Cardhop for iOS has been out for a few months now and we’re happy that the response has been so positive. Today we’re excited to announce that we’ve been hard at work on the first major update to Cardhop for iOS: version 1.1.

There’s a number of significant new features in this release, including some of your most requested features. If you’ve been enthusiastically using Cardhop for iOS and sent us feedback, you’ll surely want to read this post!

Let’s go over the main features in Cardhop 1.1. We also have a short video demonstrating the new features in Cardhop 1.1, so be sure to take a look at that too!

Multiple business cards

One of our most requested features was to support more than one business card. Many of you let us know that cards containing different information could be useful in different contexts — and we agreed. So, now you can have business cards dedicated to personal contacts, professional contacts, or as many other contexts as you can think of!

Simply add additional cards by going to Settings > Business Cards > Add Business Card. To view your business cards, just hold your iPhone in landscape orientation, or if you’re using an iPad, tap the business card icon next to your card. You can then swipe through your different cards.

Contact template

While most people use Cardhop’s natural language parser to create new contacts, some users prefer to enter everything manually. To make life easier for those users, we’ve added a contact template feature that lets you specify exactly which fields you want to appear by default when creating a new contact manually. This is very helpful if you rely on a few unique fields when creating contacts and need to manually add them each time. Go to Settings > Contact Template to set up the template to your liking.

Smart groups

Ever wanted to view all contacts that have notes saved to them? Or perhaps you’d find it convenient to access all of your contacts that don’t have a birthday added to their cards? In these situations (and many more!) smart groups will help you out.

Tap the groups button in the upper-left of the main contacts view and select “Add Smart Group” to see a list of pre-configured smart group templates you can use to quickly filter contacts that meet the smart group’s rules.

Gravatar

Cardhop will automatically look for Gravatar profile images when adding or editing email addresses for contacts. You can also look for Gravatar images for existing contacts by tapping on the image of a contact. This makes it even easier for you to have a contact list full of photos. If you’d rather not use Gravatar you can disable this option in Settings > Load Images From Gravatar.

That’s an overview of the main new features in Cardhop for iOS 1.1, but there’s even more if you take a look at the full list of changes. In addition, Cardhop for Mac 1.3 is available, so be sure to download the update on your Mac as well.

We hope this update is a helpful update for everyone, and as always, we look forward to hearing any further feedback you may have!

If you use Cardhop on your iOS devices and a Mac, then this blog post is for you! Make sure you’re logged in to iCloud on all your devices and you’ll be ready for all of the tips and tricks discussed in this post.

Let’s dive in and see how to use Cardhop for iOS and macOS together!

Handoff

Handoff lets you quickly pass info between iOS and macOS including contacts in Cardhop. If you’re browsing contact details on your iPhone and then sit down at your Mac, click the Handoff icon at the left of the Dock and Cardhop for Mac will pick up right where you left off on your iPhone.

When you’ve finished at your Mac, continue using Cardhop on your iOS device by opening the app switcher and tapping the ‘Cardhop’ bar at the bottom of the screen. You can use Handoff to continue pretty much anything between your devices, even text that you’ve started typing into Cardhop’s parser!

Syncing Favorites and Recents

Cardhop automatically syncs your favorite and recent contacts between devices. Mark a contact as a favorite on your Mac and it will appear on iOS as well!

Likewise, you can view the recent contacts you interacted with across all devices.

Copy Contact URL

You may already know that Cardhop allows you to quickly and easily copy a unique URL for a specific contact, which can then be used to jump directly to that contact, either on its own or as part of a larger shortcut.

However, did you also know that these contact URLs are compatible across devices and platforms? This means that you can paste a contact URL from Cardhop for iOS into the Notes app and then click the URL from the Notes app on your Mac to open Cardhop for Mac to that specific contact. Can you think of any other instances where this might streamline your workflow?

What’s more, you can take advantage of iCloud’s Universal Clipboard feature to quickly copy the contact URL from your Mac and then paste it into an app or text field on your iPhone, or vice versa!

If you missed our previous posts about some of the other advanced features in Cardhop for iOS, be sure to check those out!

• Cardhop for iOS tips and tricks to help you save time
• Getting the most from Cardhop for iOS and Siri Shortcuts

While this is the last post in this series, this isn’t the end for Cardhop for iOS! Keep an eye on our blog in the coming weeks, as we may have an exciting Cardhop-related announcement to share… 😉

Cardhop and Siri Shortcuts can work together to save you considerable time when managing your contacts. Let’s go over the basics of using Siri Shortcuts with Cardhop as well as a few examples of more complex shortcuts.

The Basics of Siri Shortcuts

Cardhop has a number of built in Siri Shortcuts that you can access from the Siri Shortcuts section of Cardhop’s settings. Tap any shortcut you think will be useful and you’ll be prompted to speak a phrase to activate the shortcut.

