Database Develop

Contact manager that will search through "Notes" field?

I've searched on this forum (and others), but can't find. Sometimes I keep relevant information about a contact in the notes field to remind me how I know the person, etc., and I'd like to be able to search on that field with a standard contact manager. Any ideas? Thanks.

try inesoft address book. it will allow you to type T9 style from the today screen to search through your contacts and contacts' notes

I am 100% sure that the Search program that comes with Pocket PC does search in the Note sections of the Contacts (Pocket Outlook)

search [ing] contact notes
z_zk_z said:
I am 100% sure that the Search program that comes with Pocket PC does search in the Note sections of the Contacts (Pocket Outlook)
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yeah...I did a search in my 1800 notes, 1000 contacts and it took 12 minutes to find it....on my treo...less than 10 seconds.
Being an ex database guy....I think the only way you are gonna get fast search is by making ALL data in the form of a dataBASE....like the Palm OS does (Pdb's)....AND....here's the critical thing...INDEXING EACH WORD.
Chas

G1 Contact list strange please help

hi all i have just got a g1 drc92 with official 1.6 f/w, i have a bit of a strange question someone on here will probably find easy to answer,
my problem is i have imported all my contacts into Google mail online then synced with the phone, i have 100 contacts and all are in alphabetical order except the last 5 they just seem to be added at the end of the list? i basically have a - z all listed fine then at the end of the ones that are ok i have a George , and a john etc... just 5 contacts out of order.
i have tried deleting these contacts and adding them via the phone and still they just get added to the bottom? i have tried editing the contacts online then re-syncing and it still adds to the bottom of the list in the phone and on g-mail contacts online?
please help as this is really annoying.

hmmm, must be something different about those contacts... Can't really tell you unless you give us a more thorough description or a screenshot or something like that. I bet you it has something to do with the contacts themselves though.

Maybe the name was entered under business instead of the name field?
Check your gmail contacts and look to see what's different.

Hi
I managed to sort these contacts now, i had to save them to a csv file and edit it manualy in exel? strange! but sorted now!

which roms emulate 1.5 sytle of choosing which gmail groups to sync to the phone

Hi Everyone
I really liked how in 1.5 one could chose which of their gmail contact groups they wanted to have synced to the phone. Now let me take a min to explain what I am talking about because I think when I say this I have confused people in other thread topics when asking about it. Using the web interface of gmail I have created a couple of groups (phone family, phone friends, etc). I created these groups because I did not want all 500 of my of my gmail contacts on my phone. Creating these groups allowed me to specifically choose which contacts would be synched from the web to my phone and keep them organized based on how I know them. Now in 2.1 this was taken away and replaced by a sync all contacts approach (this was already aval in 1.5 so I don't know why they would chose to take out the group syncing ability). I know there are ways to limit which contacts appear in people by going to view and then choosing no phone number this is not enough control for me because my contact list/people app on the phone is still over loaded with contacts.
Are there any 2.1 roms that emulate the syncing options that were available in 1.5?
Thank You

There isn't. Only 1.5 has that option

That really SUCKS!!!! I could have sowrn that I read in one of the threads here that at least one rom did support that functionality but I have tried it and it has been a no go :-(
Is it a HTC thing or is it an android thing? By that I mean does 2.1 just make that impossible to do or is it something that if I or someone else wanted to to make a custom rom could add in or bring that functionality back?

I agree that this sucks that this option was taken away. I have asked a few different places about this option and have got no response.

I figured it out...
Hey everyone
I can't believe it I figured it out :-D I am feeling super happy I am one step closer to bringing full functionality back to my phone :-D
I haven't duplicated it on anyone else's phone so not sure if it is a fluke or what. Also only have it working in the custom rom I am using (ALOYSIUS 2.1)
If you want to know what I did pm me and I'll let you know.

you could just, you know, tell us in this thread so everyone doesn't have to PM you

This thread will most likely be moved to the hero general forum....but I just got his PM on how he got it to work.....
dsMA said:
Here is how I got it to work. I went to settings; accounts & sync; I have background data, auto-sync, and google, email checked.
You then exit out of settings and open contacts. Go to the contacts tab, menu, display options, click on gmail account, now a list of all your gmail groups should appear, check the ones you want to sync. Click done to save changes. Now the contacts tab should be populated by all the people in those groups you have selected. And now when you go to people it should be populated by only those groups that were checked in contacts. (i didnt change any settings in people, clicking menu, view, the only things checked are phone and google)
Click to expand...
Click to collapse

interesting. i wonder if the same technique would work with a facebook group? i don't want all those people in my phone haha

