...still just a headache.
Forty-two years ago when I was managing the computing resources for a large metropolitan hospital, I had to allocate almost 25% of my programming resources for maintenance of our mailing lists. They took up so much time and they seemed deceptively simple.
Jump to the present and I'm still plagued by the mailing list problem except that now it is a personal list and it is called Contacts. And it is still deceptively simple. I mean its a list of names of people I know, show know, or once knew together with one or more pieces of useful contact information such as phone number, physical address of home or office, and email address. So why do I have such problems that a contact I need on my phone is only on my PC or one that I would like to add to a group on my PC is only on my phone. Depending on the device and the program I use to access the data I have either 2411 contacts, or 1410, or 715, or 2350, or ...well you get the idea.
When we got our iPhones I was certain this would be a solvable puzzle. There are so many applications written for the iPhone that surely someone has figured it out. Well, half a dozen programs later I'm not sure that's the case.
Duplication is probably the worst problem followed closely by outdated data that isn't easily recognized as outdated. But when I tried to attack those problems I found I couldn't even get the different programs to recognize the same NUMBER of contacts. Without that agreement I could spend 4 hours cleaning out 200 duplicate entries just to have a different application add them all back again.
Not that it wasn't a learning experience. It was that. Let me see if I can summarize my feelings about each of the apps I tried.
Saline: Undisputed winner of the naming contest. What would you expect to be the best SOLUTION for a problem with contacts - a Saline Solution. On its face this program does a lot from merging duplicates, to mass deleting of contacts meeting certain criteria. But the changes didn't seem to transmit consistently through iTunes to the PC contact file with Outlook. It was one of the first apps we tried so I may have given up early.
Dup Remover: That's what it does and that's all it does and it does it automatically. It does save the debris in the "trash can" hopefully allowing a redo.
Contacts Duster: This program likes to do things automatically but you have the ooption of making a backup before you start deleting or merging contacts. It also allows you to export contacts in large vpf files. Unfortunately, it's not clear how to restore a backup or export vpf files. Macs handle these files much more reliably than Windows.
Contact Sync: I like the way this program is organized: you upload your contact file to a work area in the cloud. This provides an automatic backup. Then you make the changes needed either automatically or semi-automatically. This is done on the PC and is a much more open process than the other programs. Unless and until they start charging for this cloud workspace, I will probably use this cleanup utility the most.
I get the feeling that I'm still missing something, like a 500 page manual on how contacts are stored and accessed. But I've already spent too much time on this project to do more now.
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