Summer is here, the sun is shining, and it’s time for the next major update of Fantastical! Fantastical 2.5 for Mac adds a number of features that’ll make organizing your summer plans much easier, and it brings a host of other other enhancements that we know you’ll find useful too.

Here’s a short video showing what’s new in Fantastical 2.5 for Mac:

Meetup.com support

Fantastical now includes full support for Meetup. Add your Meetup account to Preferences > Accounts and view and respond to your Meetup events directly in Fantastical.

Propose new time

Another helpful addition for scheduling invitations is the propose new time feature. If you’re sent an invitation and feel that another time would be more suitable, simply click the option to propose a new time and a response will be sent to the organizer. The organizer can then accept or reject the suggested changes.

Exchange users will be familiar with this functionality, which is available in Office 365 and Exchange 2013 or later. Fantastical integrates seamlessly into Exchange and will send time proposals directly through Exchange.

However, we’re really excited to bring this feature to all users by supporting new time proposals with CalDAV-based services such as iCloud, Google Calendar, and more! When you propose a new time using a CalDAV service, Fantastical will create a special email with an .ics file of the new time proposal attached.

If the other person also has a copy of Fantastical, they’ll be able to open the .ics file in Fantastical and accept or reject the new time proposal directly! Many calendar and email apps don’t support reading new time proposals automatically. If the person you’re sending the proposal doesn’t use Fantastical, the email will show the necessary details about the proposed change. This allows them to view it and update their calendar if necessary.

Multi-day events

Open Preferences > Appearance to find a new option to display timed events that span more than one day in the all-day section of the Day and Week views.

Additionally, timed events that span more than one day now show start and end times in Month view too.

Mini Window in split view

Drag the Mini Window away from the menu bar to detach it. You can then click and hold the green full screen button on another app to invoke macOS’s split view, and Fantastical’s mini window will be available to use alongside it.

Request responses option (Exchange)

It’s now possible to create invitations on your Exchange calendar and choose whether your invitees need to send a response status or not — useful if you need to add an FYI to your calendar but don’t necessarily want everyone to reply to it.

Show calendar week number in Dock or menu bar

There’s a new option to show the current calendar week number on Fantastical’s Dock icon or menu bar icon. To enable this, click Preferences > Appearance > Menu bar icon shows/App icon badge shows > Current Calendar Week.

Editing events

Press the option key when editing the start time of an event to keep the end time the same. You can also select an event in Day or Week view and then press control-option-up/down arrow to adjust the start time of the event. Using control-shift-up/down arrow will adjust the end time instead.

We know that many of you have sent us email and tweets specifically requesting many of these features, so we hope you’re as thrilled as we are to see them in Fantastical! We hope you continue to enjoy using Fantastical!

Welcome to our final post about Cardhop 1.1 for Mac! We’ve covered all of the major new features, but there are still a few notable features worth mentioning.

Related Names

Typing into the Related Name field now suggests other names from your contacts.

After confirming the related name, you can click the grey arrow that appears next to the contact name to instantly see that contact card pop up over the current card.

This is useful if you want to quickly reference a contact’s family or business connections. But did you know that you can also set custom labels for the Related Name field? If Cardhop’s presets are not enough, you can make your own labels to keep your contact cards connected.

Notes with Timestamp

Notes have always been an important part of Cardhop. Now it’s possible to click the “Add Timestamp” link at the bottom of the notes field to instantly insert the current date and time. This is useful if you need to make specific references about a contact, perhaps when you’re in a meeting or speaking on the phone with them.

Action tips

Actions are one of the most important features of Cardhop, and here are a few tips to get the most out of them.

Print

In Cardhop 1.1 we added a new print action. As you likely guessed, the print action will let you quickly print a contact.

However, you can also type “print all” or “print [name of group]” to print all your contacts or a specific contact group. We covered printing earlier in this series, and this action will let you print a specific group of contacts more efficiently.

Copy to Clipboard

While not technically an addition to Cardhop 1.1, the Copy to Clipboard action is perhaps easy to overlook — a shame because it’s extremely useful! Type “copy” followed by the name of your contact to choose information from the contact card to copy to your clipboard. Use the left and right arrows, or your cursor, to switch between contact information. Hit the return key and then paste the text wherever you wish!

