DreamLife S60 Tutorials

Intro: Manage

DreamLife allows you to organise your contacts and activities in a way that is practical and meaningful. It separates contacts categories from activity categories, giving you the flexibility to have different categorisation of your contacts and activities. The Categories feature enables you to classify each contact and activity according to the context in which you interact with it. You can choose to view only those contacts or activities in the relevant category. This is very useful if you want to find contacts or view activities within a particular area, for example, all the people in your work department or all the activities relating to your family.

A contact or activity can belong to multiple categories, enhancing the ease with which you can find information. This reflects the real-life situation where someone or an activity may belong to different areas of your life, for example, someone who is both a friend and a work colleague or a dinner that can be both work and family.

Categories can be organised in a hierarchy, with colours added to activity categories. Hierarchies reflect the real-life way we categorise things, dividing them into smaller and more specific chunks, such as business then divided into individual companies, which are then divided into departments, etc.).

Importantly, all categories will automatically include all contacts or activities assigned to them and to any of their subcategories. For example, you have a top level category called Business. Under Business, you have your company Home Designs and under that, Clients and Staff as subcategories. If you add new contacts to Staff, they will also be attached to the Business and Home Designs categories automatically. You can see from the screenshot that the organisation and relationship of your categories are clearly displayed.  This display works both in the category editor, the category menus, and the category selector in the contact and activity editor.

Attaching Categories

Adding and removing contacts is tedious in the standard Contacts. DreamLife provides multiple ways to do this. You can add or remove multiple contacts to and from categories in the contact list view. This makes moving many contacts between categories an easy task. You can also add or remove contacts from categories in any of the contact views available. In the same way, you can easily add or remove activities from categories. Whether you are viewing a list of contacts, editing a contact’s details or editing an activity's details, you can simply select the categories that you want the contact or activity to attach or detach from, as in these screenshots.

Suppose you had a work colleague whom you now also consider a friend. You want to place this person in the Personal category. There are two methods to do this: 

• In the contact list with the contact highlighted (and no contacts marked), select Options > Add to cat. and choose the category to be attached to the contact.
• In the edit contact view, scroll to the category field and select the category.

Let’s say you've decided that the first option is the most convenient. The following screenshot shows how simple it is to perform this action.

Detaching the categories is equally easy and the technique is identical to the above two methods. In the first method, instead of choosing Add to cat., choose Remove from cat.

Creating New Categories

You may create new categories to suit your needs. For example, if you wanted to put all the people who are soccer fans together:

1. First, from the contact list choose Options > Categories > Edit categories and a list of categories and subcategories appear.
2. On the same screen, select Options> Add and a category dialogue box appears.
3. Choose Personal as the Parent category, then enter Soccer as the new category. Press OK to return to the main display.

Viewing Categories

As opposed to groups in the standard Contacts, categories are treated as part of a contact’s information. That means you can see the categories a contact belongs to when editing contact details, not just from the group view. In the same way, categories are included as part of an activity's information and are visible when viewing or editing an activity.

In the latest S60 E Series phones such as E71, groups are hard to find because they are scattered through the contact list. In this case, DreamLife allows you to see a list of all your categories at a glance, saving you the need to remember and search for particular categories. You can see the list of categories when viewing a list of contacts.

For example, you may want to call all your soccer friends to get together and watch a match, or want to know what your family commitments you have in the coming week. Categories is extremely useful for situations in which you need to contact a number of people within a particular group, or find out activities relating to a particular area of your life.

The top of the screen always reflects the category that you are currently viewing. This is part of DreamLife’s constant visual feedback to keep you informed of what you are viewing.

Unfiled Categories

Another aspect of DreamLife’s category management worth mentioning is its ‘Unfiled’ category. It contains every person and activity that is not assigned to a category. This is handy for when you want to see your contacts or activities in the context of their categorisation. You can easily and quickly see who or what is in which categories without the need to check every contact, activity or category to find out. Imagine going through 300 contacts or a month's activities to check their category status, and you’ll realise how significant this unfiled category can be.

Managing Categories

Categories are easily managed and edited. For instance, if you wanted to delete a certain category, simply select Options > Categories > Edit Categories on the contact list or any activity views. You can create, modify, delete or select a category to view.

As shown, Categories is extremely useful, and very easy to operate. This feature is invaluable for people who want flexibility and convenience in organising their contacts and activities.

Example: Setup Contacts

DreamLife is the first contacts application on Symbian smartphones that allows you to categorise your contacts in a hierarchy, which better reflects the real life relationships contained in your contact database.

Hierarchical categories are a great way to categorise contacts both generally and specifically. This tutorial will demonstrate how set up hierarchical categories for contacts quickly and accurately using other tools in DreamLife, such as global find.

1. Set up your hierarchical categories

2. Do a Global Find

This Global Find is simply to find every contact that has the company field that contains the detail "smart" (case sensitive). This is just an example, and Global Find can be used to narrow or widen the search to include other search results, depending on how general or specific your search criteria is in the Global Find.

3. Select all

If there are a few exceptions, you can go through making the exceptions, then choose Invert marks to choose everything but those initially marked.

4. Add to category

The Add to cat. command (and remove from cat.) make it very easy to move many contacts between categories.

5. Choose category whenever needed

You can easily assign or remove multiple categories to a contact while editing the category field of this contact.

Note that these same categories are now also present in the Business category as well, without having to manually add them.

Example: Setup Activities

DreamLife has a unique and innovative way of organising and displaying activities in your calendar. Activities can be arranged into categories and these categories can have sub-categories to help you categorise your activities more specifically.

The great thing about these categories is that activities can belong to multiple categories and they are colour-coded, so activities will display in DreamLife in the colour of the category you save them in. This lets you easily identify different types of activities in the Activity view, you can even choose to view only one category at a time in the Activity view.

1. First, we need to create categories and sub-categories so that we can add our activities to them.

   From the Activity view, select Options > Categories > Edit categories. This will bring up a list of the categories you have created. On this screen, select Options > Add to set up a new category.

   

2. Here, you can set whether you would like the category to be a top level category, or choose a parent category. In this example, we have already set up a number of categories and we are adding a category as a sub-category of the "Business" category.

    

   

3. Next you can set the name, colour and default alarm sound for the category.

   There are 16 different colours to choose from and you can select any sound from your phone as your alarm sound. All activities you add to this category will be displayed in the colour you choose, and will have the alarm sound you set. Once these are selected, tap OK to save the category.

   

4. Now we can create an activity and place it in one of these categories.

   In this example, we are creating an appointment. From the Activity view, create a new activity by tapping an empty time slot, or go to Options > New and select the activity type you want to create.

   

5. Enter the title, time and other information in your new activity.

   

6. To select a category for this new activity to belong to, tap or select Categories and a list of your categories will appear. You can tap or select the checkbox next to the category to select multiple categories for the activity to belong to. If you need to create a new category for this activity, you can create a new category by repeating steps 1 to 3.

   Activities will always display in the colour of the highest ranking category if you are saving it to multiple categories at once, or the category you have saved the activity to first. For example, if you save the activity to the "Business" and "Smart Design" categories at the same time, then the activity will be displayed in the colour of the "Business" category. However, if you first choose to save the activity to the "Smart Design" category, and then later also add it to the "Business" category, it will display in the colour of the "Smart Design" category.

   Press Save to continue editing the activity.