Birthday field now in Address Book
October 4th, 2008 Posted in Mozilla, SeaMonkey, ThunderbirdIt appears I forgot to blog about this when it landed a couple of weeks ago, probably mainly because we were getting ready for the Shredder Alpha 3 string and code freezes.
With thanks to Josh (aka pi, who I mentored during the Google Summer of Code) we now have a birthday field in the address book:
This has been a long-awaited enhancement, and it is finally here (and it will be in Shredder Alpha 3). We’re looking to make more improvements to the address book interfaces and fields over the coming months, so keep an eye out.
10 Responses to “Birthday field now in Address Book”
By Pete on Oct 4, 2008
Regarding long-awaited enhancements for the address book:
Do you think, you can create a frame which shows all mails from/to the current address?
http://www.xobni.com/ might give you some fresh ideas…
By Standard8 on Oct 4, 2008
@Pete, we’re already thinking along those lines. See some of the post on my colleagues blog here: http://www.visophyte.org/blog/
By James John Malcolm on Oct 4, 2008
That’s a pretty fun feature - just don’t forget to turn the day/month display around for all locales except en-US !
By Standard8 on Oct 4, 2008
@James, actually its tied into the system settings if I recall correctly, so it will work fine whatever you have your system set up to.
By Pete on Oct 5, 2008
Mark,
I think after you decided to implement the calendar into TB3, thnigs will change a lot. It’s not only adding a calendar. You focus more on people and addresses because what do you enter into a calendar? Most often meetings with people who mostly are in your address book.
I’m working on a web mail client project in my company and what we experienced is that the address book is only used for looking up email addresses until you give it more value.
So, by adding the calendar, you have two main categories: the mails and the calendar. But they are not connected. The way to connect them is the address book. I suggest that you consider to give the address book the same status. Not only adding some auto fill functions in a search field. Give them their own window with a list of all adresses and when you select an address, you’ll get the adress details as well as a list of all emails and all calendar entries.
From a technical view it’s not a big deal because you already have all information.
It’s a question of paradigm: People are used to work with inboxes, calendars etc. But since everything is merging (especially when it comes to mobile devices, SMS etc.) the only static data is the person behind an address.
By Jeria on Oct 5, 2008
How about aligning the labels correctly with the text fields?
By Andrea on Oct 5, 2008
Now https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=119459 deserves some love
By Onno Ekker on Oct 5, 2008
I think the card looks kind of strange with year and age filled in, e.g. 1966 or 41.
I know 1966 is the year and 41 is the age, but it would be better if it was shown in the card:
Year: 1966, Age: 41
By Standard8 on Oct 5, 2008
@Pete:
A more integrated solution is what we are progressing towards. Some of these improvements will be in Thunderbird 3. The additional fields are things users have requested for ages, and its time to start progressing towards those.
@Jeria:
You’re right, I’ve never noticed it before, I’ll be filing a bug in a while.
@Andrea:
There’s a lot of bugs that deserve some love and we’re taking them on in a progressive way. That doesn’t stop a volunteer coming and providing a patch to something we haven’t got to yet…
@Onno:
I think the strangest thing here is the “or” now I look at it again, and maybe you’re right about the labels.
By James John Malcolm on Oct 6, 2008
@Standard8 That’s even better, if it’s like that.
Also, have you noticed how the statusbar stays dark-gray the whole time, even when the window’s unfocused?