Large Type

Large Type is another easily overlooked action. Large Type allows you to display contact details in a banner across the center of your screen. If you need to use Cardhop while giving a presentation, or have accessibility needs that would benefit from big text, simply type “large” or “big” followed by the contact name to see their info in an easy to see format.

We hope you’ve enjoyed reading this blog series on Cardhop 1.1, and it’s a great feeling to share our work with our readers! As always, feel free to get in touch with feedback or comments. Thanks for your support as we continue to take Cardhop even further. See you soon!

This week we’re taking a closer look at Cardhop for Mac’s Smart Groups — one of the most powerful features in version 1.1.

Smart Groups let you preconfigure a set of rules that Cardhop will use to automatically group your contacts, saving you the time of sorting through your contacts and manually adding them to groups. Smart Groups automatically update when you add or edit contacts, too!

Let’s take a look at Smart Groups in action and see how they can make your contact management even easier.

Open Cardhop, click the File menu and then choose New Smart Group.

Now you’ll see the Edit Smart Group window appear.

Here, you can name your Smart Group and begin to configure its rules. For example, let’s say you want to create a Smart Group of contacts who live in the same city. We’ll name our Smart Group “London contacts”.

Underneath the Smart Group’s name, you’ll see a field that lets you choose if any or all of the following rules you’ll apply to this Smart Group should be applied when sorting contacts. If this seems a bit overwhelming, don’t worry! We’ll revisit this option later in the post.

For now, we’re going to focus on setting up the Smart Group’s rules. You’ll see two pop-up menus that by default are set to “Card” and “Contains”. Select the first pop-up menu to change the element that Cardhop uses when including your contacts in the Smart Group. Selecting “Card” will ensure that all of the info on a contact card will be used to populate the Smart Group. But since we only want to make this Smart Group gather people who live in London, we’ll choose “City” from the pop-up menu.

The second pop-up menu allows you to select which rule you want to apply to the element. There are a host of different rules to choose from, but since we’re trying to group contacts from a specific city, we’ll keep the “contains” option selected.

Finally, type the text the City field needs to contain for a contact to be added to the Smart Group.

Go ahead and click OK in the bottom-right of the Edit Smart Group window and the Smart Group will be created and added to Cardhop’s sidebar. Voila! Any contacts that have the text “London” in the City field will automatically appear in the “London contacts” Smart Group!

Now that we have the Smart Group set up, we can use Cardhop’s actions to instantly interact with the group. For example, typing “email London Drinks tomorrow?” will instruct Cardhop to compose a group email to everyone in the Smart Group, with the email’s subject line reading “Drinks tomorrow?”

Another useful thing we can do with Smart Groups is to share the Smart Group with other Cardhop users. To do this, right-click the Smart Group and click “Copy Smart Group URL”

You can send this URL to a fellow Cardhop user, and they can open the URL in Cardhop to instantly have a copy of this Smart Group themselves. It’s a convenient way to share contact groups with fellow Cardhop users!

Finally, let’s head back into the Edit Smart Group window (double-click the Smart Group in the sidebar) and take a look at how additional rules can be used.

Click the + button to the right of the current Smart Group rule to add another rule below. For example, we can configure an additional rule to match birthdays that are in the next month. And if we also change the “Any” popup menu to “All”, then we can make the Smart Group only gather contacts that meet all the group’s rules.

In our example, this will make it so the Smart Group only shows contacts who live in London and have birthdays within the next month. To reflect this, we’ll go ahead and rename the London contacts Smart Group to “Upcoming Birthdays in London”.

We could use this group to keep tabs on birthdays in our local city, and perhaps use Cardhop’s email action to contact everyone and arrange a time to meet and celebrate. Alternatively, we could use the print action to print some envelopes for everyone’s birthday cards. As you can see, the possibilities of Smart Groups are only limited by your imagination!

Hopefully this post will inspire you to start creating some Smart Groups of your own! You can refer to Cardhop’s Help Book for further details, and come back next week to see our concluding blog post in this series. Enjoy! 🙂

It’s time for the second post in our series detailing new features in Cardhop 1.1. Today, we’ll cover a frequently requested feature: templates.

Cardhop’s templates provide an efficient way to customize new contacts. Do you prefer to give all of your contacts a nickname? Then set the template to always show the Nickname field when making a new contact. Do you work in a large company? In that case, you will likely find it useful to add the Job Title and Department fields to the default new contact view.

