Homepage: http://www.neilvandyke.org/bbdbpalm
Author: Neil W. Van Dyke
Updated:
BBDBpalm exporter of BBDB database to Palm(R) address book
ABOUT:
BBDBpalm exports your BBDB address database to your Palm/USR/3Com
Pilot/PalmPilot/Palm-Connected-Organizer (hereinafter simply "Palm").
BBDB is a sort of electronic address book written by Jamie Zawinsky
that integrates nicely with Emacs-based E-mail and Usenet
clients. BBDBpalm lets you bring that address book with you if you
don't have the luxury of 24/7 network access to a remote Emacs session
from your Palm.
The Web page is `http://www.neilvandyke.org/bbdbpalm/'.
This package is no longer being maintained.
REQUIREMENTS:
BBDBpalm was developed with BBDB 1.51, which is available at
`http://www.jwz.org/bbdb/' if you don't already have it. It has also
been reported to work with BBDB 2.00.02.
BBDBpalm uses the `pilot-addresses' program, which is part of the
Pilot-Link package. Pilot-Link is freely available on the 'net, and is
included with some GNU/Linux distributions. The master sources are
available at `ftp://ryeham.ee.ryerson.ca/pub/PalmOS/', although you may
wish to instead find a pre-compiled distribution for your operating
system. BBDBpalm was tested with version 0.9.0.
BBDBpalm was developed under GNU Emacs 20.3 running atop the GNU/Linux
platform. It will probably work with Emacs 19 and has been reported to
work under XEmacs 21.2b17. It will probably work under Emacs on other
Unix variants. Please let me know if you encounter any problems with
other Emacsen or Unixen.
INSTALLATION:
If you're Emacs-savvy enough to be using BBDB, then you probably don't
need much install instructions. The only three non-obvious things you
need to do are:
1. On your Palm, add an Address List category called "BBDB", in all
caps. (Reason: Unfortunately, `pilot-addresses' does not presently
create categories on your Palm, or overwrite duplicate entries.
So, every time we upload to the Palm, we blast everything in the
"BBDB" category and put all the BBDB-exported records into that
category.) If you change entries on the Palm side of things,
change their category so that you remember to manually propagate
the change to BBDB.
2. If you don't want to export everything in your BBDB to the Palm,
then do both of:
a. Put the following your `.emacs' file or wherever you put your
Emacs customizations:
(setq bbdbpalm-export-all-p nil)
b. Add a field called `palm' to each BBDB record that you wish to
export (by pressing `C-o' in the `*BBDB*' buffer with the
point on the desired record). Give each `palm' field a value
of `yes' for now. Note that a later version of BBDBpalm might
put something else in that field.
3. If you wish to have titles for people be exported to the Palm, add
a field called `title' to BBDB and use it.
ALTERNATIVES:
Tom Fawcett wrote `bbdb-pilot', which is available
at `ftp://ftp.croftj.net/usr/fawcett/bbdb-pilot.el'. The version I
found, dated 1998, didn't seem to do what I wanted (I'm so picky) but
you may prefer it.
Neale Picket hacked up a small convertor in
Feb-1998. See `http://acm.rpi.edu/~albert/pilot/Feb98/0039.html'.
THINGS TO DO:
* Add support for custom fields.
* Add special support for `Web' custom field.
* Maybe someday do bidirectional sync-ing. For now, users should just
keep all the BBDB-exported records in the `BBDB' category on their
Palm, and manually change those records on the BBDB end rather than on
the Palm end.
* Maybe I should make it fix certain family names that BBDB has
mis-parsed, such as, well... I dunno... how about... "Van Dyke"?
Better yet, I should move to BBDB 2.x and make sure it's fixed there.
* Make it be smarter about which address it picks if there are multiple
ones.
* Add BBDB extension so that it prompts you for `palm' field.
* Make it reformat phone numbers.
* Add completion-percentage indicator for file-exporting and uploading.
* Check for error from `pilot-addresses' and maybe do something with it.
* ``I think it would be nice if the order of phone numbers as they
appear in the BBDB was preserved in the Pilot. Same thing for multiple
email addresses; they are now listed in reverse order.'' [Mark Moll
, 24-Jun-1999]
* ``Maybe it's a good idea to put in a message "Please press the HotSync
button" at the appropiate time.'' [Mark Moll ,
24-Jun-1999]