N9/N950 Contacts/IM - Get help & give feedback here
 

Following the initiative of VDVsx, let's start a thread to get (constructive) feedback about the whole Contacts/IM experience on N9/N950: questions, remarks, bugs...
Feature requests are accepted too, but we now have limited resources on Nokia side to implement them... The good thing? All our middleware is open source (see [1])! Which means you can too contribute the features you'd like to see.

The disclaimer is the same as for the email support thread: although I work for Nokia, this is not an official support channel, and the people who'll take time to answer you will do it on their spare time.

[1] https://gitorious.org/qtcontacts-tracker/

Re: N9/N950 Contacts/IM - Get help & give feedback here
 

Couple of things:

I think the text area on conversation view is too hard to hit to get the virtual keyboard up, why not keep the keyboard always open or something.

Where is generic jabber accounts, all I can see is google talk.

Re: N9/N950 Contacts/IM - Get help & give feedback here
 

Contacts: unsure if bug or just a "feature". I sync my contacts with google, using MfE. This also pulled in my contact's pictures, which is nice. I've also synced with Facebook and merged contacts, it by default kept the Google contact picture.

Now, when I edit a contact and try to change the picture, I am only offered the options "Facebook" or from gallery. And if I choose Facebook, for instance, this overwrites the original picture and I can no longer choose the original picture synchronised by MfE.

Is this intentional? Or a limitation set by the MfE client? The picture change is obviously only done locally, I see it's still unchanged on Google contacts...so changing it back should be possible, right?

Edit I just noticed that as soon as I sync again with MfE, the pictures get replaced with their google originals, overwriting my local changes.

Re: N9/N950 Contacts/IM - Get help & give feedback here
 

@abustany

Sorry this is more organisational...
Do you guys plan to duplicate your threads at the meego forum?
Or do you intend to focus your threads here @TMO only?

Re: N9/N950 Contacts/IM - Get help & give feedback here
 

Request:

It is possible to export contacts to vcard but it is not possible to import contacts from file.

Only options are:
-from another phone
-from online-account
-form simcard

wartburgritter

Re: N9/N950 Contacts/IM - Get help & give feedback here
 

About the text area: that's a design decision, I guess to allow you to see more messages when you open the conversation. There was a bug about the entry being to hard to hit, as far as I know nothing has been done for it. I'll tell the messaging team about it.

About generic jabber accounts: again, design decision :-/ I'm not so happy myself with this one. The good news is, doing an account plugin for jabber would be quite easy, and you'd get the account integrated as the "stock" ones.

Re: N9/N950 Contacts/IM - Get help & give feedback here
 

Hmmm I think I see the reason for the avatar bug, I'm not sure if it was fixed in later releases. I'll forward to the appropriate people (I work more on the backend myself). Thanks for the report :)

Re: N9/N950 Contacts/IM - Get help & give feedback here
 

jalyst: This is not planned at the moment, and would probably be harder to follow (two threads instead of one). However, posting a message on the meego forum that links to here would definitely be a good idea.

Re: N9/N950 Contacts/IM - Get help & give feedback here
 

As far as I remember, there was an issue on Exchange server side that it was very picky on resolution and image formats accepted for avatars. MfE team had to do extra mile to convert images between different formats and not everything was smooth. In the end, some of design decisions were made to remove confusion arising from these underlying technical issues.

Re: N9/N950 Contacts/IM - Get help & give feedback here
 

Can understand that. In this case though, I personally would prefer a solution where choosing a displayed avatar from another source (unless it's the gallery) only changes it locally and doesn't sync it back to MfE.

Meaning, when I for example pick Facebook as someone's avatar, that contact is displayed only on my handset with the Facebook picture, instead of my handset copying that picture from Facebook and syncing it back to Google...

Re: N9/N950 Contacts/IM - Get help & give feedback here
 

Only 1 day with the N9 so far; a few issues:

Yes, it's very hard to get the keyboard opened when you hit the text entry box. Same goes for emoticon-button once you're in the text box.

I cannot use my existing chat accounts (except google, which I only have 7 contacts on) with the N9 as they're all jabber based. Defeats the point of a communications device. :)

I'm confused by the way the Google account details are (not) displayed in the contacts view. Opening a contact that also is a google contact of mine will include the Google-section with the ability to initiate a call or chat. I have not figured out any way, though, to actually see either the exact handle for this contact nor his/her online status on Google. When I choose to edit the contact, the input field for the Google account is empty as if there wasn't any. A contact's online status is given as an indicator in the avatar only. Once there is a Jabber-plugin and I'd see contacts appear on multiple networks - will I be able to tell apart which network exactly they're using at the moment?

