Savvy Apps’ Buzz Contacts is one of the finest iPhone apps to quickly access contacts from the Address Book and organize them into groups. Back in February I wrote a review of the first version of the app, and I liked what Ken Yarmosh and his team built:

Buzz is focused on groups. From a Facebook-like panel on the left, you can create as many groups as you want (such as “Friends”, “Family”, or “Work”) and assign contacts to them. Switching between groups is easy, as you just have to open the panel again and tap. Each group can have multiple pages of contacts, and each shortcut in the group’s grid view can be assigned a default action — be it call, message, or email. From the group’s management window, accessible by hitting the Groups icon in the upper right corner, you can reorder contacts, and organize pages if a group has more than four shortcuts.

The group actions of Buzz are something I found myself using on a daily basis. By tapping on the lower section of a group’s page, in fact, you get shortcuts for group messaging and emailing that will automatically use all the email addresses / phone numbers stored in your Address Book to send emails or texts to multiple recipients at once. This is particularly handy for teams, groups of friends, or family members. It’s been a huge time saver for me, as I would have to manually re-insert each contact every time I want to start a new group message or email.

Buzz Contacts 2.0, released today as a free update for existing customers, is a fantastic step forward in terms of design polish, navigation, integration with other services and apps, and overall speed of the app — an essential aspect of a utility that aims at making it easier and quicker to access your contacts.

In version 2.0, Buzz Contacts received a new icon and support for themes. Like Agenda, Savvy Apps’ other popular calendar app for iOS, users can now choose between different takes on the app’s color scheme and, interestingly, they can do so by either opening the Settings or swiping left/right on the top bar to change colors instantly. I prefer the app’s standard black theme, but I found the swipe implementation to change themes particularly well done.

Where Buzz Contacts 2.0 really excels, though, is the in functionality it adds to group management and navigation. Retaining the same Facebook-inspired panel interface of version 1.0, Buzz 2.0 adds Frequent and Outgoing sections at the top of the sidebar; in my usage, I found the Frequent “smart group” to be a great way to have the app monitor my most-contacted people for me, offering a series of shortcuts for emails, calls, or messages that I access on a daily basis. It’s reminiscent of the functionality Dialvetica offered, and it’s perfectly integrated with the other features offered by Buzz.

Such features include a double-tap action to bring up options for single contacts, which in version 2.0 got support for scheduling through Agenda or Due (so you won’t forget to contact your coworkers or friends anymore), possibility to send contact details via email or message, and integration with Box, Camera+, and Dropbox to easily add attachments to emails. This is a welcome addition to my workflow, as I rely on a Dropbox shared folder to store files for our team, and now I can easily forward them via email to a single contact (or everyone within a Buzz group) so I can add comments in the message. Or, more simply, I can attach photos from the Camera Roll or Camera+ and send them to my closest friends without leaving the app or composing a message manually.

Buzz Contacts 2.0 adds a reworked dialer that’s now easier to access and that works with phone numbers, names, and initials. Whether you prefer to dial a contact by name or number, Buzz will display results from your Address Book in real time, highlighting in green the numeric or alphabetic matches as you type. You can then double-tap on a contact to bring up the action menu, add it to a group from the dialer (a new option in 2.0), or initiate a new phone call (there’s a setting to avoid confirmation for phone calls).

To improve navigation, Buzz 2.0 deepens its reliance on swipes to create an actionable environment that’s equally powerful and intuitive. You can swipe horizontally between multiple pages of a group, and swipe to the right to open the group in a simpler list view. An additional swipe to the right will go back to the slide-out panel, which is now more responsive and better highlights the active view. In this new version, you can also swipe vertically between groups and the dialer — an option that single-handedly reinvented my usage of Buzz as it’s dramatically faster than going back to the sidebar for every kind of section switching.

Buzz Contacts 2.0 is full-featured and easy to use. Whereas an app like Launch Center Pro can work as a quick contact launcher, Buzz Contacts is a powerful contact manager and hub that in this version has been greatly improved with faster navigation and integration with other apps and services. Buzz Contacts remains the best solution for group-based contact management in my opinion, and thanks to a better dialer and support for swipes, it can now aspire to replace Apple’s Phone app for other users as well.

Buzz Contacts 2.0 is available at $0.99 for a limited time.

I’m not typically one that likes to replace Apple’s core iOS apps with third-party alternatives, but Savvy Apps’ latest iPhone app, Buzz, allows me to access my contacts faster than Apple’s own Phone software, and I had to leave a spot for it in my Dock.

