After inputting all my contacts into my core it dawned on me that an easier way of doing this would be to add the ability to pull contacts in from Google Contacts like I do on my Mobile. This gives me a backup of my contacts and means that whenever a change happens on my Mobile or Google the changes are automatically synced up in all places without ever having to manually edit them in more than one place. It would be great to have LinuxMCE playing nicely with this so that all devices would be seamless.
I like it.
http://code.google.com/apis/contacts/docs/3.0/developers_guide.html
Wow, the tools are there, and this looks like it would be very useful.
somebody take charge of this and do it.
-Thom
Thom,
I'll give it a shot now that I'm getting more comfortable with LMCE codebase, but can you provide some implementation advice please? I am only a beginner and haven't been able to look at the LMCE code to see how contacts are currently handled, but I imagine they are written to a database. I'm thinking this should be relatively easy to implement since google has already provided some code to fetch all contacts and make edits from your own application so really I think I just need to tie this into LMCE's existing code for editing contacts, etc. So basically as a start just fetch all contacts from Google and write them to the database through the web admin, then add the editing bits with a sync contacts button in the web admin to push any changes back to google. Again, I haven't even looked at the existing LMCE code yet, but does that sound about right to you?
Yes. We don't currently have THAT many fields in the pluto_telecom database for the Contact table, we just have a Contact table for the general contact info (name, company, etc.), and a Phonenumber table, for storing the individual phone numbers.
-Thom
If you do take this on - try to plan for the future. Think about how your stuff could connect to other contact databases, or how it could accumulate contacts from multiple databases simultaneously. Facebook comes to mind first. A lot of the newer smartphones are starting to have this capability, so it's definitely something people will know about.
I'm not saying that such expandability should work in the first implementation, but don't do anything that would prohibit that sort of functionality down the road.
just keep two words in mind, "simple" and "sane"
-Thom
Please make sure it works with google apps as well. Lots of people overlook that as well.
What do you mean make sure it works with google apps? You mean edits on LMCE should push back to google contacts right? Or are you referring to something else?
What about looking at integrating an existing open-source project to handle contacts and syncing, like one of the groupware projects? That could allow LinuxMCE to leverage work and technology that is constantly being developed for that purpose, and LinuxMCE would only need to be concerned with the integration. I started a thread about Calendar/Groupware integration.
Hope that helps!
/Mike
Man, I wish LMCE would just stop being so damned awesome!
Sorry guys, I will come back to this, got wrapped up with other projects for a bit. If someone else has the time now feel free to get a start on it, complete it, whatever, just please let me know if you're actively working on it so we don't duplicate efforts.
Quote from: los93sol on November 05, 2009, 09:29:15 PM
What do you mean make sure it works with google apps? You mean edits on LinuxMCE should push back to google contacts right? Or are you referring to something else?
As in... don't ask for an account that ends in @gmail.com. Google apps users (such as myself) have accounts with custom domains. That and people who choose not to create Gmail accounts and use their existing addresses instead.
Though edits on LinuxMCE definitely should push back to Google Contacts either way.
Silverskull, feel free to dig into the code and get a jump on this
Perhaps after we get this done, we could evenfurther the web-intergration, perhaps having facebook for each user piped to specific Media Directors, ie, their bedroom, etc. Or we could continue along with google, with GReader integration, GMail sending and recieving, and pretty much anything with an API out there.
Che are you going to start on this?
Quote from: los93sol on November 29, 2009, 12:07:50 AM
Che are you going to start on this?
There are some good ideas in this thread...and clearly some people who might be able to put limited amounts of development effort into realising those ideas too. What's needed is for all you guys who are interested, and have limited time, to coordinate yourselves a little - get some work underway even if its just a few hours a week and get things moving forwards.
Small amounts of effort from several people will deliver results eventually - get organised and get started :-)
All the best
Andrew
Quote from: los93sol on November 29, 2009, 12:07:50 AM
Che are you going to start on this?
I wish I could. I would love to learn to dev, but honestly have no idea where to start. I have no programming experience at all, and to be honest, it all seems just about magic to me.
Beklieve me though, if I could, I would.
Andrew, you are absolutely correct, I have zero time atm to develop on this which is why I'm pushing for someone else to get started and as I have time I will help. Che, this is a pretty easy project for you to learn on
Where, and how, do I start?
You should start by setting up a development environment for LinuxMCE: http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/Building_LinuxMCE_0810
Then do some reading about the api provided by google to interface with their stuff: http://code.google.com/apis/contacts/docs/3.0/developers_guide.html
And your going to want to spend some time looking at the source for LinuxMCE's web admin.
if I remember right, LMCE's web admin is mostly done in PHP so you'll want to do some reading and learning about PHP. Just learn on the fly as you are putting things together and trying to get it working.
I had some time to get started on this and have some decent progress already. Learning PHP as I go this is taking a considerable amount of effort, but is definitely pretty simple since google was able to spoonfeed me most of what I needed. Don't get your hopes up too high, all I'm going to be doing is pulling from Google, if you guys want more than that you'll have to get your hands a little dirty too, but as of now you navigate to the phone book, click the Google Contacts button I created, it will prompt you for your credentials and pull back all your contacts. At this point it doesn't actually do anything with them other than print them to the screen, but once I look at the existing code for adding entries I don't imagine this part will be too difficult either.
Any updates on this?
How far along did you make it los93sol?
I abandoned it after several people who wanted to help never contacted me, Im not sure where I put the code either, it'd likely just need to be started fresh anyway as there were some dependencies which I've also lost my notes on. Hit me in the dev channel if ur serious about this, I can help, but don't have enough time to do the whole thing.
I don't have any background on coding because i am a designer...
But want to learn on it can somebody give me a link were i can learn on coding or basic coding.
Here you go: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Learn+C%2B%2B+in+21+days (http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Learn+C%2B%2B+in+21+days)
Thanks for keeping up on this, los93sol.
This is something I'd like to help with but my time has gone under severe crunch and I won't have enough time to be useful until later this year/early next year.
At that time, I'll check in with you, john14paul80, and see if I can't lend some support.