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

[Aredridel]

On Sat, 2003-09-06 at 01:48, Stefan Urbanek wrote:
> 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?

My main complaint against address books is that they usually lack the
features you need when you outgrow them:  They're really hard to use
when you /do/ need to do mailings -- I help businesses every day who
used their Microsoft Windows Address book to store all their addresses,
and now want to use them elsewhere.

It's not /that/ hard to get right -- postal codes as a separate field
for sorting is the biggest thing one needs for mailing. Substring
searches work really well for things like filter-by-city, and addresses
are rarely searched anyway, but postal codes are used for filtering,
sorting and keying all sorts of information. Breaking that out would be
very neccesary to many uses of an address book.  A single plain text
field would be great for most of the rest of an address though.  (The
notable exception is to export to vCard or other apps that break
addresses up more)

Besides, if Contacts.app is a service app, I can very well see a little
mailing label program that uses it as a data source popping up -- that's
the kind of killer little app that makes many people's life much easier.

Ari

signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part