Re: GPE On Nokia N800 ITOS2007

[Mark Haury <wolfmane@xxxxxxxxx>]

Peter Bart wrote:

On Wed, 2008-04-23 at 10:13 -0600, Mark Haury wrote:
  

I have to say that the critical deal killer for me is that even though 
it may be possible to jump through a few hoops and *import* data into 
gpe, there doesn't seem to be any way to *export* it back out. 
    

	I'm not sure about what's going wrong for you, I imported my data
several years ago w/o any problems. 300 plus individual entries as one
file.

  

I edited my vcf file manually with Kate on my kubuntu system, replaced the two umlauted characters with plain characters, and the file successfully imported. The success is muted, however, by the fact that most of the fields are mixed up, and some weren't imported at all. For example, only the phone and name were put in the "Home" fields, and the state was put before the city in the addresses.

I would 
be a lot more willing to put more effort into getting my data into gpe 
if I was sure of a reasonably easy way of not only backing it up,
    

	There's a built in backup utility from Nokia that backs up the GPE
directories. You can use rsync to "backup" your home directory to
another drive, memory card, etc. Last but not least you can also simply
copy the GPE directories to another location.
  

I completely screwed up my explanation on this one. What I meant was that I want to be able to specify the working directory and keep all my data in an easily found and copied directory on one of the SDHC cards, where it's completely safe from reflashes and easily copied and transported to other machines/drives.

 but 
moving/copying it into other apps as needed. As I tend to do that a lot, 
ease of import and export is a very big deal for me. What I'm saying is 
that for me, it's not a matter of a one-time import and then I'd be 
done. It would be a constant process of import and export, and therefore 
those processes are critical to whether or not it's worth it to me to 
use the app.
    

	I don't need that kind of functionality the way you do. So far I I've
used load applet to take a screenshot of a specific entry and send that
off. For me, the less I move my data around, the more time I have to do
real work.
  

For me, moving my data around *is* what I need to do. I use the data in different ways, with different apps, most of which don't understand vcf files but all of which do understand csv files.

For me, the ideal import/export method is csv files.
    

ok 

  

I never had a problem with import or export with either my Visor Deluxe 
(Palm OS) or my Psion Series 5. It was always quick, painless and accurate.
    

	Then by all means use those devices.
  

Unfortunately, I dropped the Visor recently, and the screen is dying. The Psion wasn't well supported even when it was new, and while it's a great gadget, it only has a 10MHz processor, and is completely incapable of any kind of networking. Between the two, the Visor is more portable and versatile, but as I said, it's dying. Anyway, yours is not a very helpful comment. Both devices are more than 10 years old, and while highly capable as address books and for playing games, are pretty much obsolete for any other purpose. When I bought the Nokia, I (quite reasonably) assumed that it would have a decent PIM. Much less powerful and much more inexpensive units have very capable PIMs (come on, even my 10-plus-year-old Visor and Psion have better PIMs!). There's really no excuse for Nokia not porting Kontacts or Evolution or some other full-featured Linux PIM. I probably would have got an eee PC instead if I had known: the form factor of the Nokia isn't been nearly as much of an advantage without that particular functionality.

And no, "syncing" is not the answer. I need to be able to work with the 
data much more directly than that.
    

	I'm not sure I understand. I can sync GPE to Evolution, Schedule World,
Google, etc and work with the data from there. You don't get much more
direct than that. Why wouldn't you want a matching set of records on
another device? I had mine set up to sync to Evolution once, from there
I can save, email, etc individual or multiple contacts as I need. The
Nokia is a great device but it is limited when compared to my notebook.
Each in it's place.
  

I don't use Evolution, Schedule world, or Google. I use Access and up until now my Visor. I've been trying for a long time to migrate my Access databases to OOo Base, but it can't import tables or csv files any more than gpe can, and when connecting to the original Access database can't deal with any of the other database objects at all. Its report formatting is also incredibly limited at this point. (In my opinion, Base is still alpha level software, utterly unlike the rest of the suite.)

If anybody can point me to a different cross-platform (mainly Windows and Linux, but Mac would be a plus) database that has most of the power and ease of Access (and the most important features are reliable import/export of csv and the ability to create report layouts from scratch), I would be *extremely* appreciative. I've tried to learn about SQL and frontends for it, but everything I can find basically assumes one already knows all about it and seem to be based on scripting, and I need to work from a GUI, including creating databases from scratch. The reason I need cross-platform and GUI is so I can share it with others in my organization who are not all that computer-literate and have different OS's than me.

Mark

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