The problem is that we’ve all built up habits that will be hard to break. In both cases, Cardhop’s natural language parser made it super easy to enter and update contact information, and it even fixed a lot of capitalization and punctuation errors in addresses that I pasted in from email.Ĭardhop is a fine app, and a compelling rethinking of how you can interact with contact information, but it still faces an uphill battle for acceptance. I’ve enjoyed using Cardhop, particularly once when I needed to enter a lot of names and postal addresses for runners to whom I had to send awards for a race, and again when I went through the envelopes for our Christmas cards to verify and update addresses. Want to create a new contact with a company name, email address, Twitter handle, and phone number? Just type “Tim Cook Apple 40.” From then on, you can contact Tim with commands like “email Tim Cook.” (So, Tim, about those butterfly keyboards…) Cardhop’s innovation is the way it lets you interact with your contacts using a natural language parser. #1653: Apple Music Classical review, Authory service for writers, WWDC 2023 dates announcedįew Apple apps are as user-hostile as Contacts on the Mac, which was why I was happy to see Flexibits release Cardhop for the Mac as an alternative interface to the Mac’s system-level contact database (see “ Cardhop Puts Contacts Front and Center,” 18 October 2017).1654: Urgent OS security updates, upgrading to macOS 13 Ventura, using smart speakers while temporarily blind.#1655: 33 years of TidBITS, Twitter train wreck, tvOS 16.4.1, Apple Card Savings, Steve Jobs ebook.#1656: Passcode thieves lock iCloud accounts, the apps Adam uses, iPhoto and Aperture library conversion in Ventura.#1657: A deep dive into the innovative Arc Web browser.Flexibits just released their new Mac contact management app, Cardhop. I’ve been beta testing this app for a bit and it immediately became as much a part of my workflow as Fantastical (not coincidentally also by Flexibits), which is an app I use all day, every day.Ĭardhop is similar to what FullContact has tried to be, and has some features you’ll find in Interact Contacts for iOS, but as it stands on the Mac right now, this is the most elegant contact management solution I’ve seen. Just like Fantastical on the Mac, Cardhop sits in your menu bar, and you can bring it up with a key combo or a click. The window pops up, showing today’s birthdays and your recent contacts (and optionally a sidebar with all of your contact groups). At the top sits a universal entry field, already focused and ready for you to type. Start typing part of a name and it will filter the list. Type until you find the contact you want and click to interact with it, or just use the entry bar: type “email ben k” (or even “ben k email”) and send an email to the primary email address for the first match of Ben K. Or type “email elle work” to start an email to Elle’s work email instead of her default address. You can also create new contacts by typing a name that doesn’t exist along with things like phone numbers and email addresses, and they’ll all be intelligently parsed and included in the new contact. You can update contacts just as easily by typing enough of a name to match, and then continuing with new information. Type “Ben K 555-1212” and add that phone number to Ben’s contact card. It can also parse entire blocks of text, such as email signatures, which you can get to Cardhop either by copying from an email, hitting the keyboard shortcut, and pasting, or just use the included Service to right click and send it directly.Ĭardhop makes use of Contact groups, which is great for me. I’d previously used apps that let me add #tags in the notes field and do cool things with those. This was faster than building groups and dragging contacts around, so I’ve never used the official “groups” all that much. With Cardhop it’s easy to add a contact to a group by using a /group_name notation when adding or updating a contact, and easy to interact with the group (e.g. send a group email) by starting out with a command like “email /betatesters”. When you type an action word, if the first match doesn’t have an appropriate matching key, it will try for the next one that does, further saving time. And when you type “call,” if there’s a phone number it can automatically make the call on your iPhone and you can just walk away from your computer. There are many subtle delights you’ll find as you use Cardhop. Because it’s designed to work with natural language, you can often just type what you think should do the trick, and it will.
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