Open Contacts Changelog

What's new in Open Contacts 6.2.0

Jan 7, 2014
  • Upgrade the database engine from Firebird 2.1 to Firebird 2.5.
  • Default database file extension is now FDB rather than GDB.

New in Open Contacts 6.1.9.727 (Jul 16, 2011)

  • Bug fixed: Importing CSV might result in warning about buffer size.

New in Open Contacts 6.1.6.721 (Mar 28, 2011)

  • Minor changes to some keyboard shortcuts to avoid the use of the Alt keys.
  • When exporting XML, export unique ID for each contact.

New in Open Contacts 6.1.5.717 (Jan 26, 2011)

  • Bug fixed: when sending Email, the name and address might be corrupted.

New in Open Contacts 6.1.3.716 (Jan 26, 2011)

  • Some minor changes to hide some functions not applicable to portable applications, when Open Contacts is installed as a portable application.

New in Open Contacts 6.1.2.712 (Dec 13, 2010)

  • Integrate with SyncML Client for Open Contacts. Go to [Main Menu -> Tools -> Synchronize with SyncML Server]. This feature requires Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 or above.

New in Open Contacts 6.1.1.704 (Nov 17, 2010)

  • Restore the features of interacting with Skype. Skype had changed its way of being interacting with other programs through Windows messages, resulting in features broken. This was just fixed by using Skype4COM.
  • Bug fixed: When using SyncML for Open Contacts, if the server has contacts deleted, this bug will fail the sync. In addition, in some older version of SyncML for Open Contacts, if there are multiple contacts deleted, the progress bar could not reflect the progress accurately, though the sync is successful. V1.3.4 has this fixed.
  • Multiple relationships to a contact is represent by a link denoted by multiple tags separated by comma. If you try to create a new link upon an existing link to a contact, the relationship tags will be expanded. For example, if you defined John is Andy's manager, and then when you try to create define John is Andy's uncle, you will have the relationship tagged as "Manager, Uncle". Surely you may simple modify the relationship directly.
  • Batch processing: change a relationship tag of all contacts containing the tag.
  • In the Search Contacts window, you may search contacts of any of the selected categories.
  • When importing from CSV, the maximum length of each column imported could be up to 256 letters from previous 80, and for a notes field, the maximum length is 1024 letter.
  • Improve the handling of birthday reminder. If the birthday of a person is on 29th of February in a leap year, in the past the birthday was made 28th of February. Now the birthday is made the last day of February. Please note, Mozilla Sunbird v0.9 has wrong interpretation of the ByMonthDay attribute of the iCalendar standard; when importing the ics file, the birthday will become the last day of January. If you are using Sunbird, you may need to manually fix it.
  • A category name may now has up to 128 letters.
  • Importing from XML can handle mail merge links now.

New in Open Contacts 6.0.8.695 (Dec 18, 2009)

  • Restore the features of interacting with Skype. Skype had changed its way of being interacting with other programs through Windows messages, resulting in features broken. This was just fixed by using Skype4COM.

New in Open Contacts 6.0.7.692 (Oct 22, 2009)

  • Bug fixed: When using SyncML for Open Contacts, if the server has contacts deleted, this bug will fail the sync. In addition, in some older version of SyncML for Open Contacts, if there are multiple contacts deleted, the progress bar could not reflect the progress accurately, though the sync is successful. V1.3.4 has this fixed.

