First off, thanks very much for the source! It's excellent, both in and of itself and as an example of how to do this type of work.

Do you do development on the/a device? Do you recommend a particular way of testing changed packages on the device (N950, in my case)?

And separately, have you considered a merge tool that suggests a whole bunch of merges at one point, like the N900's "Merge Contacts" feature? I don't know if it's Ovi/Nokia Sync or switching from First/Last to Last/First view and back, but I've got four copies of lots of contacts and it's a real pain to individually go through the merge process for every one; as new contacts come in via parsing of email recipients the annoyance will only grow.

Thanks again for reaching out and for the source.

Hi,

I'd just like to say thanks very much for the great work - I've had my N9 for a week and love it more and more every day. The services/contacts and messaging framework is a prime example of why: it's how mobile devices should abstract all this stuff, instead of being tied to one service provider.

I've used mc-tool to add my generic jabber account, but I'd assumed that a service was going to be added in a future firmware release. Is this definitely not the case?

I would also like to vote for the option to hide the SMS button for non-mobile numbers. The N900 had that very option. Another thing I'm missing from that is separate work and home mobile number categories.

you have no idea how high and thick the walls are between the business units.

For sure the windows department is very well separated from the
small group of unixers. By site, if not by country.

So the partner up with MS doesnt mean a lot for the meego boys.
As far i can tell. At least not yet.

--
by the way, this is a pheomen visible in many giant corporations
(especially if they had a lot of aquisitions, i have visited the trolltech boys once.. they are all by themself holed up in oslo,norway.. still today.... - all thats common, is the exchange server, and the domain in their email address)

C'est strange. Since youre able to use MSN on the N900, I mean. Cant be THAT difficult to get on the N9, can it? And if it isnt obvious by now; I have no idea how any of this works, SW wise. :P

That's the difference between an official implementation by MS and a reverse-engineered free one. On the N900, there's (my favourite among others) the msn-pecan telepathy plugin, taken from pidgin, the open source desktop IM client. It's not official in the slightest. The developer's guessed how MSN works and written something that approximates it.

Harmattan uses telepathy too, albeit a newer version, so it would probably be relatively straightforward to migrate one of these plugins over from the n900. However, this would only give you telepathy compatibility which would mean accounts can only be added via the 'mc-tool' command in the terminal, and aren't displayed properly in the contacts app. A full implementation would require registering an MSN service that registers msn-haze or pecan as its IM provider, which involves a lot more new work. That said, this is what the services framework is supposed to provide for, so I bet it's a pleasant experience to implement.

Of course, a full MSN/Live service which could from one msn login add hotmail to the mail app, msn im, skydrive media sharing and a feed from messenger social would be nice. That's the kind of thing that this framework was designed to support.

If there are any holes in my understanding of all this, I'd love to learn more.

^ You're pretty spot-on from what i can tell, & based on what the Nokia dev's already been saying so far.
Nicely summarized....

Add me to the chorus of kudos for this - there's a "smoother" feel to the Contacts and IM integration than the N900 had. And that was pretty smooth in and of itself.

MfE connected to Google got me my contacts (only synching those) using standard email for GMail, and CalDAV for (multiple) calendar synching.

However, the birthdays of my contacts are one day off - one day early. Right there in the text in the contact record. Is there a bug I can go add my clamor to?

I like the way N9 handle messages. However, would it be possible to merge all the messaging log with a contact via different channels, and hitting the protocol button at the left hand side of the text input widget will allow me to choose which channel should be used to send the message?

For example, I have a contact foo who is on both Google Talk and Facebook Chat. So instead of having 2 different messaging logs (one for each communication channel), is it possible to merge them as one? Then to send foo a message, I can just tap on the protocol button (either google talk or facebook chat) to change which channel (protocol?) to use to send him/her message?

Sometimes the widgets in the messaging view are not very tap friendly. Sometimes it is friggin difficult to activate message composition mode for replying, and tapping the contact icon to open his/her profile also need super precision.... which is a bit annoying

awesome thanks =]

call me silly, but who? how can i contact him/them? im sure its an easy fix for them so shouldn *cross fingers*

I do develop in scratchbox, and rely mostly on the test suite to check that I didn't break anything. We then of course have testers who check with the device.
I'm not sure if you're allowed to replace a system package (qtcontacts-tracker) with a package that you built yourself, since its AEGIS origin will not be signed. I don't exactly know how the security works for N950 :-/ If it ever blocks you from doing it, one possible hack (just thinking out loud, untested) would be to just change the soname so that it gets scanned *before* the normal libqtcontacts-tracker.so (name it libaaaaa.so). The second "tracker" contact manager should then be ignored.

Using ovi sync and two devices is the best way to get duplicates. Ovi sync is quite stupid, and even having it *disabled* I had duplication issues. In a more general way, I hate how nokia forces you to have this crappy ovi account just to use maps. But I digress Future version will have an automerge button that will partially solve that issue, it however stays quite conservative in finding merge candidates. Having a third party merge application would be a good idea too (one that would do interactive merge, vs. unattended for contacts app). You might want to look at the libqtcontacts-extensions-tracker lib then, which has a merge request function ("merge" is not a stock qt-mobility operation).