So, you've copied an address book full of contacts to your new N900. Unfortunately, the lovely interface and gorgeous screen are completely let down by the fact that all you see are generic, blue men as you contacts' pictures. Contacting people via the Phone or Conversations just doesn't seem very slick.

With Hermes, you will enrich your Maemo 5 address book with photos, birthdates, homepage addresses, and more from online services such as Facebook and Twitter.

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In Detail

Hermes will connect your Contacts app to your Facebook and Twitter accounts, matching existing Contacts entries to the ones on the social networking sites that are configured in the application settings. Hermes is smart and will deal intelligently with even the smallest name variations.

If a contact is matched between the Contacts app and an online identity, Hermes will update the contact on the device with a photo (from Facebook or Twitter), birthday (from Facebook), profile URLs (on Facebook and Twitter) and homepage (from Twitter). As an added bonus, all birthdates will also appear automatically in your Calendar.

There are two modes of operation, "Retrieve" and "Refresh." Retrieve will fill in missing data for a contact. Refresh will overwrite any contacts that have matches on the social networks (i.e., your Contacts entries will be reset to the information found online).

Hermes uses the official Facebook and Twitter APIs, designed and intended by these companies to allow third party applications such as Hermes.

The released version of Hermes can be installed from the Maemo Extras repository, and can be seen at maemo.org downloads.

The testing version of Hermes is not suitable for end-users, but can be found in the Extras Testing repository for those willing to help with Extras quality assurance.

Roadmap

Current developments

Immediate plans

  • Store a history of all images that Hermes has ever downloaded to allow the user to pick from them. [MB#5452]
  • Add an "auto-update" mode for people who regularly change their Facebook profile pictures to allow Hermes to track them.

Long-term plans/possibilities

  • Match "nickname" against maemo.org username.
  • Investigate pulling contact images from Google Contacts (apparently Mail for Exchange doesn't download images). [MB#5453]

Historical developments

All of these developments have now been implemented:

  • Improved error handling & user messages.
  • Slightly clearer "Accounts" dialogue.
  • Pull down homepage from Facebook as well as Twitter.
  • Handling of accents being present/missing between online and Contacts.
  • Allow creation of "empty" contacts containing birthday & homepage info so that Facebook friends' birthdays will appear in Calendar, even if you have no other contact info for them.
  • Improved web page at hermes.garage.maemo.org.
  • Manual matching for contacts which the heuristic doesn't pick up.