Purpose of the Contacts.app (Was: Re: Postal address layouts?)

[Stefan Urbanek]

Hi all,

I have a simple question: What is the purpose of Contacts.app? Is it a personal 
address book or an address database for commercial or other bulk mailing 
purposes? What amount of addresses is it supposed to manage, 10s, 100s or 100 
000s?

I support Dirk's idea of using single field for whole address. Try to ask 
another questions: do I need to know parts of an address? For what? AFAIR, i 
have never wanted to search for 'all friends at Sesame street' or 'all business 
partners which house number is 10' or 'family members with zip code beginning 
with 8'. I think you get the idea. For searching purposes, there is (or will) 
still option for searching in the whole 'address' field. Even with 1000 contats 
the time cost should be fair.

Rather than complicating application with different address formats and wasting 
time on bundles for address formating, there are plenty of other useful 
features that can be implemented in address book i think.

What do you think?

Stefan

On 2003-09-05 20:48:57 +0200 Dirk Lattermann <dlatt@alqualonde.de> wrote:

> Hello Björn!
> 
> I remember a NEXTSTEP address book application
> (but I don't recall its name or author/company, it might
> still be available on Peanuts), which too aimed at storing
> international addresses.  They said that after some time they
> came to the conclusion that a multi-line free form text area
> is the only practicable representation for an address.
> 
> Maybe that's really better than trying to categorize the
> distinct fragments of an address.  Is there any use to be able
> to extract only the building number, the street, or only the
> town name, that is worth the pain?  (Country maybe.)
> I presume the purpose of the application is to ease looking up
> the email or postal address, and not to do data mining.
> 
> (just two european cents.)
> 
> Cheers,
> Dirk
> 
> 
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