[Patch] Create Birthday Events from your contacts

[MetaView]

This patch is now outdated, please use this app instead: http://forums.precentral.net/homebre...ml#post2767865


Hi, the week of incredible PIM enhancements is almost over and here comes another patch anybody (at least my gf) was waiting for: Create Birthday events from your contacts in the calendar

Now we have some UI to adjust reminder settings and select a repeatable event or events only for the current year. It takes the first account/first calendar.
Beside of these small flaws it works perfectly here.

How-to: Open your contacts list and select "Create Birthday Events" from the menu. There will be one notification at the beginning, telling you about the number of contacts you have, a notification for each birthday event it creates and one notification at the very end. 250 contact records with in all 7 birthdays take around 30 seconds to be done. Please wait! Runs on each language, as I don't translate anything.

UPDATE: Now you have also a "Remove Birthday Events" item in the menu. It will remove all birthday events from the calendar. To do its task it will check the notes for each all-day event. And if the note is the same I use for creation, the event and its series will be removed. This will now also be the one I submit to the feed. Further work will be done to make it a separate app which also allows searching in calendar events and contact details.

Enjoy and feel free to report back and if you like show me your appreciation by buying any of my apps from the catalog (example: ÜberRadio.

Submission to the official feed will be done too.

[mamouton]

metaview just a heads up the files are still referenced in reverse.

[MetaView]

thank you for report. I changed it, is it better now?

[mamouton]

Just installed I see the pop up at the bottom saying how many contacts are found trying to find someone with a birthday to see if it added it. I looked in the calendar but don't see the birthday's how are they displayed.

[mamouton]

It works I was wondering why it put it on the day before then I reread description. Great job! I had bought the birthday app and this works much better.

[MetaView]

Well, the reminder should be set to 1 day in advance, the birthday should be an all-day event on the correct day. If not, I might need to try it with your timezone.

[mbroc]

It was high time the birthday issue on WebOS was addressed. Want to organise your life but don't have proper birthday notification??? Amazing. The integration with contacts seems like one of the best solutions. Customer support for the "Birthdays, Anniversaries and More" application confirmed the other day that no reminder configuration was planned at least until 2011... !!!!

Now my question is, will the reminder go off at midnight as with the said app? This is an issue that really worries me as I have a light sleep and it already happened to me once, I was awoken by the "Birthdays..." app reminder.

[MetaView]

As it isn't a special app but rather a transfer of your birthday date into a calendar all-day event, it follows the same reminder rule as every other all-day event. I hope webos is smart enough not to alert you at midnight Please check it and report back.

[opacityzero]

MetaView,

Worked great on Pre running v1.4.1.1.

At first I thought 52 had failed so I ran it again...possible to include the # before..or something like this:

0 Updated, 52 Created, and 0 Failed

Thanks...also, because I ran it twice, a birthday now lists the same person twice..anyway to wipe all previous birthday events when running script so upon new contacts running this script will not keep adding previous contact's bday again and again?

In event (and minor suggestion), say First Lastname's Birthday (mm/dd/yyy)

Great work!

[MetaView]

That's why I wrote: "only creates, update isn't working yet", The events have already an unique id based on the contact id, but unfortunately the updateEvent call doesn't work yet, it complains about not finding the event. I still work on it. Then it would be perfect, as you might also be asked about the reminder settings before and then all your old events are update with the new settings.

[opacityzero]

ok...I thought Update meant in case a contact's bday was incorrectly inputted by the user and then he/she changes it, the patch would then update the calender. No worries, your patch is very much appreciated!

[cdonehew]

I just tried the patch and it worked perfectly. Unfortunately, it caused all my contacts information (phone number, e-mail address, birthday, etc) in the contacts app to disappear. I uninstalled the patch and all their information reappeared.

[MetaView]

Where did they disappear? The patch only affects the contact list form, I can hardly imagine how it would affect any other form.

[cdonehew]

Originally Posted by MetaView

Where did they disappear? The patch only affects the contact list form, I can hardly imagine how it would affect any other form.

When I "clicked" on a contacts name in the contacts app, the only thing that displayed was the contact's name and their picture. Everything else was blank (including the "edit" button on the bottom left corner of the screen). It may be due to conflicting with another one of my contacts patches. My other contacts patches are "add sync now", "additional contact labels", and "swipe to delete". I also have "Multi Scrim v2" which changes the background of the contacts app (as well as 10 other apps) to a custom picture (if you didn't already know).

[MetaView]

Can you catch the debug logs from the com.palm.apps.contacts app? Sound like an exception thrown in the details page, question is why?

[Jason Black]

Not to sound negative. This is a nice idea, nice patch. But, you should have developed it a lil more before you released it. I thought deleting the patch would delete all the birthdays it put on the calender, but it didnt, now the calender is unbearably slow.

Thanks anyway though. I will be using the finally version. Hopefully that deletes the preexisting birthday notifications.

[MetaView]

Sorry, but how could removing the patch also remove the events? No, the events are there and now part of the 1st account/1st calendar, and I guess its what anyone expects.

[kristoffer10]

this is cool, I was manually inputting birthdays in my calendar and setting them to repeat once a year, this patch makes much simpler, faster and easier...nice work and thank you!

[cdonehew]

Originally Posted by MetaView

Can you catch the debug logs from the com.palm.apps.contacts app? Sound like an exception thrown in the details page, question is why?

Forgive my ignorance, but how do I go about catching the debug logs?

[vic_singh]

does it sync with fb to locate the birthdays?