Re: [Gmailagent-devel] About a contacts frontend + RFC

[Stas Z <sta...@gm...>]

On 6/10/05, Waseem S. Daher <wd...@mi...> wrote:
>
> > RFC:
> > My idea is to create a separate GUI as a local frontend to the whole
> > Gmail contacts
> > framework, including editing, adding and removal. When there's support
> > for the export
> > of the contacts into other formats, like discussed in a prior post, I
> > will include that also.
> > This frontend will import the contacts, the user can do his thing and
> > saves the contacts
> > to disk. (That should perhaps also be the default action when the user
> > closes the app)
>=20
> Maybe this is the part I don't understand. Would this frontend run only
> once, on initial GmailAgent start? Or would it start at the beginning of
> each session, constantly getting the revised contacts list?
First of all this frontend has nothing todo with GA, it's a graphical front=
end
for the contacts support currently in libgmail2.
It could be used without installing GA, it's just a way to interact
with the Gmail
contacts. GA is just happen to be the first project that uses it.
How it would update/revise the contacts will be resolved when I start codin=
g :-)
 =20
> I guess the only reason I don't like the idea is that you won't always
> have the most up-to-date Gmail contacts. But I guess it's hard to design
> an elegant solution to do that ... so I suppose this is a reasonable
> second best. Though there should be an option to invoke the updater
> yourself.
The contacts GUI would have a button to update the list of course.:-)
(see the screenshot, it's just the first design attempt)
 =20
> What about not maintaining your own list at all, though, and just reading
> from Gmail every time you want to do a contacts transaction? The downside
> there is you have to be online and it might consume a bit of bandwidth.
Indeed, it can be a problem if one uses a dial up account.
And it's also a speed issue, a local cache works much faster.

> In short: I think it is certainly a reasonable approach.
> I intend to do the vCard export at some point in the near future (perhaps
> this weekend).
Cool, I assume that the export follows the 'official' VCard specifications?

Stas

--=20
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