What I really, really miss is an easy way to tell at a glance who of my favorite contacts is online right now (or what their status messages are). This is done in the Home screen on earlier Maemo tablets or on the N900. I could sort the contacts application accordingly, but even then I couldn't filter for favorites. Also, I'd have to bring up the application only to have a brief look. - I don't know how one could work around this in the restricted "no-desktop-view" UI concept of the N9; maybe a solution would be to push status changes of favorite contacts to the "events" screen.

Re: N9/N950 Contacts/IM - Get help & give feedback here
 

When I was involved, we tried to run this through UX people and number of complicated corner cases that they found during the session made clear that there are more issues than solutions for general public on this way, without achieving substantial improvement on usability. So this was rejected afterwards as not being simple for laymen. Probably will resurrect in next incarnations of Swipe UI, who knows...

Re: N9/N950 Contacts/IM - Get help & give feedback here
 

Anyone knows how to show birthdays on calendar. I think it was on beta1, but it seems to be missing on final version.

Re: N9/N950 Contacts/IM - Get help & give feedback here
 

It's quite interesting to see two people mentioning the "hard to hit" UI elements... I have big fingers and so far no issues, but your messages show that there might indeed be an issue.

Not displaying the google address on the chat button is... Again a design decision :-/ A workaround is to go to the "unmerge" view, there you should see the IDs. The rational was that you usually identify people by their name, not their google id :-p If you have a contact with multiple accounts, you will see the "global" presence on the avatar, and the individual presences on the chat buttons. The input field for google is empty to allow you add a new one... I'm not totally satisfied either with not having the accounts in the editor. Note that if you have a contact with two GTalk accounts, then you'll see the IDs on the buttons.

Not having widgets indeed severely limits the "check quickly who's online" usecase, I think that when you order your contact list by "availability" the favourites are still on top of the list? One possible replacement would be to "zoom" the app switcher screen to 2x2 (instead of 3x3 view), and leave the contacts app running there.

(ab)using the event view might be another option, I don't know how the API to interact with it looks like.

Re: N9/N950 Contacts/IM - Get help & give feedback here
 

The birthday implementation in beta1 was incomplete and had performance issues. The birthday feature is hopefully coming back in 1.2, at worst 1.3. The code is ready, and now works for all your contacts, except facebook (due to legal restrictions).

Note that since contactsd is open source, you could also checkout the code (see link [1]) in my original code, the birthday plugin is already packaged separately. So it'd just be a matter of installing the package on a 1.0 device (untested, might kill kittens).

Re: N9/N950 Contacts/IM - Get help & give feedback here
 

My observation is that it's hard to hit because the touch-sensitive area doesn't match the visible area. If I hit the input field exactly, nothing happens. I have to place my finger so that it's slightly outside the input field. I have to make sure I touch the line between the input field itself and the area above. Of course, finding the right position here is difficult.

It may actually help to have big fingers. - I noticed I did better when pressing my thumb flat on the screen rather than using the tip of my index finger, as i usually would. (Although when doing this, there's always a chance the touch gets interpreted as "slide-up", moving the whole application window.)


I have this feeling that without all these "design decisions", it could have been an even better device :p

The rationale that you "identify people by their name" could be used to hide away phone numbers and mail accounts... :) - The point of the contacts view is to see which contact detail is stored for a certain person. Google accounts are contact details just as phone numbers are. Also, as merging happened automatically, I would have appreciated a quick and easy way to check. - I'm not really complaining though. Just wondering...

Anyway. The bright side is: As long as I can't use my Jabber-based accounts any more, these issues don't affect me too much. Maybe that was the rationale behind leaving Jabber out *LOL*

(I use the N900 and a C7, and I really appreciate that overall the N9 inherited the way contacts/IM integrate with the system from the N900 as opposed to the C7. The points I don't really appreciate so far - the "design decisions" - are minor nuisances that probably disappear with hopefully a Jabber-plugin and some practice on my side :) ...)

Re: N9/N950 Contacts/IM - Get help & give feedback here
 

Hmm, so that looks like bad touchscreen calibration... Not sure what you can do about that :-/ In any case, the actual touch area of the text field could be bigger than the entry itself (since the area behind is "dead", ie clicking it does nothing), but I'm not sure the framework allows that. As mentioned in a previous reply, I'll bring up the issue on monday with the competent people to see if we can do something (or if something was done for 1.1 or a later release).

The "misinterpreted" swipes should get better in 1.1. I use my device with my thumbs (chimpanzee mode :-) ), so can't comment here.