For example, if you want to quickly see which contact have birthdays soon, select the “Show upcoming birthdays” shortcut and Siri will instantly tell you when you ask. Likewise, use the “Show my business card” shortcut to instantly access your business card using your voice.

Siri Shortcuts are really quick to access – they work even if your phone is locked or if you’re in a different app!

Quick Action Shortcuts

You can also use Siri to directly perform an action on any piece of contact data. This is really useful if you find yourself performing a certain action repeatedly.

For example, if you frequently visit a specific contact’s homepage you can add this action to Siri. Open the contact card and tap and hold on your contact’s URL. You’ll see an “Add to Siri” option appear, which will let you record a specific phrase to trigger the Open URL action. Consider the contact data you interact with most often and use Siri to save you time.

Example: Create links to Cardhop from Notes

If you want to do even more with Siri Shortcuts and Cardhop, then it’s possible to combine Cardhop with the Shortcuts app to make some complex scripts.

We’ll go through an example of how you can use Cardhop, Shortcuts, and Notes to make complex notes with Cardhop. This can be useful when you want to take complex notes after a phone call with a contact.

Follow along by downloading the shortcut that we’re going to walk through. You can also use this shortcut as a starting point to make your own custom shortcuts.

This Siri Shortcut starts with the Cardhop shortcut to copy the currently visible contact as a URL. This will allow you to quickly jump back to that contact in Cardhop later on. Cardhop URLs look something like this:

x-cardhop://show?id=contact:4315B792-189C-489D-A9FA-72EF6B6664C9&contact=Mira%20Abad

Notice how the contact’s name is part of the URL. We can get the name out of the URL by using the “Get Component of URL” and “Get Dictionary from Input” shortcuts that are built in to the Shortcuts app. This will let us put the contact’s name directly into the note.

Once we have the contact’s name, we combine it with the URL and create a new note using the “Create Note” shortcut. Finally, the “Show Note” shortcut opens the new note in Notes, ready to edit.

It does take a few steps, but Shortcuts lets you perform some pretty powerful actions on iOS.

Once you have the shortcut on your iPhone or iPad, open a contact in Cardhop and trigger the shortcut. It will create a new note with a link to the contact in Cardhop. Now you can write notes, add checklists, or add photos and quickly jump back to the contact in Cardhop!

Another Example: Dictate to Cardhop from Siri

Shortcuts also makes it possible to dictate to Siri and automatically open Cardhop with the dictated text inserted into the parser and ready to go.

Again, you can download this shortcut to follow along.

This shortcut uses the “Dictate Text” shortcut to start dictation. This is followed by the “Copy to Clipboard” shortcut, which will take the dictated text and copy it to the clipboard before passing it to the “URL Encode” shortcut. Next, the “URL” shortcut can be used to open Cardhop’s parser with the encoded text from the previous step. Finally, the “Open URLs” action will run the command and complete the shortcut.

Trigger this shortcut to be activated by Siri and all you have to do is start speaking and Siri will do the rest.

We hope this post inspires you to start using Cardhop with Siri Shortcuts, as well as Siri Shortcuts and Shortcuts in general. We hope it also inspires you to come up with some pretty cool workflows.

We’ll be releasing another tips and tricks post in the coming weeks, so keep an eye on our blog for more advice on how to get the most out of Cardhop for iOS.

Cardhop for iOS has only been out for a couple of weeks and we’ve been thrilled to hear the ways that everyone is using Cardhop. We wanted to share a few tips and tricks for using Cardhop for iOS as efficiently as possible, which hopefully will save you even more time.

3D Touch

If you have an iPhone that supports 3D Touch, you can 3D Touch on Cardhop’s home screen icon to immediately open Cardhop with a specific action. Cardhop’s 3D Touch options let you instantly jump to Birthdays, Favorites, your business card, or activate Cardhop’s natural language parser. 3D Touch lets you get to some of the most popular main views or features of Cardhop for iOS with a simple press!

Today widget

Cardhop’s widget is especially convenient if you want to jump to one of your favorite contacts from the lock screen or when using another app. This saves you returning to the home screen to open Cardhop and search for the contact you need. Cardhop’s widget displays four of your favorite contacts by default, and when you tap Show More, you’ll see even more favorites. To change the order of your contacts in the widget, open Cardhop’s Favorites tab and tap Edit. Simply drag your favorite contacts to rearrange their order in the list and the order of contacts in the Today widget will automatically match.

Automatically activate parser

After using Cardhop for a few days you’ll wonder how you ever managed to live without Cardhop’s natural language parsing! To be able to input text as quickly as possible, go to Cardhop’s settings and enable the Automatically Activate Parser option. Now, as soon as you tap the Cardhop app icon, the keyboard will appear, ready to take your input!

