Happy St. Patrick’s Day Everyone!

As some of you may know, I’ve been working on a mobile-friendly version of the Government Electronic Directory Service (GEDS) as a little side project. This application parses the results of the Government of Canada’s online phone book into a format that is easier to use on mobile devices like the Blackberry or iPhone.

Today I’m releasing an update to the service, prompted by an excellent blog post The Top 10 Problems with GEDS by Mike Gifford. This release includes the following new features:

• Search by Phone Number:  You can search the directory by a person’s phone number, or partial phone number.  Searches in various formats, complete or not, will work.  Examples:
  • 55512
  • 5551212
  • (613) 555-1212
  • 613.555.1212
  • 6135551212
  • 613 555 1212
• Search by Name with Given Name first: The first release allowed you to search for people only in the format of “Last Name, First Name” — for example Smith, Jason.  You can now search the more obvious “Jason Smith”.  If more than three words are entered, the system will assume that the 3rd or greater number of words are middle names, example “Jason A Smith” would be the same as searching “Smith, Jason A”.
• Smart Search Format Logic: You don’t have to pick which search format (Telephone, Last Name First, Given Name first) you’d like to use.   The application makes a best guess based on your query.

Finally, a disclaimer that this application is not an official product of the Government of Canada, just something I’ve developed for fun.

Cheers.