To edit or delete a favorite, just click once on it.

You’ll now notice a “Send” panel on each module (tasks, calendar, contacts and notes) that displays groups you are a member of and their members. Sending something is as easy as dragging and dropping it over the person’s name! The message will show up directly in their picoBeat’s inbox and can be added to their own data with a single click. You can also send a regular email to anyone by dragging and dropping your items on “email”. (in this case they’ll be sent as attachment in a standard format: iCalendar, vCard, etc.)

There are a number of improvements planned for this feature, most notably a shortcut list of favorite contacts and emails for improved usability.

As a SMS is cheap, payment works by pre-purchasing credits for your user account. Unlike many other SMS services those credits can be purchased in small increments (from 5 €) and will be usable for 2 years, so you don’t have to worry about purchasing more than you can use. To get you started, every account gets 0.10 free credits, enough to send 1 or 2 SMS to most destinations!

You might notice that some part of the messaging module seems useless or “over architectured”: this is because it was built to also work as a fully-featured email client, ready to handle multiple external mailboxes, and these features are disabled right now. Since managing email requires important investments in servers and storage (we are serious about having proper backup, speed and availability), these functionalities will be activated once a proper way of financing the service is found.

If you have any question or issues related to this messaging module a dedicated forum section has been opened.

As with the tagging system, you can also change a contact’s city or company by dragging and dropping a selection of contacts onto the company or city name.

Edit: it’s online again.

Edit: server is back online

To exchange contacts or calendaring data, the SyncML specs requires the use of the well established standards that are vCard and vCalendar. While these standards are somewhat loose, they have the advantage of being widely supported and easy to read and write: they are just a bunch of lines with a key-value association (ie a line with “ORG:ACME Inc.” for the contact’s organization name). These standards require that each line is terminated MS-DOS style, with both a carriage-return and line-feed character to mark each end of line – this is however just an arbitrary choice as a simple line-feed would be enough (this is how lines are terminated on Unix systems).

Problem is, the SyncML specs is also built on XML, which treats spaces, carriage returns, tabs and lines feeds as special “white spaces” and allows XML tools to change them. As such most of these tools consider the carriage-return sign as unimportant, as it is redundant with the line-feed to mark the end of a line.

So what happens when you put a format that requires carriage-return such as vCard inside another format that doesn’t preserve them? Lots of hair pulling, because most XML programming tools will merrily remove any carriage returns they happen to find. Thankfully almost every SyncML application out there doesn’t mind reading vCard or vCalendar data with the wrong line ending as this is trivial to do and doesn’t any difference to the data. But a few will not.