Cardhop from Flexibits got an update to version 1.1 today, and it packs in some pretty great improvements for an incremental update.
If you missed it before, Cardhop is the app from the makers of Fantastical that does for contacts what Fantastical did for calendars. All your contacts are managed from your menu bar, and you’re never more than a few keystrokes away from sending an email, making a call, sending a text, or anything else contact-related. Type “email elle” and it will find Elle’s card, pick the first email address, and hitting enter will fire up a new email in Mail (or your favorite mail app). Type “call mom home” and handoff a call to Mom’s home phone number. It’s far more powerful than that, but I’ll refer you to John Voorhees’ great writeup back in October for the overview.
Cardhop 1.1 comes with some fixes and improvements, not least of them being parsing and formatting support for French, German, Italian, Spanish, English, and Japanese. But the two updates that I personally find the most useful are Smart Groups and printing support.
Smart Groups are what you probably imagine – a group of contacts based on a set of criterion that automatically updates as contacts change to match (or fail to match) those criteria. It opens up a few interesting organization and productivity schemes, but my first interest is in pseudo-tagging. I can now add @tags in contact’s notes field and have them sorted into one or more smart folders, reducing my need for a large number of “actual” contact groups. And if I stop using Cardhop and need to access those groups in another app such as Apple’s Contacts, I can always just do a search for the @tag and drag them into a regular group.
The printing features are elegant. Much like those in Apple Contacts, but with a few extra touches in the print dialog, as well as the convenience of printing right from Cardhop. Being able to pull up a contact or an entire contact group and print envelopes with return addresses, or spit out address labels for the whole bunch with just a few keystrokes is a wonderful convenience. All you have to do is type “print [name]” or “print [group]” (or use a Quick Action).
When the print dialog comes up, make sure that you’ve clicked “Show Details.”
From there you can choose a list, envelopes, or labels, and define which fields to use and other particulars for each type. (You can also switch type with ⌘1-3.)
Other new features include template preferences to control which fields are shown when entering new contacts, an “Add Notes with Timestamp” option to add dated notes to a contact, and typing in the “related contact” field now autosuggests other names from your contacts.
I’ve been loving Cardhop, and I think it’s worth anyone’s time to grab the free trial and give it a go. Cardhop costs $19.99 US and is available on the App Store and direct from Flexibits.
