Tuesday, February 10, 2009

New Contact Code

New code dealing with physical address processing was deployed last night. The goal was to do a good job of translating postal addresses as they appear on GMail contacts into the device format. This is an interesting problem because there are many different address formats in use around the world and the address comes to us free-form with no fields identified. The new code is able to recognize addresses from a large number of countries, although it may still be challenged by some UK addresses. If the country is present in the contact's address the iPhone map application should now correctly locate addresses in countries other than the good old USA. The iPhone seems to have bug in its contact edit screen: a contact that has a valid country (for example the phone's map app finds the address correctly) will always display 'United States' for the country if you edit the contact. This doesn't happen for contacts entered on the device itself. We will be adding a 'default country' setting to the web site soon that allows a global override for the country on all contacts that don't already have their country set. Thank you to all the users from France and other countries who helped make this feature happen.
The mysterious 'squares' in contact names problem has also been fixed, along with a few contact issues seen with Windows Mobile devices (file-as not being always set, contacts appearing as 'Unknown').

27 comments:

KyleC said...

Since I started using the service I get weird issue like this show up for a hand full of contacts:
**** Bainbridge Trail
Mansfield, TX 76063
United States of America
Mansfield, TX 76063
United States of America
Mansfield, TX 76063
United States of America
Mansfield, TX 76063
United States of America
Mansfield, TX 76063
United States of America

Anyone else have this issues? It doesn't bug me that much.
*house number removed for privacy

David Boreham said...

Kyle: have you done a resync since last night? If not then you should do that (instructions on the troubleshooting page). It looks like you're seeing one of the problems that should be fixed in last nights's code.

Scott Urman said...

Whoo hoo! I had been seeing the city, state and zipcode duplicate in the second address field, and kept meaning to contact you guys about it, but never got around to it. But I just re-synched and they all are correct now! You guys rock.

I'm sticking with Nueavasync over direct google sync, at least given the current feature set of the two.

pat said...

You guys release this the day after the official sync was released by google, I might not have switched had I known, or you had already released it.

Google's sync does seem a little faster too, especially for calendar sync.

Kris said...

I am switching back, not because of this, but because my WinMo device can only sync the main calendar.

Unknown said...

Thank you so much for the fix. I just resynced my contact list and all the addresses lined up perfectly. I am a little anal retentive and the fact that the addresses have never quite been right always bothered me. Since I started with Nuevasync last July I have frequently tried to redo my contacts to make it work.
Keep up the great work Nueva Sync...I'll be sticking with you.

Jim Nutt said...

Ah, this made a huge difference, fixed a lot of my contact issues. I've still a few that aren't formatted correctly, but most are, which is a nice change from before.

Anonymous said...

Just one problemo I discovered when switching back to Google Contacts from Plaxo (I had the weird "square contacts" problem when on Google) - companies are no longer recognised as companies. Instead they are treated as regular contacts.

Guess this is more Googles fault than Nueva's, though.

BTW, Google Sync has the "square contacts" issue.

Mike McG said...

Perhaps you could support the XML formatting Zindus for Thunderbird uses.

Unknown said...

Great news!!!!
For me contact share and sync are very critical and Google translate better information between iphone format and google format respect Nuevasync.
Now with this new feature i read now i come back immediatly to nuevasync because the future feature are very interesting (push email) but now i need a stable contacts sync.....
i will try immediatly and hope works fine in order to stay on nuevasync....forever.

Thanks
Marco

Markstrom said...

Switched to Google Mobile Sync just for this issue.

But now I'm coming back.

Unknown said...

Seem to be effect to an issue about duplicate adress if i change type field...
only iphone side.

i open a ticket....

David Boreham said...

@Marco: the address duplication when you change the type on the device (e.g. 'Work' to 'Home') is a bug, possibly something that crept in when we switched to the new contacts API a few weeks ago.

Unknown said...

@David: yes thanks, support answer fasted to my support request. An Engineering tell me that issue is identified and will be fix soon.

Thanks
Marco

yibrushn said...

I Just resynced today after fixing all the addresses on the google contacts page and I still get the duplicate and wierd country stuff cropping up.

embraboy said...

Hey guys,

Has anyone reported an issue where their contacts don't appear to sync at all?

Calendars sync with no issue - excellent having the option of 11 by the way! - but my contacts just aren't hitting the phone.

I've stopped and restarted the sync a couple of times but it's not working. Any thoughts?

Cheers,
Simon

embraboy said...

Ignore me, it just took a while to send them all through.

Cheers!

Steve Crossland said...

Does anyone know of a solid, reliable cvs template to use from which contacts can be imported into Google Contacts? I'm having a lot of trouble with the name coming through into Google Contacts ok, from the import, but everything else goes into "notes". I've tried different field names but the same thing happens every time.

I've searched but haven't found anything on this. Would be great if Google allowed mapping to fields during import.

Unknown said...

I have been using Nuevasync for many months (Windows Mobile device), but for the last month my contacts have not been syncing. I decided yesterday to switch to Google Sync. This was an utter failure on my several levels which I will not go into.

I switched back to Nuevasync today, and the calendar came back great, but the contacts still don't sync. I get an error when I try to sync them. My Nuevasync account status page shows green.

Any ideas?

Unknown said...

I'm glad to see that my contacts that contain an ' are now properly displayed after a sync... previously only everything after the ' would be displayed and I would have to manually view each contact and adjust the "File As" field on my WM6 phone.

Thanks for the great work!!

Unknown said...

Can anyone provide me with the best format for Nuevasync to recognize Canadian addresses (slightly different than US addresses in that the postal code is alphanumeric)?

I am migrating my contacts over to Google so that when I finally get my iPhone (waiting for my current contract to end - 5 days!) I'll be able to make the transition as easy as possible.

Would an address like this be recognized properly?:

Mr. Jimmy Noname
123 Fake Street
Calgary, AB T3L 2Y1
Canada

Postal code with or without a space? Is the country necessary/recommended?

Thanks!

Unknown said...

Is there any way to reset the ActiveSync connection on a windows mobile device? Like I said before, the calendar syncs fine. I have tried disabling and re-enabling the contacts sync, but I still get an error every time I try to sync. It says:

Support code: 0x85010014

Thanks.

David Boreham said...

@fiveolddogs: if you get that error code on the device persistently, it usually means there's some data-specific error. If you send e-mail to support with your username we should be able to identify the problem.

David Boreham said...

@James: short answer is yes. In Thomas' address parsing code, Canadian addresses are decoded (either with or without a space in the postal code). You don't need the country for the address to be recognized--the code pattern matches each address to determine the format. You do currently need the country for iPhone mapping to work properly. It will assume USA addresses unless told otherwise.
Our address processing code was developed and tested using a very large set of sample addresses so it wasn't like we sat around thinking of countries we should try to handle. Rather, we wrote the code to handle all the address forms that showed up in the data, which included Canada of course.

Banksy said...

any eta on when we can set Nuevasync to default a chosen country. I keep having united states added onto the ends of my addresses.

Francesco said...

Me too on an italian iPhone: keep having United States added onto the ends of my addresses.

Vinicius said...

Guys my contacts won't appear on my iPhone, the calendar is ok, but the contacts not.