For the past two weeks, I’ve been testing Buzz, the latest production by iOS design and development firm Savvy Apps by Ken Yarmosh. Similarly to Agenda, also by Savvy Apps, Buzz comes with its own clean, custom UI focused on presenting text against a light background that contributes to increasing readability and finding things in seconds. Whilst I believe Agenda benefits more from this design aesthetic because of how it handles information density (a calendar app can get pretty busy), the same focus on clarity and simplicity works equally well for Buzz, which is a quick dialer/contact management app that emulates many of Apple’s Phone functionalities in a completely new interface.

Think of Buzz as a minimalist take on Apple’s Phone app, aimed at enhancing a few important functionalities, leaving out many others that are (at least in my workflow) rarely used. Whilst Phone.app obviously offers control over recently missed phone calls, the voicemail, and your system favorites, Buzz takes the “quick shortcut” aspect of apps like Launch Center and Matt Gemmell’s Favorites, combines it with group management and native integration with the Address Book, and comes up with a rather unique implementation that allows for a very lightweight usage, or deeper full-blown contact interaction. I believe many out there will find it hard to completely give up on the native Phone app — especially for the Recents view — but I found Buzz to be enough for me and, if anything, a better solution for my daily Address Book needs. (more…)

Sometime in the past five years, the Address Book got social. Our contact cards suddenly gained Twitter handles and Facebook links, whilst users more oriented towards business relationships decided to add their LinkedIn pages alongside standard phone numbers and email addresses. More importantly, the Address Book became mobile: adding a new entry to the Contacts app on our iPhones pretty much equals to exchanging business cards now and, unsurprisingly, a new category of apps has arisen from the need of turning old cards into digital reinterpretations of that paper stack full of contacts we’d keep on our desk, but never properly organize.

From this premise, Xobni (that’s Inbox spelled backwards), makers of a popular email plugin for Outlook and Gmail, released Smartr for iPhone a few weeks ago on the App Store. Developed as a mobile companion to Xobni on the desktop, Smartr leverages all the features made possible by a digital interface (search, social integration, slick design, APIs) to provide you with a social address book that’s always up to date and keeps tracks of your communication with friends, family, and work contacts over time. It is very smart indeed.

Smartr basically creates rich profiles for all your contacts, aggregating data from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and email to form a complete overview of someone you might have communicated with in the past. In pulling this data from various social networks, Smartr uses its proprietary matching technology (the “Xobni Cloud”) to analyze and compare your contacts (from your Address Book, an interesting subject following Path’s recent PR fiasco) against conversation history from email (Gmail is fully supported), usernames from Twitter and Facebook, status updates, and so forth. Once a contact is matched, a rich profile view is created featuring name, photo, phone number, and email addresses. Smartr even allows you to swipe across the top section of a profile view to switch between a person’s various social profiles, which upon tap will correctly launch the official Twitter and Facebook apps (if installed).

But what to do with these rich, automatic and integrated profiles? Well, Smartr is largely focused on search, unlike, say, a tool like Friends that’s more geared towards interacting with people from your Address Book found on other social networks. Smartr’s prominent interface element is, in fact, a search box that lets you look up contacts by name, company, title, or email. I wish the app supported @username-based look-ups, as I might remember exchanging a message or two with @hrbrt, but I can’t recall his full name from further email communications. Smartr is fast: Searching more than 6,000 contacts on my iPhone takes seconds and the information is always up to date, as Smartr is also web-based in that Xobni’s servers are constantly analyzing and matching your contacts to provide the best results. You can read more about Xobni’s privacy policy here.

Once you’ve found a contact (I managed to retrieve contact information and conversation history from messages dating back to 2008), you can interact with the profile view to compose new emails, call a phone number, or send a new message. The History tab in the top toolbar will give you access to a nicely designed graph showing how many times you’ve appeared in a conversation with a contact, with the actual messages listed below and available for inline viewing if the associated email address is also configured in Smartr (the app will use the standard iOS mail view to enable this). The third tab, Common, shows a list of common contacts between you and the contact you previously looked up.

Smartr is very fast, reliably accurate, and has proven to be a nice addition to my workflow, especially for those times I want to look up an old contact (typically developers) that I want to get in touch with again. I wouldn’t mind paying for Smartr, but the app is free, and available on the App Store. If mail integration is your thing, make sure to check out Xobni’s popular Gmail plugin as well.

While Twitter integration is engrained in iOS 5 (heck, Apple even lets you know whether you have Twitter’s official app installed or not), All Things D reports that Contacts has received a small update which includes support for adding friend’s handles on Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn, and Flickr. When you add a contact to your iPhone, you can link that person to all of their social accounts. If you tap the handle in your contacts list, you’ll be take to that person’s user profile page.