New in Open Contacts 6.0.5.689 (Oct 15, 2009)

  • Multiple relationships to a contact is represent by a link denoted by multiple tags separated by comma. If you try to create a new link upon an existing link to a contact, the relationship tags will be expanded. For example, if you defined John is Andy's manager, and then when you try to create define John is Andy's uncle, you will have the relationship tagged as "Manager, Uncle". Surely you may simple modify the relationship directly.
  • Batch processing: change a relationship tag of all contacts containing the tag.
  • In the Search Contacts window, you may search contacts of any of the selected categories.
  • When importing from CSV, the maximum length of each column imported could be up to 256 letters from previous 80, and for a notes field, the maximum length is 1024 letter.
  • Improve the handling of birthday reminder. If the birthday of a person is on 29th of February in a leap year, in the past the birthday was made 28th of February. Now the birthday is made the last day of February. Please note, Mozilla Sunbird v0.9 has wrong interpretation of the ByMonthDay attribute of the iCalendar standard; when importing the ics file, the birthday will become the last day of January. If you are using Sunbird, you may need to manually fix it.

New in Open Contacts 6.0.3.686 (Sep 7, 2009)

  • Multiple relationships to a contact is represent by a link denoted by multiple tags separated by comma. If you try to create a new link upon an existing link to a contact, the relationship tags will be expanded. For example, if you defined John is Andy's manager, and then when you try to create define John is Andy's uncle, you will have the relationship tagged as "Manager, Uncle". Surely you may simple modify the relationship directly.
  • Batch processing: change a relationship tag of all contacts containing the tag.
  • In the Search Contacts window, you may search contacts of any of the selected categories.

New in Open Contacts 6.0.0.675 Beta (Jul 28, 2009)

  • A predefined dynamic field can support multi-line. When defining a predefined field, check the "multi-line" checkbox. The field may display 2 - 4 lines. If more lines were inputted, you need to scroll down. This multi-line is handy for fields like street and address.
  • When copying email addresses of selected contacts to Windows Clipboard, you may have the addresses separated by comma or semicolon.
  • In previous versions, if you have more than 1500 selected contacts, some operations may fail. These bugs are fixed.
  • The database structure was re-constructed and otimized, thus if you are using Open Contacts 5, a migration process will kick in.

New in Open Contacts 5.3.10.654 (May 26, 2009)

  • In a Birthday field, the date picker may popup with keyboard shortcut "Alt+Down", while in the past only when the field gets focused, the picker will popup.
  • Bug fixed: in Russian Windows, the "Convert to Angular" function could not generate the degree symbol properly.
  • Bug fixed: in Russian Windows, address in Russian could not be used in the map functions. This is fixed by using percent encoding.

New in Open Contacts 5.3.9.646 (May 15, 2009)

  • Fix a bug: when inserting a new section, and section order might be wrong in some scenarios.
  • Bug fixed: With Outlook 2007, Email could not be created when Outlook is not yet running.
  • Bug fixed: With Mozilla Thunderbird v2.0.0.20 or above, the installation location could not be found.

New in Open Contacts 5.3.8.644 (Apr 20, 2009)

  • For non-English users, language resources compressed in a zip file can be patched into Open Contacts. The function is located at [Main menu -> Tools -> Apply translation patch].

New in Open Contacts 5.3.7 (Mar 31, 2009)

  • When importing from Microsoft Outlook 2003 and above, photos can be imported as well.

New in Open Contacts 5.3.5 (Nov 30, 2008)

  • Better supports for mail merge. Multiple extadr and street fields are exported.
  • When selecting a category, contacts of the category and its subcategories will be listed by default. Existing users may check [Options -> General -> List contacts of categories recursively].

New in Open Contacts 5.3.1.605 (Jul 22, 2008)

  • Provide more methods for exporting selected contacts to different formats of HTML in order to publish some contact info to the Web. HTML with hCard embedded is also included.

New in Open Contacts 5.3.06.01 (Jul 11, 2008)

  • Face lifting. The command bar in the edit window is moved to the top.
  • Font name of edit boxes, categories and contact list can be configurated.
  • Create iCalendar file which may generate birthday reminders in any calendar program running on PC, Web or PDA. The new function is located in [Main menu -> Output -> Export to Birthday Reminder].
  • Some minor face lifts to the program UI.
  • Improve synchronizing for organizational contacts, along with SyncML Client for Open Contacts v1.0.3.
  • Bug fixing. On Vista, when creating shortcut for default Contacts directory, the program crashes. Fixed.

