Re: [O] ANN: org-vcard. Export/import vCards. Backwards-compatible with org-contacts.el.

[Alexis]

Charles Philip Chan writes:

> Personally I find no MUA as usable and feature rich as Gnus. ;-)

Heh! i didn't mind Gnus as a news reader, despite some initial
challenges in getting it set up for that; but i gave up trying to get it
working to my satisfaction as an MUA. It seems to be a very capable
package overall, but i decided to stick with Mutt after a number of
hours wrestling with Gnus (and its user manual, which i often found more
confusing than enlightening) to get even the basic functionality i
wanted. Later, and in contrast, i got basic functionality within about
an hour of installing mu4e; and i now have little incentive to try Gnus
again as an MUA. i'm more than willing to gradually and continually
tweak a system to better meet my needs, but i'm not likely to be able to
get to that point when even basic setup is such a struggle ....

But to keep this discussion more on topic :-), this issue has informed
how i've designed org-vcard - i want it to be as easy to use "out of the
box" as possible, including making it as easy as possible for users to
take advantage of its underlying flexibility[1]. This has taken more
work than it might otherwise have done, but i think it's the right
approach to take.

[1] i (and many others, it seems) found GNOME 3 problematic in this
regard. i don't use it myself, but have in the past supported users who
did, and i wasn't thrilled to find GNOME 3 had taken away GUI access to
various configuration options important to my users, rather than
e.g. hiding them in an "Advanced" section with "HERE BE DRAGONS!!!"
warnings when people try to access those options.

> I am mainly talking about bbdb3 now, since I can't remember the
> variable names in bbdb2. For phone numbers one can use free form style
> by calling bbdb-insert-field with a prefix or change the variable
> bbdb-phone-style
>
> [snip]
>
> As for postal codes, either turn the checking off by setting
> bbdb-check-postcode to nil or change the variable
> bbdb-legal-postcodes

*nod*

Still, i'm surprised there's no default support for Australian-style
phone numbers and postcodes; are there really that few Australians
making use of BBDB?

In any case, if some people are happy with a BBDB-based solution to
managing their contacts, that's fine with me! It's just that i want an
Org-based system for myself. :-)


Alexis.