Flexibits
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Flexibits updates contacts app Cardhop, adds deeper integration with Fantastical
Flexibits, the company behind productivity apps Fantastical and Cardhop, is releasing a new version of Cardhop for both macOS and iOS. This is the second major version of the app and it adds new features, such as business card scanning, widgets, organizational charts and a deeper integration with Fantastical.
Cardhop is a clever take on contact management. It uses the same address book as the default Contacts app on your Mac, iPhone and iPad. But it lets you search, add and edit contacts much more efficiently.
On the Mac, Cardhop sits in the menu bar. When you click on the icon or hit a keyboard shortcut, you can see your contacts but you can also start typing. This is when it gets interesting.
As expected, you can find a contact card by typing a few letters. But you can also add information to an existing contact this way.
Image Credits: Flexibits
For instance, if you type a name followed by a phone number, Cardhop automatically figures out that the phone number doesn’t exist in the existing contact entry — hit enter and the number is saved. If the person isn’t even in your address book, you can create a new contact just by dumping information in the search field.
The app truly shines if you think about Cardhop as a sort of command-line interface to interact with your contacts. You can type “call Jane”, “email Tom” or “whatsapp Natasha” — Cardhop parses the action for you. It can be particularly handy to initiate calls on your iPhone from your Mac.
With Cardhop 2, the design has been updated and there are a handful of new features. You can now create widgets with your favorite actions. On iOS, you can add it to your home screen. On macOS, you can access it from the Notification Center. Widgets have been a popular feature of iOS 14 and many users will like that new feature.
If you’re also using Fantastical, you can send a calendar invite to someone else from Cardhop. And if you tend to invite the same group of people to your events, you can create a group in Cardhop. The next time you want to send an invitation, you can create an event with everyone in the group from Cardhop. This is going to be a good alternative to email aliases.
Cardhop can now also generate organizational charts and family trees based on relationships in your contacts. And if you work for a big company with a contact directory, you could easily find the right person to talk with using this new feature.
On iOS, Flexibits has also added a business card scanning feature. You can add contacts just by pointing your phone at a business card. There are many apps that offer that feature already, but now it’s integrated.
Image Credits: Flexibits
Flexibits has been around for 10 years. Originally, the company released new major updates and users had to pay to download the new version. That’s how independent development companies used to charge for apps.
Last year, the company launched a new version of Fantastical with a freemium model. New users could download the app for free and would have to pay a subscription of $4.99 per month or $39.99 per year to unlock all features. Existing users could keep using the app for free as all existing features had been unlocked for them.
After switching to this new model, Flexibits released quite a few updates to Fantastical. For instance, you can now join conference calls quickly with shortcuts in the menu bar and in the app. Fantastical now also supports Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams.
Flexibits wants to go one step further and create an ecosystem of productivity apps. Cardhop 2 is a free app with a few free features. If you want to unlock everything, you have to subscribe to the same Flexibits Premium subscription.
In other words, the company is bundling premium versions of Fantastical and Cardhop in a single subscription — and the price isn’t changing. Existing Cardhop users who don’t want to subscribe will also keep everything that was available in Cardhop 1 for free.
And if you’re already using Cardhop, it’s nice to see an update. It means that the app is going to be supported going forward. When you rely on an app for your work, it’s better when it’s regularly updated and keeps working as expected year after year. And I suspect many Fantastical users will try out Cardhop thanks to the new Flexibits Premium subscription.
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Flexibits launches major Fantastical update
Flexibits, the company behind popular calendar app Fantastical, is releasing Fantastical 3.0 on all platforms today — macOS, iOS, iPadOS and watchOS. New features include event proposals, interesting calendars, new calendar views and weather forecasts.
I’ve been using the app on my Mac, iPhone and iPad for a week. The main difference with Fantastical 2 is that the app is now exactly the same across all platforms. You’ll find the same feature set, the same interface and the same calendar-syncing engine in all those apps.
“Think about it as one app and one platform that’s called Fantastical,” Flexibits co-founder Michael Simmons told me.
Now that Fantastical is a unified platform, Flexibits is also switching to a unified pricing model. All apps are free with basic features and you have to subscribe to unlock everything. The free version doesn’t support adding tasks, adding events using the natural language parsing engine, etc.
The Mac app used to cost $49.99, the iPhone app used to cost $9.99 and the iPad app used to cost $4.99. Now, you can subscribe for $4.99 per month or $39.99 per year to unlock apps on all platforms.
If you’ve been using Fantastical 2 in the past, you’ll keep all Fantastical 2 features, with a few additions. You still have to subscribe to unlock the full feature set.
While the interface of the Mac app hasn’t changed much, the iPhone app is getting a nice design update. In addition to dark mode, you can now swipe up and down on the top area to switch from the default DayTicker view to a month view and to a full-screen vertical view.
That full-screen vertical view is a great addition. For instance, you can see a week view without having to rotate your phone to landscape, a month view with events details and a year view to quickly jump to another date.
I customized the full-screen week view to display the next four days so that I get larger columns and I can more easily see the details of my events. That view reminds me of Sunrise’s week view, a well-designed calendar app that shut down four years ago.
In the week and day view, you can also zoom in and out by pinching the screen. It’s a great way to see more details or see more hours. Overall, it’s a fluid user experience and I’m sure power users are going to love swiping their fingers across the screen.
Scheduling and a renewed focus on tasks
When it comes to new features, Fantastical now has a built-in meeting proposal feature. When you create an event, you can add other options if you haven’t decided on a specific time just yet. You can see all proposed events in your calendar with a “Proposed” label and your invitee receives an email with event details. When they select a date and time, your proposed events are replaced by a single event.