New in Open Contacts 5.2.4.593 (Jun 28, 2008)

  • Face lifting. The command bar in the edit window is moved to the top.
  • Font name of edit boxes, categories and contact list can be configurated.

New in Open Contacts 5.2.3 (Jun 15, 2008)

  • Create iCalendar file which may generate birthday reminders in any calendar program running on PC, Web or PDA. The new function is located in [Main menu -> Output -> Export to Birthday Reminder].
  • Some minor face lifts to the program UI

New in Open Contacts 5.2.1 (May 22, 2008)

  • Bug fixing. On Vista, when creating shortcut for default Contacts directory, the program crashes. Fixed.

New in Open Contacts 5.2 (May 7, 2008)

  • Improve the way of change log management. From this version, you may use Open Contacts along with SyncML Client for Open Contacts to synchronize contact information with smart phones, PDA and other Web base address books.

New in Open Contacts 5.1.1.564 (Mar 12, 2008)

  • The Initials Grid window is changed to a drop-down window in the Contact List window.
  • Some face lifts to GUI.

New in Open Contacts 5.1 (Feb 24, 2008)

  • The drop down count of dynamic fields is adjustable from 8 to 36. This is configured in the Options.
  • When inputting birthday, it is acceptable to define month and day only without year. The format is MM-DD. In the Search Birthday window, the age of a contact won't be calculated if no year is defined.
  • When pasting multiple lines of text with predefined labels to create multiple fields, now the program can use only characters at the right end of the last TAB character if any.
  • Support advanced management of postal addresses. While each section of a record may have one postal address, you may appoint the postal address of one of the sections to be the postal address. In addition, if you prefer using a company's address, you may set the postal address to be the company's.
  • For the Quick View window, you may view postal address only after setting the Quick View style sheet to be "Postal address".
  • When inputting names of contacts, you may choose to have fields "Given name", "middle name" and "Surname" only while hiding the full name field, as you may prefer not to use automatic full name analysis. And for tolerating duplicated names, you may still amend the full name.
  • When exporting to XML with options, all categories will be exported as well if option "Settings" is checked. Then when importing from such XML to another database, all categories will be restored.
  • Add the Communication template for the Quick View window. You may change the template of the Quick View through the Options-View. This template groups data fields of electronic communication by Email, phone, and instant messenger.

New in Open Contacts 5.0.2.546 (Jan 23, 2008)

  • Could not delete a section. Fixed.

New in Open Contacts 5.0 Beta 5.0.0.539 (Nov 22, 2007)

  • Support change log which is dynamically generated. Thus, synchronization with Plaxo server and SyncML server has become possible.
  • Open Contacts Plaxo Sync was developed.

New in Open Contacts 4.1.10.527 (Sep 26, 2007)

  • Quick search contacts modified between period.
  • Quick search contacts created between period.
  • Quick search contacts without category assigned. This function replaces two similar functions which were available in the Searches menu.

New in Open Contacts 4.1.7.521 (Aug 17, 2007)

  • Import from Windows Vista Contact files.
  • Add hCard.xsl in the Templates directory for transforming selected contact info to HTML with hCard tags.

New in Open Contacts 4.1.3.515 Beta (Jul 26, 2007)

  • Add convenient ways of creating new address book for the same user or new users.
  • A shortcut is created on the desktop for you to create new working directory of address book.
  • In the Tools menu, you may run function "Create Address Book". You may create for current user, or all users.

New in Open Contacts 4.1.0.498 (Jul 5, 2007)

  • In addition to built-in actions upon contact data, you as computer literate can develop custom actions using Web URL query, EXE program, Windows scripts or DLL programs.

New in Open Contacts 4.1.0.496 Beta (Jun 27, 2007)

  • In addition to built-in actions upon contact data, you as computer literate can develop custom actions using Web URL query, EXE program, Windows scripts or DLL programs. Please check the Developer pages for details.

