05 – Contacts

In this chapter you set up your address book, learn how a phone number says which phone it is, and see where birthdays come from.

Aperio keeps contacts beside your calendars and task lists, out of the same accounts you connected in Chapter 02: an iCloud or Nextcloud account brings its CardDAV address books, a Google or Microsoft account brings its contacts, an Exchange account brings yours plus the company directory — and there is a local address book that needs no account at all.

Contacts are what the attendee picker offers when you invite people to an event (Chapter 03), and what the birthday calendars are built from.

Finding your way around

Open Contacts from the sidebar (on the phone: the Contacts tab). The list is grouped by address book, with the number of entries in each group heading.

• Enter opens the selected contact for editing.
• Insert creates a new one.
• Delete removes the selected contact (with a confirmation step).
• The Menu key or Shift+F10 opens its context menu.
• Search covers your own address books and connected directories such as the Global Address List — including people who are not in any book of yours.

On the phone the address books are collapsed by default: you get a short list of book headings and expand only the one you want, so a company directory with thousands of entries does not bury your personal book. Each contact row carries Edit and Delete as accessibility actions on the row itself.

Read-only books. Directories — the Global Address List, Google Directory and Other Contacts, Microsoft’s Suggested People — are read-only by nature. Their entries open in a view-only editor: you can read every field, but Save and Delete are gone.

What a contact holds

• Display name (required), first name, last name.
• Organization, job title and department.
• Email addresses, phone numbers and websites — any number of each, every one with its own label (see below).
• Postal addresses — street, postal code, city, region, country, each with a label.
• Birthday and anniversary.
• Notes.
• A photo, which you can set from a file (on the phone from the photo library) and remove again.

A contact can also be a distribution list: tick This is a distribution list (group) and the person fields give way to a member editor — one member per line, either Name <email@example.com> or a bare email address.

Labels: which phone number is which

An email address, a phone number or a website is never just the value. Each one sits in its own row with a Label in front of it:

Home · Work · Mobile · Fax · Other · No label · Custom…

Pick Custom… and a free-text field appears, so a number can be called Holiday home or Reception if that is what it is.

On the desktop the label is a dropdown at the top of the row. On the phone it is a button that opens the choice in a dialog; the button says what is currently chosen, so you hear “Phone number 2, label: mobile” without opening anything.

Add a row with Add phone number (or Add email address / Add website), remove one with the Remove button at the end of its row.

Screen-reader note: Each row is a small group of its own: the label button or dropdown, then the value, then Remove. The label always comes before the value — walking down a contact with four numbers, you hear which one it is before you hear the digits. The row number is part of every control’s name (“Remove phone number 2”), so you always know where you are.

What each provider does with a label

Every system files a phone number under some kind of label, but they do not agree on how. Aperio stores your word and each account translates it on the way out:

• CardDAV / iCloud / Nextcloud and Google keep whatever you typed. A custom label like Holiday home survives a round trip unchanged.
• Exchange has a fixed vocabulary and a fixed number of slots: four voice numbers, a fax number, and three email addresses per contact. A label it has no word for takes the next free voice slot — the number always travels, only the word may be replaced. A fifth voice number cannot be stored at all.
• Outlook / Microsoft 365 has three phone collections — one mobile number, home numbers, business numbers. A second number labelled mobile joins the business list rather than pushing the first one out.
• The local address book stores everything exactly as you typed it.

The same applies to websites: CardDAV and Google keep as many as you like, Exchange and Outlook keep exactly one (a work-labelled one is preferred, and otherwise the first).

Anniversary on Outlook. Microsoft 365 contacts have a birthday field but no anniversary field. An anniversary you enter on an Outlook contact has nowhere to be stored and will be empty again after the next sync. Every other account type keeps it.

Birthdays in the calendar

Every address book that has birthdays in it also appears as a read-only birthday calendar in the calendar list, which you can show or hide like any other calendar. Those entries are derived from the contacts themselves — there is nothing to edit there; change the birthday on the contact and the calendar follows.

You can give a birthday calendar its own default reminders, so you are warned a few days ahead rather than on the morning itself.

Sync and privacy

Under Settings → Contacts you control:

• the sync interval, and a Sync now button;
• whether read-only directories (Global Address List, Suggested People, Other Contacts, Workspace Directory) are pulled on every sync. They are skipped by default because they can be very large — search reaches them either way, on demand;
• Clear cache, which drops the in-memory snapshots of external address books. Your own local contacts are untouched; the next sync re-pulls the rest.

Aperio syncs your contacts directly with the connected providers and keeps names, addresses, numbers, birthdays and organisation fields in memory so that search and the attendee picker stay responsive. What a provider itself collects and how long it keeps it is governed by that provider’s own privacy policy; the settings page links to Google’s and Microsoft’s, and for CardDAV, iCloud and Exchange servers the policy of that server applies.

Summary

You can keep contacts across several address books, label every phone number, email address and website, and let birthdays appear in your calendar. In the next chapter you’ll get to know the views.