KDEConnect Contact sync
Wow, it’s been a while! Busy, busy, busy! And I should be more busy still, but the heat makes it difficult to focus.
Then, a thing I wanted to test for a long while: KDE Contact sync. Those who remember the Palm days, might be as surprised as I am that local sync with phones really doesn’t exist anymore; we all rely on big G or Card/Web/CalDAV for these things now. Good news, KDEConnect, which is a great little utility, fills this gap. I use it to control my computers from the couch and filesync mostly (took a photo, swipe to desktop). It also has contact sync, but it never became quite clear where it would sync. Came across this post and it’s true, ~/.local/share/kpeoplevcard/ is where cards end up on the desktop. Slightly confusing: there will be no longer a menu item on the Android client forcing a sync, it’ll do so automagically from now on. Looks like every time it detects a change. Files in this dir do not appear in KAddressBook though, nor does adding the dir (as vCard dir, which it is) help. Adding new contacts by hand are not synced back to the phone either, so it seems to be one-way. Documentation for this function is sparse, KDE help shows 3 paragraphs written in 2015 and on the web others seem puzzled as I am.
Adding the dir to Thunderbird seems to not do much. After a restart however, it seems stuck on an infinite refresh. You can’t delete or modify the address book anymore. Creating a new book and importing the dir gives ‘0 contacts imported.’
Verdict: no bueno.