Keyboard actions

Typing actions into Cardhop allows you to interact with contacts very quickly, but there’s time to be saved here, too! As soon as you open the search bar you’ll see a variety of small buttons above the keyboard. Tap one of these buttons to insert the corresponding action text into the parser instead of having to type it out. These buttons can be fully customized by tapping the “…” icon. Add your most used actions and they’ll only be a single tap away.

Siri “Type to Cardhop” shortcut

Last but not least, you can use Siri to instantly open Cardhop and activate the parser without any tapping at all. To set this up, open Cardhop’s settings and select Siri Shortcuts. Tap the Type to Cardhop shortcut and record a phrase to trigger the Siri shortcut. The next time you summon Siri and speak your prerecorded phrase, you’ll be taken directly to Cardhop with the keyboard open and awaiting your input — no tapping necessary!

We hope that some of these tips will help you use Cardhop even faster. Have a tip with Cardhop that we missed? Get in touch with us on Twitter or through our website and let us know!

We’ll be publishing another tips and tricks post soon, so be sure to check back for more helpful advice on using Cardhop for iOS. See you then!

About a year and a half ago we released Cardhop for Mac, which was our vision for a better way of using and interacting with your contacts. Instead of thinking of your contacts as random pieces of data, we want Cardhop to help you to see your contacts as what they really are: important people in your life.

Not surprisingly, one of the most common requests we receive is to have Cardhop available on iOS. We heard you loud and clear, and today we’re happy to announce Cardhop for iOS!

If you’re already enjoying Cardhop for Mac, then we think you’re going to love Cardhop on your iPhone and iPad. But if you’re not yet part of the Cardhop family, now is the perfect opportunity to change that! Cardhop for iOS is a Universal app so it looks and works great on both iPhone and iPad.

Head over to our Cardhop for iOS webpage and watch our introductory video, learn more about Cardhop, and find out how to get it on the App Store.

If you want a deeper dive into Cardhop for iOS, take a look at our tutorial videos to see Cardhop in action.

Cardhop for Mac is also receiving a free update today. Cardhop 1.2 for Mac adds support for syncing with Cardhop for iOS, favorite contacts, and directory lookup support for Google Contacts, G Suite, and Exchange.

We’ll be doing more blog posts with additional tips and tricks on how to get the most out of Cardhop for iOS. Check back next week for the first post in that series!

We hope you enjoy using Cardhop on your iPhone and iPad. We’ve certainly had a lot of fun developing Cardhop, and we look forward to hearing what you think!

Fantastical 2 is now ready for iOS 12, watchOS 5, and the new Apple Watch Series 4! Fantastical 2.10 for iPhone and Apple Watch and Fantastical 2.10 for iPad take advantage of new iOS 12 and watchOS 5 features, including Siri Shortcuts, interactive notifications, and Siri and Infograph watch faces.

Siri Shortcuts

Siri Shortcuts allow you to bring Fantastical directly into custom Siri phrases and other shortcuts. Here are some examples of what you can do with Fantastical’s shortcuts:

• Set a phrase such as “Hey Fantastical” to automatically open Fantastical to quickly begin creating a new event or reminder using Fantastical’s parser
• Show upcoming events or reminders as part of a custom shortcut using the Shortcuts app
• Jump to a specific reminders list by creating a button on the home screen with the Shortcuts app
• And more: You can see all of Fantastical’s available shortcuts in the Settings app under Fantastical

You can access Fantastical’s shortcuts from the Settings app under Fantastical > Siri & Search > Shortcuts, or from Apple’s Shortcuts app.

If you want to learn more about how the Shortcuts app works and how you can integrate Fantastical with other shortcuts, we suggest taking a look at Apple’s guide to the Shortcuts app.

Interactive notifications

You can now snooze events and reminders directly from the notifications, rather than having to open Fantastical. This makes it even more convenient to snooze items for later, and you can even choose how long you want to snooze for.

Siri watch face

Fantastical will now send upcoming events and reminders to the Siri watch face. Siri watch face learns what kind of information you want to see over time, so the more you use Fantastical on your watch the more often you’ll see upcoming events and reminders.

Infograph watch face

Fantastical 2.10 also brings support for the new Infograph watch faces for the Apple Watch Series 4. You can choose from three different complication styles: Two for the Infograph face and one for the Infograph Modular face. Don’t forget that you can customize what is shown in the complications. Open Fantastical, tap the settings icon, then tap Apple Watch and you can choose what kind of information is shown.

Fantastical 2.10 is available now, so open the App Store and make sure you’re up to date, then enjoy!

Finally, please note that Fantastical 2.10 now requires iOS 11 or later and watchOS 4 or later. But since you’re reading this you’ve already updated to iOS 12 and watchOS 5, right? 🙂

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!