Contacts 0.8.3 review

Contacts is a stand-alone address book application for the ROX Desktop

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 156K Developer: Guido Schimmels

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Contacts is a stand-alone address book application for the ROX Desktop. There is an extra package for users of other freedesktop.org compliant environments.

You can use Contacts to view and create vCard business cards. Contacts creates a vCard for every contact and stores it in a central directory in your home folder. A reasonable subset of rfc2426 has been implemented.

Here are some key features of "Contacts":
Tabs

There are two tabs, one for home, one for work related data.

Drag & Drop Loading

You can load a vCard by dragging it onto Contacts.
You can add a sound, photo or logo the same way. Contacts figures out by filetype which is which. Drag an image onto the "Home" tab if you want it to be added as a photo. To add a logo image, switch to the "Work" tab before dragging!

Searching

Use the toolbar entry for searching contacts.

Extended Attributes

Contacts saves the cards with extended attributes on Linux and Solaris, if supported by the filesystem:
user.mime_type = text/directory
user.creator = Contacts

My Card

You can tell Contacts which card is your's: "Menu->My Card->This is my card"
At any later time you can easily load your card by pressing "Alt-M" or from
"Menu->My Card->Open my card"

PGP

Contacts supports embedded public PGP keys.
They can be exported from a vCard to a file, or directly imported into your keyring.

Live Toolbar

The presence of NOTE, KEY, SOUND, PHOTO, LOGO, GEO/TZ properties is indicated by toolbar icon.

Info about those properties is available through the icon tooltip. Click to edit!
You add them in the first place via menu and short-cuts or drag'n drop, respectively.

Birthday Notification

Nearing birthdays are indicated by the color of a birthday cake in the toolbar:
Next birthday more than a week away
Next birthday within seven days
Next birthday tomorrow
There is a birthday today
When there is no birthdate recorded for any of your contacts, no cake is shown.

Requirements:
Contacts depends on PyGTK2 (version 2.4/2.6) and ROX-Lib2 and a POSIX environment (Linux, BSD, Solaris...).
The dependencies on Glade and Gnome have been removed.
For picking GEO data from a world map you need the GnomeCanvas python extension, which itself doesn't pull in more dependencies, though, as the sources are part of gnome-python, your package manager may think different. With GnomeCanvas missing, the map will not appear, but you can still enter the GEO data with the means left. Contacts uses GnuPG for PGP, so you need to have the gpg utility installed for that.