Quote:
Originally Posted by SaintGermain
Fair enough, Groups support on iOS is really incomplete and cumbersome.
To even use the solution you propose to create a Contact in a Group, you need to create a Group in the first place. But it is not possible to create a Group without a third-party Apps or without iTunes/iCloud.
|
Or any CardDAV server, like FastMail
At any rate, I don't disagree at all that it's cumbersome, but to be fair it's enough for many users who are happy to manage their groups on their desktop and only need to view them on their iOS devices.
Quote:
Anyway what I would really want is to separate Contacts in different Categories. We can use some workaround by using Groups, but Groups is not really meant to be used as Categories.
I can try to create different Address Books, but it is not supported by Fastmail.
|
Yeah, unless you have an older business/family account (which includes an extra shared address book for the entire group), there's really no way to*have more multiple address books. However, I also don't think that having multiple address books is really the panacea that you might think it is.
I surmise that what you're looking for is a complete separation of contacts into separate address books, but how well that works is really going to depend on what clients you're using to access CardDAV. As you've noted, proper CardDAV support is far from standard across all client platforms, and support for separate address books can be even messier than support for multiple groups — for instance, while some CardDAV clients (iOS and Android, for instance) understand multiple address books in a single CardDAV account, others like Thunderbird require that you set up multiple, separate CardDAV accounts, one for each address book.
Further, the UI in many clients won't necessarily improve as much as you'd think. For instance, on iOS having separate address books doesn't really change much — you can still only filter and work with it all in much the same way as if you were only using groups, and now you'll have to designate a default address book where new contacts will be created, with no ability to move them between address books if you forget to select the other address book before adding a new contact. Further, if you end up with the same contact in both address books you'll suddenly be dealing with "unified" contact records that try to bring the information from both across in a way that doesn't always make logical sense. IMHO, having multiple address books on iOS can make things
more cumbersome, not less, with the only advantage being that you'd be able to have distinct groups within each address book. The only real advantage to this is that you can have separate sets of groups in each one, but I'm not entirely convinced that this one benefit is worth the extra complexity on the iOS side.
While
assigning users to groups in FastMail can be a bit cumbersome — since groups work more like "tags" than "folders"*— it's still not too complicated to do this through the web interface, particularly since FastMail nicely provides a "No Group" smart group that shows you any contacts that haven't been assigned to ANY group. So you could create separate groups for "Personal" and "Business" and then just go into the "No Group" and assign them from there until "No Group" is completely empty. If you wanted additional "Personal" and "Business" sub-groups, you could still do this just by prefixing them so they'd sort accordingly, although I'll be the first to admit it's not nearly as clean and simple as having entirely separate address books in this particular case.
However, when it comes right down to it, I think the real issue is that CardDAV isn't as much of a "standard" as any of us would like it to be across all platforms, so at the end of the day, whether we're using groups or separate address books, it's all still very kludgy.