I agree I don't really need all my facebook friends in my addressbook. In fact when you go to people -> view -> I leave facebook unchecked so none of them do. So if you would rather none of your facebook friends show up in the people app that is the way to do it.
Now it would be cool though if you could do something similar with facebook contacts that you could do with gmail contacts; I personally don't know. I suspect you might be able to filter the facebook contacts and sync/display by groups provided that facebook allows you to create groups of contacts but I don't know if they do.

Contacts in Phone App not necessarily People App....
I have 4200 contacts. I REALLY REALLY REALLY want this solved.
While testing the Andriod App and Google Contacts I realized a couple of things.
In Google Contacts selecting ALL Contacts I could REMOVE them from MY CONTACTS under GROUPS.
If you look to the left hand side column you will see MY CONTACTS now has ZERO contacts in it and ALL CONTACTS has all your contacts.
Then I selected ALL CONTACTS in the left hand side column. The I selected only the contacts I wanted to be in MY CONTACTS. When you click on a CONTACT you now have an option next to GROUPS at the top that say MOVE TO MY CONTACTS.
The great thing about this is under the PEOPLE APP only MY CONTACTS and the GROUPS I have created show up in the PEOPLE APP.
This is what I hoped would happen.
What happened in addition to this you ask?
Now when I go into the PHONE APP I click on MENU then PEOPLE and voila! Only the selected contacts come up. Perfect so far right?
Wrong. From the HOME screen I press the TALK BUTTON. When I start scrolling through the HISTORY of the calls and I arrive at the last HISTORY call I see that the 1st CONTACT of my 4200 contacts shows up. Then I scroll on down and realize that all 4200 contacts ARE THERE!!!!
So it is not only the PEOPLE APP that needs work but ALSO the PHONE APP. In my opinion.
Am I missing something?
So my question is now how do I tell the phone app to only sync whats in PEOPLE APP and not request ALL CONTACTS?
Any thoughts? Ive only worked and researched this for about 5 hours. So I am probably missing something.
Thank you for your help.
David
Build: Damage Control v2.09.01
Firmware: 2.1-update1
Baseband: 2.42.01.04.27
Kernal: 2.6.29-bc0d2cf

The Fix
For people who stumble upon this thread and need an answer let me share my experiences.
In version 1.5 of the OS HTC allowed us to pick which contact groups we wanted to sync to our phones from our gmail accounts. Enter 2.1, now we no longer have that granulated control, we are forced to sync all of our gmail contacts. After talking with HTC they told me that this is not a result of a change in their contact app (people) but rather a change google made to the android os.
I will now talk about some of the display options provided by people:
launch people - click menu (physical phone button) - click view
As it relates to google here if you want to sync your google contacts you must check the google box. Unfortunately as I stated above this syncs all google contacts. HTC does allow you some limited control over which contacts are actually displayed in your contact list though sadly the controls are not all that great. The only real useful option is at the top "show only contacts with phone numbers". This will only display those contacts which you have a stored phone number for. This option applies globally so if you have your phone tied to flicker, facebook, and twitter then also only contacts with phone numbers present will be displayed. There is a setting under Google that says "show auto gmail contacts" this will display those contacts that are set to show up in your gchat.
How to fix the problem.
Simple answer is that you are going to need to have the AOSP contacts app on your phone. The easiest way to do this is find a rom that includes it. This is actually easier said then done if you want to keep sense on your phone. Everyone has their opinion of sense, either you like it or you don't; personally I like it. The only rom that has both that I am aware of is Alyosius. I find it to be a good rom with both oc and non oc versions aval. If you have a rom that has the aosp contacts app here is what you do:
1. launch the contacts app (contacts)
2. menu (physical phone button)
3. display options
you will now be provided with the various accounts your phone syncs to
click on your gmail account
a set of sub options should now show up, after scrolling through the suboptions you will notice that all your gmail contact groups are shown.
4. check which ever groups you want displayed
Note: this does not prevent your phone from syncing all your contacts, there does not seem to be a way to prevent your phone from syncing all your gmail contacts. this simply makes managing the contacts that show up on your phone more manageable. This trick will limit the contacts that show up in the contact/people app to just those whose groups you have checked.
Note: when preforming a search view the search app or search button it is still possible to search for contacts that are not displayed i.e. since all groups are synced no matter what you will get search hits on those contacts same goes for when using the dialer.
If the rom you use does not have AOSP contacts I would contact the rom developer and see if it is possible to install the AOSP contacts app on your own and see if they can help you.
I hope this is helpful to people.