Well yes there are many UI decisions with which I disagree too... But don't worry, windows phone is coming to fix all that :-p ! </sarcastic mode>

Note that you can already "use" your jabber account by following the instructions in http://wiki.meego.com/Migrating_from..._account_setup (just replace the gtalk settings by your jabber settings).

What will work: contacts will appear in your contact list, you'll see the presence/receive messages etc.
What will not work: there will be no chat button in the contact card (implementation detail, because the the account in only in telepathy, not in the accounts framework and contacts app uses the latter). To initiate a chat, go to Messages app, click on the "start chat" button in lower right corner, and pick your contact.

This is far from ideal, but can be a temporary work around until someone publishes an account plugin for jabber.

Re: N9/N950 Contacts/IM - Get help & give feedback here
 

I first thought that would be it, as some UI elements in the lower area of the screen had a similar issues. But then, most applications (most notably the keyboard) work fine and detect touches without any problems, so... I really don’t know.

Certainly. Maybe in 2020, when (if ever) Windows Phone reaches the level of current smartphones, I'll be willing to try. ;)


Ah. That's interesting. Thank you for this helpful link! I'm not sure I'll do it here and now on a brand new device (that I wouldn't know how to re-flash if I break it), but if time passes without a proper plug-in in sight, I'll know what to do. The restrictions you mentioned I could live with.


A very different issue:

In the accounts setup, I don't find a way to change username/password for existing accounts. (Google, flickr, SIP, mail accounts, all the same) I'm not gonna try now, but what will happen if I change the password for an account on the server? Will I have to delete and re-create the whole account or will the N9 ask again once a login fails?

Re: N9/N950 Contacts/IM - Get help & give feedback here
 

I have heard this also from some of my friends who have N9.

Generally speaking it is quite strange that some of the UI elements are sooo tiny. When I tried the pre installed drive application, it was quite nice that it had these larger buttons to hit, it was much easier to use.

Re: N9/N950 Contacts/IM - Get help & give feedback here
 

Hi abustany, thanks a lot for the great work and more for your time to be here.

I use mfe and works exchange server. All work (I mean things get synchronised two ways) but I have some trouble finding out which field in Outlook corresponds in N9(50).

Is there a document/list describing which fields from an N9 contact match in the outlook contact?

Re: N9/N950 Contacts/IM - Get help & give feedback here
 

I have come across one strange thing in the contacts. I noticed that one contact has two phone numbers, one is an old number that is not valid any more. I wanted to delete this number but it did not show at all in the edit contact screen. But in the normal contact screen both numbers are shown, both as Mobile number. So I changed the correct number to be Home number, and then both numbers are shown in the edit contact. But the unwanted number is grayed out and can not be edited.
I wondered for a long time where this old number came from, and finally understood that it comes from his facebook profile.

So there were two problems:
- If there were two phone numbers, both marked as Mobile number, only one was visible in the edit contact.
- You can not remove a number that comes from contact's facebook profile. And there is no indication that the number comes from facebook profile.

Re: N9/N950 Contacts/IM - Get help & give feedback here
 

I'm using N950 and I can re-produce this issue. But honestly I never noticed it before, maybe because I tend to press near the right side of "To".....

Re: N9/N950 Contacts/IM - Get help & give feedback here
 

This should be a safe hack, if you then decide to remove the account (using mc-tool too) the contacts will just go away. But yeah, let's hope someone adds a jabber account plugin soon...

In that case the N9 will notice the password does not work anymore, and popup a dialog asking you for the new one.

Re: N9/N950 Contacts/IM - Get help & give feedback here
 

Hello Saturn, the MFE synchronization is handled by the MFE daemon, ie. contacts does not do any mapping itself here. So I suggest you ask on the email thread: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=78480

Note that, if I remember correctly, the MFE protocol has some limitations, and maybe not all the fields can be synced.

Re: N9/N950 Contacts/IM - Get help & give feedback here
 

Hmm, OK so there seems to be a bug here, that is, one number was missing in the editor. I'll check on Monday if this was fixed, thanks for the report.

Greyed out fields are read only yes, I agree it's not completely obvious, and showing the origin of the detail would surely help understanding the behaviour. But at the same time, we try to keep UI clutter at a minimum...

The fact that you cannot remove the number is not a bug though, it's a feature ;-) You get the contact from facebook as it is, and can't modify it (same way as you can't edit your friend's profile on facebook :-) ).

Re: N9/N950 Contacts/IM - Get help & give feedback here
 

Hi, I already have the N9, but the following are missing. I hope they will be added back later on:
- The intelligence to recognise a phone number is Mobile and will only enable addressing Text messages to those numbers.
- AIM account plug-in for contact and conversation.
- Yahoo account plug-in for contact and conversation.
- MSN account plug-in for contact and conversation.
- infinite number of Tel phone entries per contact, with the ability to "tag" them as "mobile". "home". "office". "fax", etc. (I believe currently the contact in N9 only take up to 3 tel phones per contact record.

