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!

The last few posts on our blog have covered the major new features from Fantastical’s 2.2 update. This is the final part of our Fantastical 2.2 series, and we’re going out with a bang! Here’s an additional eight features that we’ve not yet covered. Enjoy!

Automatic location suggestions

Before 2.2, entering a location in Fantastical required you to enter text in the separate location field if you wanted to search for location suggestions. Now all you have to do is type your location directly into the main parser field and Fantastical’s natural language processing will present you with a list of options on the fly. For example, type “Meeting at 1:30pm at Starbucks” and the closest locations will be shown.

Multiple selection

No one enjoys editing multiple events one-by-one, and you can now use the shift key to select multiple events to delete, cut, copy, or move in bulk. This should help take the pain out of extensive editing sessions.

Drag and drop preview

Have you ever started typing out an event only to realize that you created it for the wrong day or time by mistake? Instead of going back and deleting your text, or typing in a new date and time in the event’s details, you can now simply drag the event preview to another day in the main calendar window or the mini-month view in the sidebar.

Second time line

If you have friends, family, or coworkers in other time zones, this will make coordinating with them much easier. Enable Fantastical’s second time line and you’ll see another set of hours on the right-hand side of Day and Week view. Choose a different time zone and you’ll be able to quickly see what time it is in that time zone and compare it with your own time zone. Convenient or what?

Set subscribed calendars’ refresh frequency

If you subscribe to calendars in Fantastical, you can now configure how frequently you’d like these calendars to refresh. Now you’ll never miss another subscribed calendar update again!

Invitation response and shared calendar change notifications

Whether you’re a social butterfly or a master planner, this feature will bring a smile to your face: Fantastical will show you a notification when someone responds to one of your invitations, keeping you immediately up to date with everyone’s attendance at your next event. This feature is only available on CalDAV servers that support these notifications (including iCloud).

Fantastical 2.2 also shows change notifications if you have a shared calendar or reminder list on iCloud. This lets you know when changes are made to the shared calendar or reminder list, and who made them.

Airmail integration

Fans of Airmail will be pleased to hear that Fantastical can now email events directly through Airmail. Just make sure that you’re using Airmail 3 and set it to be your default email app in the built-in Mail app’s preferences.

Viewing enhancements

Last but not least, we’ve made all sorts of minor but useful UI tweaks for your convenience: the current day is now highlighted in light blue, the Year view has been enhanced, and you can also choose to start the Month view on the current week instead of the start of the month.

We hope these little improvements add up to make Fantastical even more of a pleasure to use. Thanks again to those who took the time to get in touch and share their thoughts — there’s been lots of feedback from you all and we always appreciate hearing it.

Believe it or not, prior to Fantastical 2.2, one of our most requested features was printing. We eventually realized this was because many of our customers find printing to be especially useful in a corporate environment. As such, we are happy to say that Fantastical now has full printing support!

This blog post will provide a brief overview of Fantastical’s printing ability. Feel free to check our documentation for further details. We also have a short video walkthrough of printing.

Print preview

To see a quick preview of what your final printout will look like, go to File > Print or use the command-P keyboard shortcut. You’ll be presented with a preview of your printed calendar. Use the arrow buttons at the bottom-left to flip through your pages, or take a closer look by using the zoom slider.

Changing view and paper options

In the top-right of the print preview there are options to change the current view and paper configurations. The view option allows you to change your printout to reflect day, week, month, year, and list views (you can also press command-1 through command-5 to quickly jump between these views. The paper option allows you to create a printout to match whatever size paper you’re using.

Setting a printing range

Below the view and paper options lies the range settings. Here you can specify the start and end dates for your printout. The options presented here will differ depending on your chosen view, but whatever your required parameters, Fantastical will be able to accommodate them.

Customizing calendar elements

Various other options exist to help you tailor the data on your printout to your needs. You’re able to choose a specific calendar set and toggle the following elements on or off: all-day events, timed events, reminders, and week numbers. You can also toggle a mini calendar, color-coded keys to identify which calendar or reminder list items belong to, or choose to save some ink by printing in black and white.

Printer options

After setting up your printout exactly as you wish, click Continue and you’ll see the confirmation screen. Here you’ll find the usual printer options that macOS provides, including the ability to save your printout as a PDF. With the clean and crisp design that Fantastical applies to calendar printouts, you may find that you want to save blank copies of the various calendar views for use in other situations, too.

We hope everyone who requested printing will enjoy its configurability and aesthetic. We’ll be posting the final part of our version 2.2 blog series in a few weeks. In that post, we’ll discuss all of the miscellaneous, yet important features not yet covered in our other posts. Until then, we hope you’re continuing to enjoy Fantastical!

We’re back with a dive into another new feature in Fantastical 2.2! If you haven’t done so already, make sure that you’re up to date and running Fantastical 2.2.4. If you purchased Fantastical from the Mac App Store you can update via the Mac App Store’s Updates tab. If you downloaded Fantastical directly from our store, simply select Check for Updates from the Fantastical menu in the upper-left of the menu bar.

In this blog post we’re going to be taking a look at Fantastical’s powerful Availability view.

Availability is a convenient, time-saving tool that helps you schedule event times with invitees and works with most major calendar services (with the exception of iCloud). Availability will save a lot of hassle when trying to schedule events with multiple invitees, leaving you free to focus on preparing for your event.

Quickly viewing invitee availability

As soon as you start adding invitees, you’ll notice a small icon next to their name. This icon denotes the invitee’s availability via a tick, cross or question mark, and allows you to quickly glance at your list of invitees to see who’s free at the planned time of your event.

Checking invitee availability in detail

By clicking Check Availability you can dive a bit deeper into your invitees’ calendars and view a timeline of their schedules around the time of your planned event. If there looks like there’s an available slot close to the original time of your event, simply drag and drop your event into the available slot and Fantastical will automatically update the event time and the invitee availability icons accordingly. You can also set Availability to display an all-day view or just working hours, and switch between days by using the arrow buttons at the top of the Availability view.

Expanding the Availability window

If you have a larger list of invitees, it might be a little cumbersome to try and view everyone’s schedules in the event creation window. In this case, click the pop-out window icon in the upper right of the Availability section, and Availability will become its own window that can be resized or maximized as you like.

Auto-scheduling an event time

It can often be a nightmare to try and coordinate everyone’s schedules, especially if you’re trying to manage a large invitee list! Thankfully, Availability has a Next Available Time button that can be selected to have Fantastical automatically find the next free slot that you and your invitees have in your schedules. Pretty convenient, right?

Cancelling events with a message

After successfully scheduling a time to meet, something may come up that requires the meeting to be cancelled. Due to this possibility, deleting an event will provide an option to send a message to your invitees, explaining your reason for canceling the event and hopefully reducing the amount of follow-up email you receive if an important meeting has to be postponed.

If you’d like to see Availability in action, please be sure to watch our video walkthrough.

We hope you enjoy getting to grips with Availability and that it saves you a significant amount of time when scheduling your events! We still have a few more 2.2 features to cover in this series of blog posts, and next time we’ll be discussing printing. Thanks for reading and we hope you’re enjoying Fantastical!