[improvement] People app contacts cannot be prioritized
asked 2019-12-13 01:31:39 +0200
My contact list is years old and some of the contacts were moving among many devices. Nokia ? > Nokia N9 > Jolla 1 > XperiaX > Xperia XA2.
I am now in a state when some contacts have unremovable items like old Jabber and xmpp links, addresses, phones. Some of the details are synced from my linked accounts and I am rather lazy to spend my time with total clean-up.
I can live with that but it would be better to have option to select primary/default phone number, choose order within detail type (make actual phone first, actual address first, etc.).
I believe that this is a little step which significantly improves usability and I've been waiting for it for too long already :)
Another example which is not related to laziness:
Google synced contact contains "work" mobile phone number (which is foreign state service provider), but I know also the "private" number which is local services provider. For some reason, I have always the foreign number first. I don't want to delete it, I just don't want to call it accidentally and I want to give it lower priority, I simply want it to be second.
However, if I delete the number, it is synced back to the same position.
There are also two addresses (just in case we would have native working navigation one day...) - work address and home address. Work address is synced from contacts, home address is added manually.
For some reason is work address first again and if I delete it manually, it is synced back to the first position.
AFAIK there's no standard way to sort properties in the VCARD format, only maybe some proprietary extensions. Then SFOS would have to either design it's own extension properties, or use Googles, Apples, or some other extension.
Other than that, I don't think such details belong in a mobile app. It's up to the end-user to "garbage-collect" ones own data e.g. in a desktop application. I for one wouldn't want to have some mobile app or backend doing that.
Tanghus ( 2019-12-13 12:13:51 +0200 )editOk, I will give you another example for consideration and I am posting it also to the main request.
Google synced contact contains "work" mobile phone number (which is foreign state service provider), but I know also the "private" number which is local services provider. For some reason, I have always the foreign number first. I don't want to delete it, I just don't want to call it accidentally and I want to give it lower priority, I simply want it to be second.
However, if I delete the number, it is synced back to the same position.
There are also two addresses (just in case we would have native working navigation one day...) - work address and home address. Work address is synced from contacts, home address is added manually.
For some reason is work address first again and if I delete it manually, it is synced back to the first position.
rastakajakwanna ( 2019-12-13 12:59:57 +0200 )editWell, VCARD just defines the format but you still should be able to choose order of the items. I don't think there is fixed "logical" order (alphabetical), I think that only line order matters.
If I am correct, phone numbers should be represented by blocks:
TEL;WORK;VOICE:(111) 555-1212 TEL;HOME;VOICE:(404) 555-5432
and changing order of the blocks should also change the position in the app.
Similar to the address blocks.
rastakajakwanna ( 2019-12-13 13:07:57 +0200 )editIn theory, yes, but there's no guarantee that any application or backend won't change the order.
I hear you, and I see the value of such an extension. I haven't been able to find references to anyone doing it, but I'd be interested if you find it.
Tanghus ( 2019-12-13 13:18:26 +0200 )editWell, I am surprised that any application would be able to change the vcf file. I thought that apps are talking to SFOS using api and in such case the only owner is a process which manages the vcf content.
Btw, I cannot find the vcf file in .vault/People/ folder anymore. I cannot actually "find . -type f -name *.vcf" anything, so I cannot test my approach by hard-editing the all.vcf.
rastakajakwanna ( 2019-12-13 13:59:13 +0200 )edit