570113 - Replace contact summary pane with "contact properties" pane

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 92321

(Thunderbird :: Address Book, enhancement)

Description

[naught]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.2.3) Gecko/20100423 Ubuntu/10.04 (lucid) Firefox/3.6.3
Build Identifier: 3.0.4

The Contact summary pane is next to useless - it usually doesn't provide any more information than the main contact spreadsheet (unless your contacts have images, which is pretty rare). It would be far, far more useful to have an "contact properties" pane - basically, the contact properties dialogue in a pane that automatically switches contacts as you click them in the spreadsheet.

As far as I can work out, this would have basically no draw-backs - the contact properties dialogue already has the capability to display all the information in the contact summary pane, including images, albeit on separate tabs.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Hi naught, sorry for late reply, but thanks anyway for your nice idea. It's obvious that pane would be more useful if we could edit the data which is already in front of us. However, albeit impractical, at least it's working correctly (as opposed to, say, mailing lists), and editing is just one click away. So it won't be prioritized unless somebody volunteers to fix this. Also, the summary could still be useful for copying data which becomes harder when it's all editable fields, but perhaps that could be solved with an "Edit" button or other such which just enables inline editing.

I found the same request which was filed as early as 2001, so I'll mark yours as a duplicate of that.

There was an attempt within recent few years to rip out the entire old AB and replace with a new one, but it's a lot of work and so far, nothing has materialized.
Basically, it's a manpower problem as TB is now maintained by volunteers.