The following is not specific to Contacts/IM but is relevent:
- Ability to increase font size on text.

Re: N9/N950 Contacts/IM - Get help & give feedback here
 

for me, the only two main things i want changed for the conversations is:

1. As everyone else has already mentioned, its a bit hard to tap the bottom area to type a message (hiding the keyboard is easy, but getting it up is an effort and a half)

2. i prefer it to NOT auto capitilise my letters after a fullstop.. id rather me choosing when i want a capital letter..

Re: N9/N950 Contacts/IM - Get help & give feedback here
 

At least in France you can SMS landlines... The message will either by read by a voice synthesizer, or shown on the phone if the terminal is compatible.

Those are not provided by default, since there is no agreement between Nokia and the service providers... Again, since telepathy has connection managers for those, all you need is someone making an account plugin, and they'll integrate smoothly into the platform.

Hmm, I don't know of such a limitation, here I can add as many numbers as I want:
- Entering a phone number makes a new "number" field appear below
- Clicking on the "label" of the field allows me to choose the subtype

I'm running a slightly more recent firmware than you do though, so it might have been fixed in between.

Unfortunately you can't really do that without breaking all the layout... Or, at least the device is not designed to support that. I agree that the fonts (especially on the home screen) are quite small.

Re: N9/N950 Contacts/IM - Get help & give feedback here
 

After checking, the bug stems from the way mfe contacts are handled (as local contacts), so when you pick a new avatar the current "local" avatar is lost. Changing this now would be a consequent change, and the management decided not to go for it (the issue was discussed recently) :-(

Re: N9/N950 Contacts/IM - Get help & give feedback here
 

This was probably fixed, since I can't reproduce the issue on more recent firmwares.

Re: N9/N950 Contacts/IM - Get help & give feedback here
 

Since yesterday I have problem connecting to skype. I have deleted and reentered my skype account but when I try to connect I get a fail message: "Sorry, can't connect to skype". Worked fine until yesterday. I have the same problem on 2 separate units (N9's) on different (swedish) carriers.

edit: Reboot fixed it! Could have sworn I rebooted my phone several times yesterday. I think there should be a notification when leaving the ovi store that recomends you to reboot you device after an install has been made!

Re: N9/N950 Contacts/IM - Get help & give feedback here
 

Hmmm, Skype works fine for me here, on N9 too :-/ Anyone else can reproduce the issue?

Re: N9/N950 Contacts/IM - Get help & give feedback here
 

So, I just checked on two different firmware versions:
- in the next update you'll receive, the behaviour is still not perfect but a bit better (the touch area *above* the field is made a bit larger)
- in the next next update you'll receive, the issue is completely fixed. Too bad the fix didn't make it to an earlier release :-/

I guess the designers deliberately chose to limit the number of options in the settings... I looked in gconf, and it seems the setting is not exposed there either. You might want to contact the maliit (input framework, it's open source) devs, maybe they have a solution.

Re: N9/N950 Contacts/IM - Get help & give feedback here
 

Seems weird that Nokia cant get MSN to be native, what with their little partner-up with Microsoft.

Oh well, any news on a plugin for this?

Re: N9/N950 Contacts/IM - Get help & give feedback here
 

I have once tried to package telepathy-python and papyon, and add the account with mc-tool, it worked fine. So the account plugin is really all that's missing.

Re: N9/N950 Contacts/IM - Get help & give feedback here
 

I do see the argument for not being able to delete the number that comes from a facebook profile (which does not belong to me).

But I have a counter argument:
The phone book of my phone should be under my control, not under someone else's :-) So at least you should be able hide it from the call/sms dialog.

Maybe the grayed out field could still be active and when clicked could give a popup explaining why this field cannot be edited and give option to disable the number (or email address or whatever...).

Re: N9/N950 Contacts/IM - Get help & give feedback here
 

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combinatorial_explosion :-)

Then, what happens if the number on Facebook changes? Do we still hide it? How do you "unhide" a number? Also means we'd need to have a list somewhere that says what details to hide for which contact, keep it up to date, etc...

Re: N9/N950 Contacts/IM - Get help & give feedback here
 

ive had the phone for 3 days and this is driving me NUTS

Re: N9/N950 Contacts/IM - Get help & give feedback here
 

see post #28

Re: N9/N950 Contacts/IM - Get help & give feedback here
 

I hade the same problem with my Twitter account the first day I had my N9... eventually, only a hard reset (Clear device) has fixed this for me... since then everything is fine.