[Q] Contacts

Hello, I'm a new owner (less than a week) of the Captivate and a newbie for android except for messing with the Backflip for a couple weeks. All of your guides have been great and I've been tweaking the heck of my captivate. I've even recovered from a near-bricking... scary but satisfying when I breathed life back into the phone. Currently I've got it rooted, OCed, new interface, etc.
However there's one aspect I'd really like to change that's bothering me. As you can guess from my subject it's the contact handling. I haven't seen any threads addressing it and hope someone can either help or point me towards a solution.
In a nutshell, contact handling is horrible. It makes me appreciate motoblur on the backflip... and I hate going backwards. I can't sync my google contact groups and the current implementation is acting strangely. I have it set up to only sync and ONLY display google contacts yet I'm getting an abbreviated list on the contacts tab. There's a lot of contacts that will only display if I click Groups->google. I have no idea why.
Are there any mods that will improve the display of contacts and handle the managing and syncing of google contact groups? Also, what folders will it sync if I enable contact sync with my exchange server? Will disabling sync remove the contacts if I don't like how they're being displayed?
Thanks.

I agree. The stock Contact app on this phone is garbage. The google groups are completely hosed on this app. No individual ringtones can be assigned unless you also create duplicates as phone contacts and then link them together. That is completely brain dead. Even if you do that, you still can't view the google group assigments. They are there, you just can't see them. Try to create a new group with the same name as one of your google groups that doesn't show. It will say it can't create it because it already exists. I'll say it again, the Contacts app on the Captivate is garbage. I haven't been able to find a replacement for it either. Anybody have some suggestions?

The closest thing I can find is an app called GroupU. It presents all of your google groups and changes made through it sync back to your google contacts. However it not integrated into he OS so it's a bit awkward to use.
Still looking for other options. Are there any phones out there that have better contact/google integration? If so, would it be possible to, say, backup that phones contacts.apk and restore it to the captivate? I don't think this would be possible (though I'd definitely try it if I had a different android phone) but I'm still knew to this and haven't gotten down to code level yet.
Anybody else have other options?

Raleran said:
In a nutshell, contact handling is horrible. It makes me appreciate motoblur on the backflip... and I hate going backwards. I can't sync my google contact groups and the current implementation is acting strangely. I have it set up to only sync and ONLY display google contacts yet I'm getting an abbreviated list on the contacts tab. There's a lot of contacts that will only display if I click Groups->google. I have no idea why.
Thanks.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Two things I can think of in response that might answer some of your questions/issues.
You are obviously aware that you can display contacts from a specific location as you described like "google contacts." For some reason the contacts app has default settings for certain apps. For example; only display contacts with phone number when you are in the dialer or only display contacts with email addresses when in the email app. I have noticed that this weird auto filtering has a tendency to block the contacts I want at the wrong time. I would try checking the filters and make sure its not just hiding what you want to see.
Secondly, I was annoyed with the poor handling of contact groups by the captivate. It seems that the phone will not sync the group placement of the contacts with gmail. From the reading I did, it seems this is a known issue and is being addressed. Google recently made changes to the contacts section online and I am assuming that we will see a change on next months update.
I hope this answers some questions. I have not tried any 3rd party contacts managers so I don't have a replacement suggestion. I got my filters straight and I don't mind waiting for a "groups" fix.

This is my wife's biggest gripe with her phone as well. The groups come through weird, and when she links two contacts together we can't seem to figure out how to set one as the default, so several contacts are showing up in her list as their Twitter username instead of their actual name.
Also, no assigning personalized ringtones for Google contacts? Seriously? Vanilla 2.1 and 2.2 don't have this problem.
I can't wait for somebody to write a vanilla ROM for the Captivate and get completely rid of touchwiz.

