03 2003 - 06:58:44 PDT


Hi folks,

First, I have to confess that I never use OS X AddressBook, but I use
my Newton's Names on a daily basis.

I would like your opinion about how to best synchronize NewtonOS'
Groups, Companies and Labels into the AddressBook.

I did it mostly wrong because of my lack of knowledge of the AddressBook.

Nicolas uses the AddressBook but he does not use the Newton much. We
came to several possible solutions:

- we can synchronize Newton groups as OS X groups. After all, they're
very similar in the way the data is *stored*.
- we can synchronize Newton labels as OS X groups. They're very
similar in the way the data is *displayed*.
- we can synchronize Newton companies as OS X persons. Trouble is
that a Newton company shall be sorted under its name but it can have
as many affiliates as we want.
- we can synchronize Newton companies as OS X persons and OS X group:
* the company would be a person filed into a group
* affiliates would be persons filed into the same group

Finally, we can do a mix of the above.

What do you think?
The best is that you decide since it really depends on the way we use
companies. Personnally, not many Newton companies have affiliates but
I need the address or the phone number of those companies. Plus I
don't use Newton groups at all and labels are very important for
sorting items.

There is no real limit. Both the Newton and the Mac accepts hidden
custom meta-data. We can use this custom meta-data to identify
special items, like distinguishing OS X groups that are labels on the
Newton and OS X groups that are groups on the Newton. We can also set
preferences to adapt to some profiles if we agree on two or three
profiles of importation.

BTW, the ticket in the bug database for this issue is the following:
http://bugs.kallisys.com/Ticket/Display.html?id=25

Additionally, I disabled synchronization of companies in the CVS
because I did it plain wrong. Nevertheless, importation of e-mails
from the Newton now works pretty well, the OS X label matches the
NewtonOS e-mail system name. And I realized I broke a lot of things
between 1.0 and the nightly on Nicolas' website. They're fixed now
(especially serial port works). As always, the source code is
committed to the CVS. If you want a recent build, drop me a line.

Finally, I'm sorry to say that OS X addressbook doesn't handle
birthdays without a year, so people in that case on your Newton will
be born in 2920. If I remove the year, it puts 2003. The other option
was to not synchronize the birthday for those, unless some OS X
AddressBook expert has a better advice.

Paul

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