User/Contact personal notes

[ljoonal]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

At times I cannot remember at all who someone is on my contacts, or why, or when it was that I added them. Beyond my poor memory, this lack of remembering could be partly accounted to the plethora of functionality that is tied to adding someone as a contact. As just a single example, just to send someone a message, I currently am forced to add them as a contact (#943).

Additionally, there can be things that relate to a person, that I would like to be able to double check, even if I think I do remember them correctly. Examples of such include which date to wish someone a happy birthday on, or what pronouns to use when referring to him/her/etc.

Describe the solution you'd like

A way to add text that is personal to the local user (me), that is tied to some other user, and that easy to view and modify from other references of that user.

With more example specifics, this could be a field in the contacts view that'd be specific to the user that is selected, and that would only ever be visible to the local user (not the user selected nor anyone else), that would allow writing arbitrary text into it.

Nice to haves would including syncing this field between machines, or even better, somehow doing it in an end-to-end encrypted manner, as I presume users personal notes could potentially contain something they'd deem sensitive.

Describe alternatives you've considered

The few decent UX alternatives I've managed come up with:

• Making a mod for this functionality, aka porting FriendNotes over from the old VRC mod to Resonite, which VRC now has implemented into their base game. Yet to solve how it would be managed & synced between different machines in a way that'd facilitate setups with multiple users per machine, and also be secure. Probably would need to forego all of that and leave it as "users need to figure out how to sync the db file themselves", and have the db file locations be specific per logged-in user. My personal issue with this is that I dislike working with the Resonite UI from mod code, so I've not gotten around to it yet.
• Spawning out what boils down to a ´.txt´ file within Resonite each time I want to view or edit the notes. Somehow in user-space I guess? I guess it should also be possible somehow to create a custom facet for it, but if I was to personally implement this I'd find the aforementioned method less janky and easier to do...

The following alternatives are awfully cumbersome to use from an UX standpoint whilst in Resonite in VR, but which I have also given thought to:

• For a very low-tech solution, using a traditional paper notebook.
• For a middle ground, I have considered making a .txt file which I could access via the Steam overlay.
• The highest effort solution would be making external software for the functionality similar to VRCX, such as my currently non-functional onlivfe project. If taken far enough, this software could also implement a custom steam overlay to provide a better UX than just a virtual desktop window. But it'd still not actually integrate properly into Resonite...

Additional Context

Similar to #915, although this would be more of "written notes to remember person by" usecase instead of "sort and categorize contacts". A really cool idea in my opinion would be to combine this with the tags, so that the tags could be parsed from the notes, for example Bob from accounting, #coworkers, would add the coworkers tag.

At least for me personally this would also solve #1095, as I'd just note down the date of when I add someone to my contacts, and eventually prune old ones I don't remember well.

Would be categorized under #1116 I imagine if realized.

Other considerations I've had is that if this could possibly lead to potential privacy/moderation issues. In practice I can even now also just store the data in a less secure, more easy to share format (.txt files). Meaning that my own conclusion is that, since it's possible already, and this could be designed in a way which doesn't promote sharing of notes, that there shouldn't be any issues.

Requesters

@ljoonal, @Banane9, also originally requested by @Kirv-goldblade on a separate issue, see https://github.com/Yellow-Dog-Man/Resonite-Issues/issues/1095#issuecomment-1880118954

[shiftyscales]

As you highlighted- this would be something that depends on the contacts UI rework, #1116. Being able to place notes about a particular user is something that exists as a part of other messaging services like Discord, and seems like a sensible inclusion when we get around to working further on how contacts, and messaging are handled on the platform.