Cardhop 2.0.10

So, I’ve been in the BusyMac orbit for quite some time (a decade or so). And, I was in the AgileBits orbit on my iOS devices with Fantastical until I decided last year to standardize on BusyCal on all my devices.

I love that the BusyMac stuff still has a family resemblance to Now Up-To-Date and Now Contacts—they were my favorite Palm apps because their databases could be synched with my Mac and then be massaged to my heart’s content (and of course to get exactly what I needed on my mobile device).

BusyCal seems to be getting all the love; BusyContacts is limping along in a late 1.x development cycle where it has been since its introduction. There are interoperability issues that the developer says have to do with security and privacy walls on Macintosh. Whatever; it’s a surprisingly clunky app that seems to always be one step behind the cloud giants and loses tagging information randomly.

So, is CardHop combined with Fantastical (which appears to be mandatory) everything that BusyContacts is not? Who is using it and what do you appreciate about it?

I have used Fantastical for a few years and I’m very happy with it (I’ve also used BusyCal in the past and liked it too). I use CardHop as part of my Fantastical/Flexibits subscription.

It seems like a nice app, but I haven’t developed the habit of using it as regularly as I would like. It seems to be well-integrated with macOS, but I still haven’t found the logical synergy between Calendars and Contacts. Fantastical on its own does a great job with it’s natural language management.

Cardhop is a game changer on iOS, less so on Mac. If only for the graceful timestamp feature in contact card notes, it’s just great. I have found syncing between iOS and Mac delayed sometimes but I generally love the apps.

I do believe that there should be phone support, even if limited to a certain number of instances or at the very least, chat support, for the Flexibits bundle. I have also suggested they have a product forum, even using this chat software which is so good, much like Michael Tsai, the developer of EagleFiler and ToothFairy, among other elegant software, does.

An easy way to approximate it would be to create a subreddit where people could interact and help one another; it would not be very demanding and could provide some useful customer knowledge for the Flexibits developers.

There’s a slight inaccuracy in the pricing info in the article – you can use CardHop for free, but to unlock some of the ‘advanced’ features, you need to subscribe.

Since you can use it for free, the easiest thing would be to download CardHop and give it a try. There’s no reason you can’t use CardHop with BusyCal except you presumably miss out on certain integrations. But I happily use CardHop and Apple Calendar so it’s possible to mix and match.

I’ve been using CardHop since the beginning when it was a separate product with a one-off fee and would struggle without it. What I love is that with a system-wide hotkey, I can pop up a window and find contact info for someone. It has lots of great ways of using the info too (including large type display), but the ability to quickly, and with the keyboard only, bring up contact info is invaluable. It’s also a lot quicker to add contact info with CardHop because of its natural language processing.

For me it’s the exact opposite! I’d miss it on iOS but get by fine. But because on MacOS it allows interaction and accessibility to contact information that is otherwise not possible with Apple’s app, I would take a significant productivity hit without CardHop (as happened in the lean years between the demise of BuddyPop and the launch of CardHop).