GNOME developer Allan Day has previewed designs for a new ‘contacts’ application due to feature in GNOME 3.2.
The revamped, rebuilt and rethought GNOME Contacts application aims to consolidate your contacts from various online accounts into one place.
It sounds similar in approach to that taken by Android, which is able to mesh Twitter, Google contacts, Facebook contacts etc into one address book.
GNOME Contacts will also allow you to ‘link’ contacts should it not happen automatically.
One stop shop
“This means that looking up someone in GNOME Contacts will give you access to a summary of all your online relationships with that person (or as many as we are legally allowed to), including the various ways you can communicate with that person and links to the different places where they exist on the web.” writes Allan Day on his blog.
We’ve tried really hard to make GNOME Contacts about people rather than data.” he continues. “This is one reason why the right hand pane has such a prominent and rich representation of the contact, which makes it feel personal.
I’m hoping that we’ll be able to pull in a range of different data to display there so that the most recent status update, Tweet or even IM message is included below the contact name.”
Personally I cannot commend the design and the mooted feature set enough. Contacts applications are often overlooked by a great many, particularly with Facebook and Google Contacts being but a click or so away.
GNOME Contacts, with its multi-sourced data, could just prove to be an indispensible tool for users of the GNOME desktop – and an enviable app to have for those not on it.