And what about if you find your contacts’ Twitter accounts more important then their mobile phone numbers? Feel free to delete the mobile field and add the Twitter field instead — it’ll save you from having to do this each time you add a new contact.

Let’s walk through configuring Cardhop’s template settings.

When you open Cardhop’s Template preferences you’ll see a preview of the default template Cardhop uses for new contacts. It looks like this:

Whenever you create a new contact you’ll see these fields.

Let’s imagine that you primarily use Cardhop to create new business contacts. In this use case, having a home email address may not be particularly relevant. So click the home field to change it’s label to ‘work’ instead.

Now, when you create a new contact and specify an email address, it will be added as a ‘work’ email.

So far so good, but what if you don’t feel the need to remember your business contacts’ birthdays? Back in Preferences > Template, you can click the ‘birthday’ field and delete it. You won’t see this field any more when making new contacts.

Instead, perhaps you’d find it more convenient to be able to enter your co-worker’s job title? And let’s say your organization likes to link a URL to its employees, so we’ll configure Cardhop to add these new fields to the template. Just click the (+) Add Field button to the lower-left of the Template view to add these fields to the template.

After adding these fields, your template will appear like this:

When you close Cardhop’s preferences, you can create a new contact directly from the text parser and all of these fields will appear right away. In fact, you can enter all of this information right from the keyboard — just type your contact’s details into the text parser and Cardhop will do the rest for you!

As you can see, the template preference is a flexible way to adapt Cardhop to your existing workflow. Please feel free to refer to Cardhop’s Help Book for further details about the template feature.

Be sure to revisit our blog next week, when we’ll be discussing another one of the new features added to Cardhop 1.1. See you soon!

Welcome to our first post about the new features added in Cardhop 1.1!

Today we’ll cover printing lists of contacts, envelopes, and mailing labels. This is useful to anyone who wants to have a physical copy of their contacts, as well as anyone who needs to send traditional mail.

Opening print

Open Cardhop and select File > Print All Contacts, or press command-P, to see a preview of your entire contact list.

Alternatively, you can select a single contact and then select File > Print to only print that contact. You can also print multiple contacts by holding down the shift key, choosing the contacts you want to include in the printout, and then selecting File > Print Selected Contacts.

When you see the print preview, click Show Details to further customize your printout.

Customizing your printout

At the top of the preview window you can select your printer using the Printer option. The Presets option below allows you to load or save specific printout options — very useful if you print frequently. Underneath the standard Copies and Pages settings you’ll see a popup menu with Cardhop as the default. The other options in this list allow you to change the standard macOS printing options, but we’ll be focusing on the Cardhop section here.

The Style setting lets you choose how you’d like to print your contacts. Whether you want a detailed list of contacts, envelopes or labels, Cardhop has you covered! Let’s take a closer look at each of these three different styles.

Lists

The list style prints your contacts as a continuous list. Use the checkboxes to select which details you want to include. You can include as little or as much as you want, so you can easily produce anything from a quick list of your contacts’ names to an extensive physical reference of every detail about your contacts.

Envelopes

Use Cardhop to quickly print envelopes with your contact addresses automatically added — in other words, sending holiday or announcement cards will never be a chore again!

Cardhop includes all the options that you need to customize your envelopes, such as choosing the envelope size, whether or not to include a return address, and whether to create envelopes for your contacts’ home or work address (or both). You can also choose to address your contacts by their name, company, or both.

For a personal touch, you can add a picture to the envelope with the Image option.

Labels

If you need to stick your contacts to invitations, parcels, the kitchen fridge, or any other surface you can imagine, then labels are for you.

Like with envelopes, you can customize the appearance of your labels, including a personalized picture. Cardhop also allows you to print labels with or without an address. If you need name tags for your next party or company gathering then Cardhop can handle that too!

We hope this post helped give you a few ideas about how you can use the new printing options. If you’re looking for more, Cardhop’s Help Book provides more detail about every option available and our video walkthrough will show you printing in action.

Check back next week to learn more about other new features in Cardhop 1.1. See you then!

We’re excited to announce that Cardhop’s first major update is here!

We launched Cardhop 1.0 in October last year, and it has been an exciting few months for us as we’ve watched people learn more about our vision for contacts. Since then, we’ve been gathering feedback and thinking about how Cardhop can work even better for you.

Cardhop 1.1 brings native support for new languages and provides new contact management features that we think will make organizing and interacting with your contacts even easier.

