That was just a suggestion, I know that contacts is closed-source so there’s not much you can do with this if API won’t allow. Anyway, even a separate fulltext search feature would be very handy.

And for sure I’m not going to interrupt in your hard work.
Cheers!

Thanks a lot for your effort – this application does exactly what I was dreaming of. Apart from merging back unmerged twitter contacts it actually found couple of contacts I didn’t think of merging.

Since you mentioned you’re going to write fulltext search feature – just want to suggest that it would be even greater if you would be able to alter default search behaviour with your plugin. It would be great if search results included nickname matches by default.

Thank you, for great app.
What can you say about this bug:
https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10436

It will be nice if you can solve this problem. Hope for you and good luck.

I actually would like to be able to edit them on the contacts application, but since it is not possible…

What I thought about was an external application that could change the formating off all fields, possibly run by some criteria (all records/list of records, fields to change and formating rules – example: XX space XX space XXXX-XXXX, right to left. Maybe a regex could do it). you could run this application once to place all fields in a good-looking format. Then, you could run it just after adding a new contact manually.

As for how often I look at them I would say very often. Whenever I’m near a land phone I just look up the number on the N900 and dial it manually on the land phone (it is way cheaper and avoids hitting my brain with some microwaves :-). There is also the mess that are (manily because of my country’s operators) handling the same number for SMS versus normal dialing versus SIP dialing. It gets worse still for roaming. Hence, there is a lot of manually reading and re-entering the numbers depending on the situation.

@Achim:
I didn’t know of this app, what’s the name?
Having separate ringtones is possible in theory, but it can be tricky and have unwanted consequences: the N900 does some tricks to be sure that the ringtone is played quickly even if the phone is overloaded and swapping, replacing the default system could make you miss some calls.

@Felipe:
It’s possible through the API, but it’s probably not trivial (i.e. not a 1 hour hack).
It’s possible to modify directly the DB, but the risks of breaking everything are high :)

@Stefan Kost:
How useful would this be for normal people? And how would it be just a way for people like me to compulsively try to fill all the details? :)

@Luis:
Do you mean a utility that does that automatically for all the numbers? Or do it manually? Note that only North America has a standardised way to write phone numbers.
Also, how often do you look at phone numbers after inserting them? (just curiosity)

@Michael Banck:
Most people fill first names, last names and nicknames at random. Even worse if the contacts are imported from somewhere else.
Anything that assumes rationality in those fields is flawed ;)
I thought about rejecting merger suggestions, but IMO you don’t run the merger every day. Ideally you run it only once or maybe once after configuring a new IM account, so I’m not sure this feature is so important to implement.