Re: I've looked for the answers, honest...

> - I know the problem with export from BitPim to Microsoft Outlook 
> has already been reported but can't find an answer anywhere?

What problem?  BitPim doesn't have code to export to Outlook.  (Feel
free to contribute some :-)

> - when importing from Lotus Notes Address File (vCard .vcf format) 
> I was under the impression that as records imported they would be 
> color coded (white, green, yellow, red = deleted)

The colour coding is not of the imported data, but of the data in
BitPim.  For example if your import contains a John Smith and BitPim
already contains a John Smith and the import contains data that
was used to update the record in BitPim then you will get the yellow
changed colour.  The only way to get deleted is to right click and
choose delete.

> However, when I deleted some records in Lotus Notes and then imported the 
> file to BitPim, 

For BitPim to detect that the record was deleted in Lotus Notes and hence
should be deleted in BitPim, we would need to have stored the data
from the first import and compared it against the second, and applied
the changes.  In a nutshell that is what syncing programs do and it
gets really tough really quickly (if you care about doing it well).

That is definitely the direction BitPim is heading and was one of the
motivations behind moving to using the underlying database.  However
we are solving the problem of how you get in the information the
very first time first.  With this you don't have an earlier set
of data to compare against and produce a list of changes.  You
only have the data already in BitPim and imported data to look at
and have to make good guesses about what is going on.  That is also
hard :-)

This is one of the areas someone can contribute to BitPim if you
don't want to write code.  It is necessary to work out a synchronisation
algorithm that will actually work.  Traditional ones don't deal with
things like data sources being limited or deliberately munging your
data.  For example Outlook only supports 3 email addresses.  So if
an entry actually has four, but BitPim only sees 3 coming back from
Outlook, was one deleted?  When you write to phones, they have very
limited name fields (eg 16 or 22 characters) and so things will be
truncated.  What if the user read that information into Outlook and
so now Outlook is showing us a truncated name.  Was that the user
deliberately making the name shorter or something else mangling it.

Working out a robust synchronization algorithm in the face of all
this is difficult.  I'd welcome someone doing that hard work :-)

Roger


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