I have been frustrated for months by the inability of my nice new Nokia phone to synch usefully with any of the three places where I keep contacts. None of them, you understand, are perfect, but I dont need a fourth.  Ecco would be the most useful, since it links to each contact all the relevant information. Buit it’s very old, no longer properly supported, and has no email links and limited contact fields. So everything was exported from there into CSV a long time ago, and reimported into Thunderbird (if there were email addresses); contacts with phone numbers went into my old Sony Ericsson phone. One of these lists got imported into Google Contacts.

The supplied Nokia software synches with none of these, although it claims to import individual vCards. If you try this, however, you will probably find that everything is imported from the vCards except the phone numbers. Why would anyone want those on a phone?

To cut a very very very long story short, it turns out that Nokia only reads the v 2.1 vCard standard, while everyone else, and especially Thunderbird, reads and writes v3.0. So yesterday I stayed out of the sleet and wrote two little python scripts. One merged all the contacts which had email addresses with the ones that had phone numbers and churned out 600 vCards with both email and numbers. The other changed all these vCards from version 3.0 to version 2.1; and now I have all my numbers back. The nice thing about python is that I didn’t even have to write this second program in an editor. I just scribbled in the interpreter until it worked. So now of course I have forgotten the incantation.

I still have to try synching the updated version with Google. That may destroy everything but it doesn’t matter. I still have the contacts on my computer. And I post this in case anyone else is frustrated in the same way.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 14th, 2008 at 10:13 am and is part of nördig, Software. There is a feed for responses you can follow.