This feature works with a server back end. And Flexibits didn’t stop there with server-side features. For instance, one of the key features of Fantastical is calendar sets. That feature lets you toggle multiple calendars and task lists and save those settings as a specific view. Your calendar sets now sync across all your devices.
Task management has also been improved. In addition to iCloud Reminders support, Fantastical now also supports task lists in Todoist and Google Tasks.
There’s a new feature called interesting calendars. Google Calendar users are familiar with that feature — it lets you add calendars for holidays, sports, TV, quarterly earnings, etc. The company has partnered with SchedJoules for those calendars.
Finally, you can enable weather forecasts in Fantastical. You can click on weather icons in the DayTicker or week view to check the weather in the coming days. If you’re traveling, you can also open an event to see the weather in that location at the time of your event. The company has partnered with AccuWeather for that feature.
Refining existing features
Flexibits is also using this opportunity to improve some of its most popular features. For instance, the natural language parsing engine has been updated. That feature lets you create events by typing a sentence. For instance, you can say “Team meeting tomorrow at 3pm” to create an event for tomorrow at 3pm called “Team meeting.”
Fantastical now automatically looks up names in your address book to add attendees. For instance, if you type “Lunch with Sarah on Monday at 1pm”, you get a drop-down menu and you can select Sarah in your contacts. She’ll be added as an attendee and receive a calendar invitation. Fantastical also tries to guess locations using the same system.
The natural language parsing engine also supports recurring events, selecting a specific calendar and adding alerts to your events. You can also create tasks by writing “todo Buy baguette tomorrow” for instance.
Another feature that is a nice quality-of-life improvement is Google Hangouts Meet and Zoom support. When you create an event, you can generate a Google Hangouts Meet or Zoom link to create a video-conferencing room associated to your event.
Behind the scene, the iPhone and iPad apps have received a huge upgrade as they now fetch your calendar data directly. They don’t rely on Apple’s calendar engine. Fantastical has a built-in calendar engine, just like the Mac app, which means the iOS app is no longer constrained by Apple’s API.
A new foundation
Switching to a subscription model is a risky move for Fantastical. The app now features live content with weather data and interesting calendars. And Flexibits has to pay those data partners to get this information.
But the main reason why a subscription makes sense is that the old paid app model doesn’t work anymore. Flexibits wants to ship updates more regularly instead of waiting two or three years in order to release a paid update with a ton of new features at once.
Fantastical 3.0 looks like a great foundation to build upon. Sure, subscribing to a calendar isn’t for everyone. But a ton of iPhone users looking for a free calendar app are going to download Fantastical now that it’s a free download.
And people who rely heavily on their calendar will subscribe. As a subscriber, you get a well-designed app that works so much better than Apple’s calendar app, Google Calendar or Microsoft Outlook.
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Contacts app Cardhop comes to iOS
Productivity nerds, rejoice! Flexibits, the company behind Fantastical, is releasing Cardhop on the iPhone and iPad today. Cardhop, originally released on macOS, lets you text or call your contacts as well as add information more quickly.
If you have an iPhone, chances are you’re using the default Contacts app. It’s a pretty straightforward app, but it hasn’t evolved in years.
For instance, one of my biggest pain points is that I use many different messaging apps depending on the person with whom I’m talking. You can long-press on the call or video button app to change the default app to Skype, WhatsApp, Telegram and more. But that “message” button only works with Messages.
Cardhop solves that problem by becoming the gateway for all contact-based actions. In addition to phone calls, Messages, FaceTime and FaceTime Audio, the app supports WhatsApp, Telegram, Messenger, Skype, Viber and Twitter.
When you tap on the “message” button in a contact card or when you swipe on a name, you can select the messaging app to use. The “Recents” tab doesn’t just show contact names, but also actions. This way, you can repeat past actions and contact your friends using their favorite app more easily.
Cardhop also features a birthday tab with an overview of the upcoming birthdays in your contacts. Now that people use Facebook less and less, adding birthday information to your contacts could be a way to rely even less on Facebook.
Your company may be using a contact directory in G Suite or Exchange. Cardhop now supports looking up people in those directories on both iOS and macOS.
And if you share your contact information with a lot of people, Cardhop lets you customize your vCard. For instance, you can exclude your birthday or your home address. This way, when you send your information in iMessage or over Airdrop, professional contacts get a limited set of information.
You also can create a virtual business card with a QR code. This feature reminds me of the QR codes to quickly add friends on WeChat, Snapchat or Instagram.
Command line for contacts
Cardhop features a search bar right above the tab buttons. And this is the app’s most powerful feature. Just like on the map, you can learn shortcuts to trigger actions in no time.
For instance, if you type “WhatsApp Natasha” or “wa Natasha,” it launches your conversation thread with Natasha. If you type “copy Zack,” you get Zack’s contact card with a copy button next to each field (phone number, email address, etc.).
Adding a new contact is also as easy as typing things in the search area. If you type “Amy Poehler 202-555-0172” and she’s not in your address book, Cardhop creates a new entry with a first name, a last name and a phone number.
If you’re into Siri Shortcuts, you also can create custom commands to call or text your most important people in your life with a voice command.
Replacing a default app
Many companies have tried to replace a default app. Replacing Calendar or Podcasts is easier than the Phone app. The Phone app is deeply integrated with iOS. When you call someone in Cardhop, iOS jumps to the Phone app to initiate the call. And you won’t see any missed calls in Cardhop.
But Flexibits doesn’t want to reinvent the wheel and leverage the same contact database. Every time you add a card in Cardhop, it appears in the Phone app, and vice versa.
I think most people don’t need a new contact app and it could be more confusing than anything else. But if you contact a ton of people and you know Cardhop could make this process a little bit easier, Cardhop works well. It is now available in the App Store for $4.99. You can get it for $3.99 for a limited time.
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