The inclusion of the feature shows Apple’s acknowledgement of the importance of Web presences and contact information. But it could be much more useful if users don’t have to enter each of their friends’ handles manually, as appears to be the case at least in this release.

There’s also an inactive “add custom service” button that may allow you to add someone’s Instagram or MLKSHK account in the future – currently I found this particular feature wasn’t working. To access these additional profiles, edit a contact, and add a Profile field. If tap on the word Profile, you can select between the various social networks.

[via All Things D]

As you might have read if you follow me on Twitter, my MobileMe subscription expired last week. In the past year, I’ve relied on MobileMe’s services (but not the webapp) for syncing all my contacts, calendars, emails and bookmarks from the desktop to the cloud and back to iOS devices such as my iPhone 4 and iPad. But when the subscription was nearing its expiration date (Apple notifies you weeks before with a series of emails and a brief note on Me.com), I was left with a question: should I renew? Considering all the rumors about MobileMe being completely revamped and going free we’ve heard in the past months, I was skeptical about a renewal because I didn’t want to pay for a service that is likely going through some major changes and won’t no longer be supported (at least in its current iteration) a year from now. And even if I still have access to some sections of my old MobileMe account (mail, contacts and Find My iPhone), I decided that renewing wasn’t simply worth it and it was time for me to find an alternative — even a temporary one until MobileMe is updated to include new features and pricing schemes. That alternative is Google Sync, and here’s my experience so far. (more…)

A new patent design uncovered by Patently Apple today gives us a hint at some interface elements Apple may implement in future versions of iOS, perhaps as soon as iOS 5 is released later this year. The patent doesn’t provide many details and the mockups realized by Apple are nowhere near the final style of an iOS product, but they can let us speculate on the interface changes several apps will likely go through.

In this patent, Apple has focused on browsing the iTunes Store and accessing the Address Book. The main concept seems to be that raw lists of items — songs, artists, and even contacts — should evolve into a visually richer experience based on “tiles”, rather than vertical lists. Does that ring a bell? Yes, at first I thought of the Windows Phone 7 UI — but the implementation Apple is envisioning here is quite different. From what we can see in the sketches posted online, the design looks like a mix of the Finder’s standard icon view and the iTunes album art screensaver: there’s a grid containing albums and songs in the iTunes Store and a different contact visualization in Address Book with a series of thumbnails for all your friends, and a bigger one in the foreground for the contact you’re currently talking to / editing in the app. Apple is calling these things “Segmented Graphical Representations”, and from a first look it sounds like they’re aiming for a more visual interaction with the OS based on thumbnails and graphics, rather than lists of text. (more…)

In these past months on MacStories, we have covered two apps that aim at becoming replacements for the standard Apple Phone app: Favorites and Dialvetica. By leveraging the APIs of iOS that allow for 3rd party apps to access your contact’s list, these apps are focused on letting you quickly access your favorite contacts and either call them, text them or email them with a few taps. Favorites and Dialvetica are not really focused on the number dialing part of the phone experience (although the latest Dialvetica update introduced a dialpad), they’re rather simple interfaces to get to your most contacted friends and do stuff. Shortcuts, that is.

QuickBins, a free iPhone app by Chalk, is very similar to Favorites, but it’s based on drag & drop. The app displays your favorite contacts (which you’ll have to add manually) as profile pictures on a grid, and you can even create multiple pages of contacts. As you fire up the app, you’ll notice 4 big buttons at each corner: those are shortcuts to initiate a call, send a text message, an email and check on a contact’s address. How do you activate these commands? Simple: you take a contact, and you drop it on a button. QuickBins will then forward you to an external app (third-party software can’t send calls or text without loading Apple’s stock apps) to perform the action.

That’s it. QuickBins will soon introduce support for Skype, Twitter and Google Voice, it’s free and ad-supported, but you can remove the ads with a $2.99 in-app purchase. QuickBins also happens to have a beautiful UI design that makes it a real pleasure to tap on its icon and look at the dashboard.

QuickBins is available for free here.

Developed by Spanning Sync and available in the Mac App Store at $4.99, Contacts Cleaner is a simple utility aimed at fixing the little problems that can slowly take over your state-of-the-art Address Book organization. I’m talking about unrecognized Unicode characters (because admit it, you tried to paste weird symbols next to your boss’ phone number), missing info and extra spaces between names that shouldn’t be there. Contacts Cleaner can fix these issues thanks to a minimal and simple interface that makes it easy to go through the most scary list of broken contacts. (more…)