New in Open Contacts 4.1.0.495 Beta (Jun 19, 2007)

  • In addition to built-in actions upon contact data, you as computer literate can develop custom actions using Web URL query, EXE program, Windows scripts or DLL programs.

New in Open Contacts 4.0.2.484 (May 30, 2007)

  • Importing from MS Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora and vCard becomes customizable through XML templates. With the basic templates provided, you may modify the XML files to change the mappings. Basically you can import almost all fields of the sources.
  • Be compatible with "Start PortableApps".
  • Batch processing of changing section names of selected contacts. This feature is useful to maintain consistency of section names.
  • For frequently used fields like City, State and Country, when you key-in data, you will have a dropdown list of historic items. For example, after you have entered "Chatswood" into field city, next time when you key-in data in this field, and key-in letter "C", you will have "Chatswood" in the dropdown list. In addition, you can make any predefined field to remember a list of historic items. Obviously, some fields like "Phone" and "Email", historic items will not make sense for fast data entry. To enable this feature, you will need to enable this function in the Options window, and enable desired fields to have such feature in the Define Predefined Fields window.
  • When exporting selected contacts to XML, you will have more options. This will make the XML more informative in order to transform the XML to other data format using XSLT.
  • Support the concept of Myself in database. You may define one of the contacts to be yourself. When exporting to XML, "Myself" may be exported as well in a separated section.
  • If you have multiple address book databases to use, you may define a alias for each of these database, so you can be sure which database you are using. The alias is defined in the Database tab of the Options window.
  • Export data to XML with categories and linked contacts. And you can export both people and and companies in the same XML if you select contacts in a search window. Thus, this can be used for merging contact info to another address book database.
  • From imported XML, recovery categories and linked contacts.
  • Import from LDIF files exported from address book of Mozilla/Netscape/Thunderbird. Previous method of importing CSV is obsolete.
  • Import from LDIF files exported from other data sources. You will then need to define your own mappings saved in XML.
  • Share most settings with Contacts Express, so you may switch between Open Contacts and Contacts Express if installed.
  • The commands in the contact list window are presented as dropdown menu.

New in Open Contacts 3.8.1.407 (Dec 23, 2006)

  • When importing from CSV, if the CSV fields contain no full name field, but surname and given name, the full name will be composed with these names

New in Open Contacts 3.8.0.405 (Dec 8, 2006)

  • In quick search window, when starting typing the second character of keyword, the window will start showing results, with names and field values matched.
  • When defining categories for selected contacts, in the popup categories tree, those categories shared by all selected will be checked and bold, and those shared by some will be bold only.
  • In presenting selected contacts in HTML format, the memo fields will have line breaks.
  • In the Contact List window, quick search by name is supported. When inputting a character, contacts with initial matching the character will come up; when inputting more than one character, contacts containing the characters will come up. This feature may be enabled through the Options window.
  • Confirmation before deleting a category.
  • After changing a contact name, the new name will replace the old one, rather than be added to the end of the contact list.
  • Support default phone number prefix. You might have a lot phone numbers of local contacts without country/code. When traveling, you might need to dial extra area codes. You may use function "Call after modifying number" to compensate such change. In addition, this feature is handy for you to dial via Skype which requires country code all the time.
  • Highlight current field of the Edit Contact window.
  • Auto save. When a contact is modified and you want to quit the program or load another contact, the contact will be saved automatically. If you want to discard the changes, press Ctrl Z.

New in Open Contacts 3.7.0.331 Beta (Aug 25, 2006)

  • The basic info part of the contact edit window can adjust. the edit boxes when resizing the window.
  • Support the Geo field with latitude and longitude. The map service can be activated with this field. This feature is handy when you get friends living in the bush where the streets get no name.
  • Support relationships between people, and support multiple relationships between 2 contacts optionally.