Cardhop 1.0
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.
I’ve been using LaunchBar to access my contacts for many years. It works great for searching but doesn’t really support adding or editing contacts. This is where Cardhop shines, since it features a Fantastical-like interface for parsing information about new contacts as you type. Going beyond Fantastical, you can also edit existing contents by typing in the search field.
For example, you can type “Brian twitter @brian” to add a Twitter account. This is limited, however. There doesn’t seem to be a way to add to the notes field. And I was hoping to be able to write something like “Brian spouse Sara” because it otherwise takes several steps to add a “related names” field, select “spouse” for it, and then enter the spouse. I was also excited to see that you can enter the contact’s title when creating it, but in practice this only worked some of the time. For example, “Tim Cook title CEO company Apple” sets Tim’s title to “title CEO”, although “Tim Cook title CEO” correctly sets the title to “CEO” (but doesn’t set the company).
I love the idea of entering contacts in this way, though I’m not sure I do it often enough to make it worth installing Cardhop and learning how to use it. I just don’t meet that many new people. In contrast, I enter multiple new calendar events every day, so Fantastical is invaluable. Still, I’m going to give Cardhop a try because I think I may find its group features helpful.
Lastly, the icon. I don’t fully understand why it’s a sandwich on a plate, but it’s beautiful.
See also: Stephen Hackett, Brett Terpstra, Rene Ritchie, Juli Clover, David Sparks, Jason Snell, Adam C. Engst.
Update (2017-10-24): Objective Development:
In this article I want you to show three basic features of Cardhop that can be easily accessed via LaunchBar:
- Creating contacts
- Sending selected texts to Cardhop
- Opening contacts
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My guess is they figured that a classical Rolodex card looks like a sandwich with a bite out of it. (Every Rolodex image returned by Google has _two_ notches at the bottom, but maybe it was an artistic simplification?)
