Max Maischein

For a long time now, I've been thinking how to organize my information about people, their addresses, phone numbers and birthdays, their websites and code they've contributed to, codename "Hoover". But there are some problems that always keep me from writing more than the bland user interface I've come up with so far.

The main problem is, that I'm no good with user interfaces. So I'd like to reuse somebody elses user interface and just import the data into it. Perl is good at that. But I'm not aware of a sufficiently good data store with sufficiently nice user interface. There are some proprietary solutions that have good to horrible integration with other programs:

The Windows Address Book is a pain to import and export, and it doesn't support custom properties of contacts.

Thunderbird is fair to automate (through Mozrepl). Adding custom fields is possible, and there are already some premade importers, for example for Gravatar images.

Building my own LDAP schema would be the enterprisey solution, but getting applications to talk to it seems hard. Having only Thunderbird available to read from the LDAP also makes this a solution less desireable.

Ideally, I want a storage format that (I) can synchronize with my mobile phone and automate from Perl, to keep the information synchronized with the interwebs.