Instead, they start email and text messages, phone calls, tweets, and the like through a combination of autocomplete, recents, and other features that are built into the communications apps themselves. Over the past week, I’ve asked friends and family whether they use contacts apps and none do. Whether Cardhop is the right choice for you will depend on how you approach communications. It looks fantastic, but I’m not sure how the icon relates to the app’s name or functionality.
Cardhop and google voice full#
Like Fantastical, Cardhop is full of delightful little animations that provide affordances like confirming for users that a new contact has been saved.Ĭardhop also features a detailed app icon that’s a sandwich with a bite taken out of it and a contact card branded into the bread. Instead, Cardhop lists upcoming birthdays and recently contacted people, both of which are likely to be more relevant to users than the beginning of an alphabetical list. Having a contacts app open to the top of an alphabetical list of contacts is not particularly useful. In addition to picking the action buttons that appear on each contact card, you can use the default dark theme or a light one, pick a default Twitter client and mapping app, and choose how names are displayed and sorted.Ī unique design decision that sets Cardhop apart from other contacts apps is that it does not display all of your contacts by default.
Cardhop and google voice mac#
Pair your iPhone to your Mac via Bluetooth, and you can also send the calls directly to your phone, which is useful if you want to start a call as you’re leaving home.Ĭardhop is also highly customizable. If you have Continuity or WiFi calling enabled on your iPhone, you can initiate calls from your Mac. Cardhop also has a quick-entry notes field at the bottom of each contact card.Ĭardhop’s action buttons are customizable.Īnother interesting feature is how Cardhop handles calls. Each of those can be replaced with several other options from the preferences pane including getting directions, opening a webpage, starting a Skype call or video chat, copying a contact, sending messages via Twitter or Telegram, and more. By default, there are options to send a text or email message, make a call, or start a video chat. There is also a service available that will add highlighted text to your contacts.Ĭlicking on a contact opens a popover contact card with a row of customizable action buttons at the top. If the app recognizes the information you enter, it pulls up the matching card and offers to edit it if it includes any new information. If you enter information that it doesn’t recognize, it offers to add a new contact. Cardhop has the smarts built in to deal with both. Most of the time, your interaction with Cardhop will start from its text field regardless of whether you’re looking for contact information you saved months ago or are adding a new contact. You can also hide the groups panel with a button at the bottom of the Cardhop window, which reduces Cardhop to its most minimal UI, which is how I prefer to use it because I don’t usually organize contacts into groups. If you want to see all your contacts though, they are just one button click away. Below that is a column of contact groups on the left, which are the same ones you’d find if you open Apple’s Contacts app, and a list of recently contacted people and upcoming birthdays on the right. Clicking on Cardhop’s icon in your menu bar opens a detachable drop-down window with a cursor blinking in an empty field. In a communications app-centric world, I expect Cardhop will be a tough sell.Ĭardhop is based on a single text field that sometimes acts as a search field and other times is a text input field. Other apps and services make it easy to bypass contacts apps altogether with favorites and recent contacts lists. Email clients and messaging apps automatically fill in contact information based on past messages you’ve sent. However, contacts apps are less necessary today than ever before. Many contacts apps are notoriously clunky, hard to get information into, and prone to creating duplicates, which limits their utility. The app is beautifully-designed and powerful but solves a problem that I’m not sure many people have today.
Now, Flexibits wants to do the same for contacts with a brand new app called Cardhop by integrating contact creation, management, and interaction into a single text field of a macOS menu bar app. It followed up with iPhone and iPad versions. Flexibits took much of the frustration out of calendars when it introduced Fantastical for macOS in 2011 by leveraging natural language input of events.
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