Another brain-dead feature of contact groups: if you do "send message" to a group, you're presented with a list of all the contacts in the group. None of the contacts in the group are selected, and there's no "select all" option; you have to go through and tap every member of the group.

Shovelhead84 said:
You are obviously aware that you can display contacts from a specific location as you described like "google contacts." For some reason the contacts app has default settings for certain apps. For example; only display contacts with phone number when you are in the dialer or only display contacts with email addresses when in the email app. I have noticed that this weird auto filtering has a tendency to block the contacts I want at the wrong time. I would try checking the filters and make sure its not just hiding what you want to see.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I'm having this trouble with the default contact app. If I go to the "desktop" and start contacts I get a different listing on the contact tab then the groups->google tab. I've made sure that only google contacts are displaying (unselected google and made sure the contacts tab was blank). I don't see any filters except for the "only display contacts with phone numbers". Are there any others hidden somewhere?
Shovelhead84 said:
Secondly, I was annoyed with the poor handling of contact groups by the captivate. It seems that the phone will not sync the group placement of the contacts with gmail. From the reading I did, it seems this is a known issue and is being addressed. Google recently made changes to the contacts section online and I am assuming that we will see a change on next months update.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I think that the groups are carried to the phone and they're synced in the background. I think that Touchwiz contacts just doesn't display them. Here's why I believe this... GroupU says in their description "Contacts GroupU integrates with built-in phonebook seamlessly." When I loaded it, it knew my labels I had set up in google contacts AND when I changed the assignment it synced back to my desktop.
I haven't seen anything on next months update... do you mean 2.2 will be released then?

Kiserai said:
Also, no assigning personalized ringtones for Google contacts? Seriously? Vanilla 2.1 and 2.2 don't have this problem.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Here's the strange thing... I know someone with the original droid and they can't access groups either. Go figure.
I've never seen a vanilla ROM for android... so I have absolutely no clue what it looks like.

Raleran said:
I'm having this trouble with the default contact app. If I go to the "desktop" and start contacts I get a different listing on the contact tab then the groups->google tab. I've made sure that only google contacts are displaying (unselected google and made sure the contacts tab was blank). I don't see any filters except for the "only display contacts with phone numbers". Are there any others hidden somewhere?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I would double check this but I just picked up my phone and it is dead. Not sure why but my battery is completely drained...I think you will see different filter options base on contact application launch. IE...dialer, email, messaging
Raleran said:
I haven't seen anything on next months update... do you mean 2.2 will be released then?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
We can only hope... here is one post on it.
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=754678

EX Dialer seems great
Kiserai said:
This is my wife's biggest gripe with her phone as well. The groups come through weird, and when she links two contacts together we can't seem to figure out how to set one as the default, so several contacts are showing up in her list as their Twitter username instead of their actual name.
Also, no assigning personalized ringtones for Google contacts? Seriously? Vanilla 2.1 and 2.2 don't have this problem.
I can't wait for somebody to write a vanilla ROM for the Captivate and get completely rid of touchwiz.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
First off try EX Dialer, it seems fine, and I think it addresses your complaints.
Sendly any JB 4.2 release for your Cappy will astound you, most CM 10.1 based ROMs are really fine.
I like Captivating, though slim bean looks well supported.
Dosolutions

[Q] Showing particular contacts(Groups) from Gmail account.

hey. was just wondering if there's anyway to sync selected groups of contacts instead of every damned one on my list.
reason is that i don't want hundreds of e-mails clogging up my contacts list.
sure, i can show only contacts with numbers. but there are some contacts which i only have their e-mails.
thanks!

i'm looking for something similar myself
i got several email accounts (more than 15) that i sync with and you can imagine the huge mess of contacts i have in my phone when i pull up the list to search for an email or phone number
i'm trying to find a way or something to organize all that
also to sync it all across all the accounts
or something along the line
just to clean them up and make it easy to the eyes
i have no problem finding the number or email of the person i need to contact
it just eye soring to see over a 1000+ contacts when you bring up the list to pick from the list.
good lord Android came with an awesome search build in, else it would have been a major pain in the arsenal as it was with Windows Mobile and PalmOS and every other smartphone i've ever had before, even Blackberry sucked at contacts handling

ah well. looks like for now i have to show only contacts with phone numbers. and add some random numbers for the important contacts that i only somehow have their e-mail addresses. bummer.