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On 02/08/2011 04:26 PM, Mark Banner wrote:
<blockquote cite="mid:4D51B4F0.90207@mozillamessaging.com"
type="cite">
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<div class="ace-line" id="magicdomid1170"><span class="">At </span><span
class="author-g-hnfb38hyas63j2q1">the recent</span><span
class=""> all-hands, we had several discussions touching on
the address book. We've been struggling with what to do with
the address book - whilst it feels that it needs some
significant rework, especially in the back-end, there's a big
question of what to rework it in to and how.</span></div>
<div class="ace-line" id="magicdomid1172"><br>
</div>
<div class="ace-line" id="magicdomid1285"><span
class="author-g-s2ebflgv0cuguexb">Thunderbird's address book
is critically useful to Thunderbird's operations today. There
are also areas in which many improvements are possible. Those
areas include:</span><span class="author-g-s2ebflgv0cuguexb"><br>
</span>
<ul>
<li><span class="author-g-s2ebflgv0cuguexb">Improving the
database schema for individuals, to accommodate an
evolution in the kinds of information that users want to
keep about their contacts (e.g. more & different
fields, more values per fields)</span></li>
<li><span class="author-g-s2ebflgv0cuguexb">Better integration
with other sources of contact data, whether corporate
(e.g. LDAP servers), operating system provided, or web
& cloud-based systems.</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
</blockquote>
This may be a bit nit-picky, but, particularly in the case of
operating system address books, there are three different kinds of
integration:<br>
1. Expose the OS address book as an additional address book<br>
2. Use the OS address book as the primary address book<br>
2a. Expose a system address book backend API to access the primary
address book [1]<br>
3. Synchronize the OS address book with the primary address book[s]
(more useful for cloud-based address books, I think).<br>
<br>
Which kind of integration did you mean?<br>
<br>
<blockquote cite="mid:4D51B4F0.90207@mozillamessaging.com"
type="cite">
<div class="ace-line" id="magicdomid1285">
<ul>
</ul>
</div>
<span class="">There are some existing efforts that have been
looking at Contacts and Contacts management on the internet</span><span
class="author-g-hnfb38hyas63j2q1"> (for example, the <a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://mozillalabs.com/contacts/">various</a> <a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://mozillalabs.com/messaging/thunderbird-contacts/">efforts</a>
on Mozilla Labs)</span><span class="">. We feel that it is worth
watching these as well as encouraging experimentation from
within the Thunderbird area.</span> </blockquote>
I know one thing that was mooted at some point was making the
current Thunderbird APIs closer to the contacts API. While it would
probably be a bad idea to fully switch to the API, would it be a
worthy experiment to include the API in TB for the next version or
so, to see what extension authors think of it?<br>
<br>
[1] I should mention that the mere definition of a "system address
book" seems to be getting increasingly wonky. While OS X has a
standard address book API, and Windows XP has the WAB API, Windows
Vista added Windows Contacts, which is now listed as obsolete in
MSDN without any hint about what replaces it (presumably in Windows
7). Well, there is a user comment indicating that Windows Live
Connect may have replaced it, but that documentation only refers to
cloud APIs, so that doesn't solve desktop access. And then there's
Linux, where the standard GNOME API is the evolution-data-server,
the standard KDE API is either akonadi... But then there's libfolks
which is trying to be a metacontacts API, but is used only by one
application so far (as it's still under development). In short,
"EEK!"<br>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it. -- Donald E. Knuth</pre>
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