Mobile/Archive/Contacts

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Summary

Add form autocomplete support for using email addresses from a device's address book. When in an email field, typing a person's name should display any matching email addresses from the device address book.

Current Status

Code exists to read the system address book on Maemo and desktop Linux. The Mozilla Labs "people" project does something very similar with form autocomplete and we'll use their autocomplete code for inspiration.

Basic support for Maemo/Linux has landed.

Next Steps

  • Make a patch for Maemo/Linux (evolution ebook)
  • Research how to access Android address book
  • Should we care about Mac and Windows? Code exists for Mac, so it should be easy.

Related Bugs

Team

  • Design: madhava
  • Team Members: mfinkle

Designs

The current auto-complete design (layout-wise) suffices for this.

One issue is how the two buckets of auto-complete data (history and contacts) combine for presentation to the user. I think that:

  • Before a user has started to type
    • History should take priority over (be listed before) contacts data. The rationale is that items you've bothered to type before are more likely to be the ones you want than addresses/names that happen to be in your contacts book.
  • Once the user has started to type
    • names/address from both buckets should be presented integrated, in order based on closeness to match of the entered characters
    • where there's a tie, history should come before contacts (same rationale as before)

Other questions:

  • Make the person data be accessible to add-ons, which could add data from other sources?

Goals/Use Cases

  • Map names to email addresses in email fields.
  • Map names to phone numbers addresses in phone fields.

Non Goals

  • Full identity management system (high overhead)
  • Web-based address books (high overhead)