Cardhop Provides You With a Command Line for Contacts
Mac: Today Flexibits, makers of the beloved calendar app Lifehacker Fantastical, are bringing their command-line approach to contacts with Cardhop ($ 19.99). This new contacts app is action-oriented, not contacts database; you mostly use it by recording commands as if you were talking to Siri. It’s a potentially attractive interface if you remember to use it.
Cardhop’s command set is powerful, but not exhaustive: you can text messages, make calls, Skype, email, get directions, and more — basically anything you could do (more awkwardly) from the Contacts app. Enter “email to Frank Lessig, hello buddy!” and you are sent to the selected email application with up to and the storylines filled in. (I couldn’t get Cardhop to start my text messages the same way.)
Adding and updating contacts is much easier in Cardhop than in Contacts. You can copy and paste the entire set of contact information into the command line and it will sort everything. He understands a whole chunk of text like “Emily Schermerhorn 555-889-4105 73 E 5th St New York NY 10013 birthday November 12 twitter schemilyyy”. You can just as easily update your contacts; Once Emily is created, you can add her blog by typing “url emily schermerhorn schermerly.com” – the name shows her card and the rest fills in the information.
The app also supports contact groups, so you can send an email or text message to an entire pre-defined group with a single command. This is useful if you work with Teams, D&D Groups, or Secret Cliques.
Of course, since Cardhop isn’t on iOS, you probably won’t have it on hand most of the time when you add a contact, text messages, or call. But if you frequently switch from computer to phone while doing a task, it can save you a couple of seconds each time. For example, you can start a call from your desktop and send it to your phone.
Cardhop relies on all of your existing accounts and can only access them through the Contacts app on your Mac. This means that your Gmail, Exchange or Facebook contacts only sync with Cardhop if you sync them with your contacts first. To send an email from Cardhop, you need to allow your preferred email client to handle all email links . If you’re laughing at me for not syncing these things yet, then Cardhop is for you.
Cardhop can only access accounts that will sync with Apple contacts, so you can’t use it to open Snapchat, Signal, or Whatsapp. This limit will only grow as the number of messaging apps grows unless Apple catches up with integration support.
Like Fantastical, Cardhop will seem pointless to some people, while others will change their lives. I didn’t “get” Fantastical until I needed to manipulate multiple shared calendars in a custom interface. Likewise, Cardhop will help you if you are struggling with the limitations of your various contact lists – but only after you sync all of those lists with your Apple contacts.
Apps like this that try to completely rethink the normal workflow run into a problem. To truly take advantage of them, you need to abandon the old approach. Siri lives or dies depending on whether you intend to use it before jumping into the app. Cardhop too; this is only useful if you can get out of the habit of hacking Gmail, Skype, or Messages. Even so, Cardhop is just an efficient launcher. You still need to shutdown in another application.
For some, this will still be convincing enough. If you like Siri, Quicksilver, Alfred, Slackbot, and IFTTT, or have your favorite keyboard shortcuts, this could be twenty dollars. For that money, you’ll get several years of stable updates if Flexibits with Fantastical’s track record is any indication.
There are certainly features that need to be expanded. Cardhop is powerful enough to make me think of a dozen other things I wish it could do. I often came up with teams that thought they should work. I continued to respect the limits of context recognition. I could not run the actual content of my texts on the command line. And while the app can identify identical contacts from multiple accounts, it doesn’t just combine similar ones. This will not solve all problems with your current contact base; in fact, he will inherit them.
And as far as I understand, there is no fantastic integration. So now I have another command line and another application that is in my crowded menu. After all, this application would be much more useful if it were part of OS X. But it’s the same with most menu bar applications.
Cardhop is promising – not in the sense that version 2 will be great, but in the sense that version 1 might be awesome and I don’t know it yet. Anyone with a phone and a computer can benefit from it in some way, but only a few people will appreciate his approach. If this intrigues you, you should definitely check out the 21-day free trial. I will keep testing and check again. It will take some time to prove its worth.