(Archived) Address Book?

[Dudds 0]

Having seen a thread on the lack of compatibility between EN and, say, Gmail address book - is anyone aware of a specific (Trunk?) address book app for EN? If not, does anyone have a suggestion for the best way to store addresses in EN?

[hodnettd 0]

As alluded to in that other thread, there is no universal standard for capturing a person's contact information. It is possible to create an app that's capable of exporting data from Evernote and importing it into GMail but that app is not guaranteed to work with Yahoo! or Live Mail (nee Hotmail), let alone desktop clients like Apple's Mail and Microsoft's Outlook. And I think the reason why EN didn't want to implement a "universal exchanger" is because they don't have the time and resources to tackle what turns out to be a non-trivial problem.

Err... short answer short, I'm not aware of any such universal app, nor do I expect to ever see one.

On the other hand, if you wanted to limit yourself to just two environments... say GMail and Outlook, it would be - in theory - very easy to create a program that does that export import dance but then you have to ask yourself the question, why use Evernote in the first place? You're better off just using Google Contacts which is designed for that purpose. Admittedly, Contacts doesn't work very well but it's there, it's already integrated into GMail and it has an API.

Now, to answer the second question (in good faith):

Most database programming books will tell you that all you really need are first name, last name, street address, city, state, zip code, phone number and email address fields. If you want to allow for two phone numbers, such as a cell phone, you'll need a second phone field. In fact, for GMail, the Google Contacts API will tell you exactly what you need.

Within Evernote, you'll want to borrow a page from XML and create a note (or multiple notes) with the following contents:

Johnname>
Doename>
1234 Main Streetaddress 1>
Apt 23address 2>
Anytown
Washington D.C.
10000
000-555-12341>
000-555-56782>

That gives you an EN note that's human readable and also easily parsed by other software. Then all you have to do is write the code that exports that data into a format that Microsoft's Live Mail will recognize.

[Dudds 0]

Excellent - many thanks for that. Something to do over the weekend ...

[ct236 1]

Okay! Here it is in late November. Did the project ever get done? I ask cause I'd like to synchronize my Google contacts with Evernote. Why? I like the idea of having all my contacts backed up on all my different computers, and I find Evernote easier to search and work with on my Sprint Android phone. For the time being, at least. Does anyone else here back up their Google contacts in Evernote? And if so, how?

[jbenson2 2,149]

I back up my GMail contacts into Evernote.

It is not a great system, but Evernote's search capability makes it workable.

Every month or so, I will do a full export of all my contact information to a print file.

I copy and paste it into an Evernote note.

[katahdin 8]

I do too but its been a while - thanks for reminding me !

But the significant issue is: have you tried to restored your contacts from this file?

[jbenson2 2,149]

I do too but its been a while - thanks for reminding me !

But the significant issue is: have you tried to restored your contacts from this file?

You are funny!

That would be worse than sticking burning bamboo under my fingernails.

[katahdin 8]

Actually its not funny! I recall, back in the days (25-25 years ago) when IBM was 93-95% of the real world, one of the system utilities programs, I think, (recalling this as I type) was "fastcopy" which backed up your disk to magnetic tape in its own proprietary format. We gleefully went along confident that our data was secure.. Yup, you guessed it ! Factcopy "restore" function didn't work ! Now talk about heart palpitations ! Don't recall which company found this out the hard way - but it was a significant one and bet it cost them and IBM a bundle !

I export the contacts to a csv file, notepad, select all, copy, then paste into a new note. With all those commas - one extra comma or one missing comma - catastrophe !! LOL