Doug

Oh, and a very nice review too, Niek

1) The “giant blue screen in the middle of your today screen”
This is the selection color used by your theme. For instance, if you select the “Guava Bubbles” theme that comes with every device, the selection color will also change accordingly.
The same solid selection color is used by most plugins to give a clue of their selection status. Just try to move around the plugins using the up and down cursor keys, and you will see what I mean.
Of course, any plugin may bypass this default behavior if desired, and in the future we may actually add an option and let the user decide if he/she prefers the background to be transparent in all circumstances. But this may have a few side-effects.
When Face Contact is selected as the active plugin it intercepts the Start Call button so that you can start a call with a simple key press. It also intercepts other keyboard events (such as scrolling via cursor keys or jumping to a specific initial in the contact list) and it overrides the Today menu bar (so the SIP can be accessed if the device has no keyboard). Knowing that the plugin is selected provides a clue that such actions can be performed.
Furfthermore, most users have complex and colorful background and some even use a photograph as the Today screen background. As long as everything is static, displaying contacts’photos on top of such backgrounds may be cool and sharp looking because of the 3D rendering and reflection effects, which give the impression of a different plane and perspective.
But as soon as you start scrolling through your contacts, a colorful background may be very disturbing, as it is more difficult to recognize photos or to read the index-tracking letter as it changes. This is especially true if the Today background is a photograph.
So, switching to the solid selection color defined by the theme has the interesting side-effect of improving the ergonomics of interaction.

2) “I’m careful with my today screen space and this takes a lot of space for just a contact manager”
The first assertion (”I’m careful with my today screen space”) is something subjective so it’s not debatable. But please note that there are quite a few people displaying huge digital or analog clocks on their today screen, and these often take much more space than Face Contact to convey little information (only the time in most cases). The same applies to plugins with weather forecast (which use at least as much space as Face Contact), or news feeds, and so on.
The second assertion (”this takes a lot of space for just a contact manager”) is not subjective, as it is easily measurable. The standard Contacts application requires the whole screen, and this actually applies to just about all “contact managers” I’m aware of: they would never have a chance to fit within the Today screen.
Furthermore, in its standard view (with contacts displayed by Name), on a typical 240×320 device, the standard Contacts application displays 8 contacts at a time (per screen). On a square screen device, such as a Treo, the Contacts app only shows 5 contacts. Face Contact displays 7 contacts in all circumstances, and even more when in landscape mode or on a hi-res device), In other words, Face Contact displays about the same number of contacts of the standard Contacts app, yet it uses just a small portion of the screen.
Not too bad for a “contact manager”.

3) “There should be an option to add all your contacts at the same time”
You are absolutely right. Actually, in the original design, Face Contact wasn’t even supposed to have an “Add Contact” command, and all existing contacts were added automatically the very first time the plugin was invoked.
BUT, when we were considering this approach, we also planned to have a “Filter By Category” option. Then we decided to leave such filtering out of this first release, and, lacking such “filtering capability”, we thought that automatically adding all contacts at once was simply too much at this stage.
Hence, as it is now, you have to explicitely “add” contacts that you wish to use with Face Contact.
Nevertheless please note that this doesn’t imply that you need to take a day off to add all your contacts to Face Contact the first time you install it.
A very reasonable approach to using Face Contact can be easily described as follows:
- You start by adding the contacts that you interact with frequently.
- Whenever you need to call or write to a contact that’s not in the list, rather than launching the standard “Contacts” application, you simply use the “Add Contact” command of Face Contact to lookup the contact.
- This requires just about the same number of taps or keystrokes that you would perform to launch and lookup a contact with the standard Contacts app, but…
- as a byproduct, not only you will get to the contact that you need to call, but this will also be added to Face Contact, so it will be available for any further use.
In other words, you can easily increase the list as needed, when needed.

Thanks again for your review.

Best regards,
Agostino Morreale