Marco Barisione’s Weblog

During the Christmas holidays I managed to find some time to write a couple of small programs related to the address book on the N900; they are nothing too fancy (no UI, no proper packaging, not the best code quality, etc.) as I wrote them for my personal use, but I still think it could be useful to share them with other people.

The one I’m talking about today is a simple command-line utility that adds an email address to your contacts based on the Jabber ID (or on the ID of other protocols). This is very useful to me as in Collabora we all have a roster automatically filled with the other Collaborans, this way I can automatically have their email addresses in my address book.

This cannot be done automatically for all the contact as, usually, it’s not true that a Jabber ID is also a valid email address (for instance it’s not true for jabber.org users), but it’s true at least for the GMail and Collabora servers.

If you want to try jid-to-email get the already compiled arm executable or the source code. Remember to take a backup before trying it, I don’t want to be blamed if something goes horribly wrong .

The program accepts two arguments: the vcard field for the IM protocol and a regular expression. For instance, if you cd to the directory where the program is and do “./jid-to-email X-JABBER @collabora.co.uk”, an email address will be added to all the contacts that have a Jabber ID containing “@collabora.co.uk”. Similarly “./jid-to-email X-JABBER ‘@g(oogle)?mail\.com’” will add an email address to all the contacts with a Jabber ID containing “@gmail.com” or “@googlemail.com”. You could also try using “X-MSN” to do the same thing for contacts that use their GMail address as MSN ID.

Please, let me know if you know any other server where the Jabber ID is always a valid email address.

By the way, this week-end I’m going to Brussels for FOSDEM: hope to meet a lot of GNOME people there!

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Some lovely guy sent me this email:

From:    ****@gmx.de
Subject: Freedom!

Take your closed source crap out of this planet, nobody cares about it.

--
Freedom Lover
--
Jetzt kostenlos herunterladen: Internet Explorer 8 und Mozilla Firefox 3.5 -
sicherer, schneller und einfacher! http://portal.gmx.net/de/go/chbrowser

Note the irony of using an email service that adds to your email an advertisement for Internet Explorer…

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It looks like Santa Claus arrived early for the Collabora employees

N900 pyramid, and sadly some of them didn’t arrive yet

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In the last months the traffic on the #telepathy IRC channel on Freenode has been constantly growing, reaching the point where communication among developers is difficult and, at the same time, some new Empathy users are scared and don’t talk on the channel. This is why we just created a new #empathy channel on GIMPNet (irc.gnome.org) for all the empathy users, while #telepathy will be used for development-related discussions.

See you all on #empathy!

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After the Maemo Summit the details on the address book application and framework in Maemo 5 are finally completely public so I can openly talk about what I worked on during the past year and, even better, I actually have a smartphone that runs this software! (Thanks to Nokia that gave out 300 N900s, but I will talk about this in my next post)

Contacts on the N900

Contact details

As you can see from the screenshots, the Contacts application has everything you would expect from a normal phone address book but it also tightly integrates IM. Your local, Jabber/GTalk and Skype contacts will appear in the same address book and, if you have a friend on multiple IM protocols, you can easily merge all the contacts into a single entity.

My main task has been making the component responsible for the IM part of the address book work properly, this component is an evolution-data-server backend (recently released under LGPL) that acts as a bridge between the Telepathy IM framework and evolution-data-server. See the README file for more details.
Sadly the library on top of evolution-data-server that does the magic contact merging and contains the widgets used on Maemo is not open, but there is some hope for it.

Address book components

At the Maemo Summit I also gave a talk on Telepathy and how it’s used on Maemo, both for messaging/VOIP and for the contacts integration. The slides are available in PDF or in OpenOffice.org format (but for some reason colours look wrong in some recent versions of OpenOffice).

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