Without further ado, here’s what’s new in Cardhop 1.1:

• Support for French, German, Italian, Spanish and Japanese (including full text parsing and localized address and phone formats)
• Smart groups: create dynamic smart groups that automatically update based on specific search criteria
• Template preferences to customize fields and labels for new contacts
• Printing support: print customized envelopes, labels, and lists of contacts
• Quick Action for printing: type “print” or use a Quick Action button to quickly print a contact or group
• “Add Notes with Timestamp” option to quickly insert the current date and time into the notes of a contact
• Typing into a related name field now suggests other names in your contacts

We also have a video demonstrating some of the new features in Cardhop 1.1:

Cardhop 1.1 is the result of months of hard work and it’s made possible by the ongoing support from our enthusiastic fans and community — thank you!

Over the next few weeks we’ll be releasing a series of blog posts that will dig deeper into the new 1.1 features, so keep an eye out for them!

Back in 2012, we stupidly pre-announced Cardhop. In hindsight, we’re not sure why we did it, but we were likely just so excited that we wanted to let you know that we were working on it. However, it did teach us a very important lesson: never pre-announce apps. 🙂 Kidding aside, in those past 5 years or so, we also learned a lot of other lessons. Most importantly, we learned that the whole contacts “genre” is bad. Really bad.

All we had to do was mention that “we’re making a contacts app” and people would react with a noncommittal “oh”, as if it’s not an app they would ever use. After being concerned, we quickly figured out why. Contacts apps have traditionally been nothing more than databases. Boring apps that do nothing for you. Instead they were apps where you have to be an administrator. Before Cardhop, contacts apps had been cumbersome, inelegant, and to put it bluntly, frustrating.

This changes today. Cardhop was designed with one thing in mind: making your contacts enjoyable to use.

Rather than writing a long blog post with lots of screenshots to tell you what it does or why you have to have it, go watch our promo video for Cardhop. While you’re there, be sure to check out the “Cardhop in action” videos, too.

The same way Fantastical revolutionized how you use your calendars — believe it or not, Fantastical 1 came out in 2011, before Apple released Siri and before voice assistants were mainstream — we believe Cardhop will revolutionize how your use your contacts. We hope that relationships are strengthened and people actually look forward to interacting with their contacts.

There’s one catch: You have to force yourself to use Cardhop for a day or two. After all, old habits die hard. Force yourself to open Cardhop rather than doing things the old way, and after a bit you’ll start to understand the power of Cardhop. It sounds silly, but just give it a day or two to develop new habits with Cardhop and you’ll thank us later.

Cardhop was a true labor of love and we couldn’t have done it without some help from a few of our friends along the way: Casey Fleser, Dustin and Dylan Bruzenak, Ed Wynne, Rogie King, Wolfgang Bartelme, Josh Mobley, and the designer of the world’s most delicious, most delightful, and biggest smile-inducing icon: David Lanham. 🙂

We also want to thank Adam and Darren Fanton, creators of the new video tool, ScreenSpace, which we used to create the Cardhop promo video. If you’re an app developer and want to make promo videos like Cardhop’s, go check it out.

Flexibits was created in 2011 with the single goal of making apps flexible. We’re users, too, and we hate when an app is difficult and frustrating. With Fantastical, Chatology, and now, Cardhop, we hope our apps are making your lives a little bit better. We’ve said this before, but we want to thank you for your continued support, and also for you very kind words throughout the years. They mean so much to us, and they keep us going.

We hope you enjoy Cardhop. Thank you in advance for trying it out!

It’s that time of the year again: A new version of iOS! We’re happy to announce that Fantastical 2 for iPhone and Fantastical 2 for iPad have been updated to version 2.9 and are now available.

Version 2.9 brings full support for iOS 11, including drag and drop! On iPad, you can now drag and drop events and reminders within Fantastical to move or reschedule them, drag and drop text into Fantastical to create new events or reminders, or drag and drop from Fantastical to other apps to share your schedule. On iPhone, you can drag and drop events and reminders from the list onto the DayTicker or calendar to quickly reschedule an item.

If you haven’t already, open the App Store and make sure you’re up to date!

Happy midsummer! Fantastical 2.4 for Mac is here and ready to hit the beach with you! As usual, this is a free update if you already have Fantastical 2 for Mac. If you’ve previously tried Fantastical 2 for Mac, this update will reset your trial and give you another 21 days to try out Fantastical.

We’re hard at work on other exciting projects, so we’ll get right to it.

First, we have a video highlighting some the new features in 2.4:

Attachments

You can now view, create, and edit attachments on iCloud and Exchange, as well as view attachments on Google Calendar.

Travel Time

One of our most requested features is finally here! Set and view travel time for events, and receive automatic time to leave notifications to ensure you get to your events on time.

Combined duplicate events

If you use Fantastical in a corporate setting with shared calendars you’ve inevitably had the situation where a single event ends up duplicated across all of your shared calendars. Fantastical 2.4 will now automatically merge these duplicate events into a single event to reduce clutter.

Undo and redo support

Fantastical now has full undo and redo support for adding, editing, and deleting events and reminders. Did you accidentally reschedule an event and want to move it back? Just press command-Z and your event will get moved back to where it was.

Month view improvements

Ever end up with so many events on one day that you can’t see them all in the Month view? There’s now an easier way to see those additional events. Click on the “more…” label on a busy day it will temporarily expand to show you everything on that day.

Also, if you like the Month view but wish you could see fewer or more events, we have a new option for you. The Month view can now be configured to show as few as two weeks at a time, or as many as eight weeks at a time.

Exchange invitation improvements

2.4 brings some new improvements to managing Exchange invitations.

First, you can now forward invitations to other people. Right-click on an invitation and select Forward and you can bring additional people in to an event.

Second, you can now respond to an Exchange invitation without sending a message to the sender. Click and hold on the Accept, Maybe, or Decline buttons and you can change your status silently.

Google invitation response messages

It is now possible to send a message when responding to an invitation on Google Calendar. Response messages appear in Google Calendar for the sender.

Facebook push updates

Get updates to your Facebook events even faster. Push updates make it so you’ll receive new events and updates to existing events within a few seconds. This is enabled for you automatically.

Please enjoy the new features in Fantastical 2.4 for Mac. And the rest of your summer. 🙂

Greetings Fantastical fans! It’s time for another big update to Fantastical 2 for Mac, bringing a collection of new features that we think you’re going to love. We’ll briefly outline the additions, but be sure to check it out for yourself by updating to version 2.3 right now (it’s a free update!).

Full macOS Sierra (10.12) compatibility

Even though Fantastical is already compatible with Sierra, 2.3 brings some final bits of polish to make Fantastical even more at home on Sierra. In particular, be sure to check out the updated Today widget appearance.

Fantastical 2.3 requires macOS El Capitan (10.11) or Sierra (10.12). macOS Yosemite (10.10) is no longer supported, so be sure to stay up to date with latest version of macOS.

Hide, show, and resize the sidebar

If you use Fantastical on a small-screen Mac, you’re going to love this feature. You can now completely hide the sidebar in the main calendar window, allowing your main calendar view to take up the entire window. Just drag to resize, select View > Hide Sidebar from the Menu, or press option-command-S. If you thought the sidebar was too small in the past, you can also drag to make the sidebar wider.

Default calendar and reminder list per calendar set

Calendar sets are even better in 2.3, as you can set a default calendar and reminder list for each calendar set. This means you can have your Work calendar as the default for your “Work” calendar set, but when you switch to your “Home” set, a different calendar will become your default. This makes changing between different contexts even more efficient.

Improved Facebook support

Facebook users can now enjoy faster updates, accept or decline invitations to Facebook events, and set alerts for upcoming events. If Facebook is a big part of organizing your social gatherings, this update will make life easier for you. If you aren’t using Facebook with Fantastical already, add your Facebook account to the Accounts section of Fantastical’s preferences.

Default invitation alerts

If you prefer to automatically be reminded of meetings that you’re invited to, there’s now an option to apply your usual default alerts to event invitations when you accept them. This will save you time manually editing each new invitation that you accept.

Usability enhancements

Last but not least, we’ve spent time fine-tuning other aspects of Fantastical’s UI. You can now press control-shift and hover over overlapping events in the Day or Week view to quickly view more details. Or press control and an arrow key to reschedule a selected event or reminder instantly. We also added support for traditional mouse scroll wheels in the Day, Week, Month, and Year views (classic mouse enthusiasts rejoice!)

Version 2.3 also includes a bunch of other small improvements, things we polished, and bugs we squashed. We hope you enjoy these new additions, and as always, thanks for your continued support as we continue to make Fantastical the best it can be!