Flexibits is well-known for its popular calendar app Fantastical available across Apple's platforms, but it also offers a contacts management app, Cardhop, that goes above and beyond what Apple's stock Contacts app offers.
Coinciding with its 10th anniversary, Flexibits this week is introducing Cardhop 2.0 for Mac, iPhone, and iPad, with an all-new design. It also brings a number of new features that supplement the powerful parsing engine that makes it easy to manage your contacts and initiate actions such as messages and calls by typing a quick line of text:
Relationships: View relationships among your contacts in a family tree view, or even view company org charts that can be automatically generated from Google and Office 365 entries.
Widgets: With Notification Center and Home Screen widgets, you can easily set up quick access for frequent contacts by simply specifying a person and an action, and widget setups can sync across your devices.
Business card scanning: Add contacts by simply scanning a business card with the camera on your iPhone or iPad. Cardhop will automatically recognize relevant data fields and populate them, and will also save a picture of the business card with the entry.
Fantastical integration: Invite a single contact or a group of contacts to events via Fantastical.
Fantastical made the shift to a subscription app last year, offering a free tier with limited functionality and a premium tier that unlocks full functionality for the app. Cardhop is now following suit, but with a catch – Fantastical and Cardhop are now bundled together in a single Flexibits Premium subscription at the same price as the previous Fantastical Premium.
Pricing for Flexibits Premium comes in at $4.99 per month or $39.99 per year (a 33% discount compared to monthly), with a 14-day free trial. A family plan for up to five family members is also available, priced at $7.99 per month or $64.99 per year.
Existing Fantastical Premium subscribers will be automatically upgraded to Flexibits Premium to receive access to Cardhop 2.0. Users who previously purchased Cardhop 1 will be able to download Cardhop 2 and continue to use all of the features that were included in Cardhop 1, but will need to subscribe to Flexibits Premium to unlock the new capabilities.
I know people complain about subscription model, but Fantastical has a very nice value for its price, and offers all the basic features you need in the free version. Glad to see this update for Cardhop!
I have a hard time seeing the value add for a subscription calendar and contacts viewer. The heavy lifting of storing the data even is where your email is stored. No push notifications. Etc.
I wish Apple bought Fantastical+Cardhop to revamp contacts+phone and calendar.
I'm starting to think Apple has forgotten they have a Contacts app. Don't think either the Mac or iOS versions have been updated with anything obvious since they removed the skeuomorphism. Thankful that Flexibits is around to fill that void.
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Top Rated Comments
Either way, Flexibit looks like its doing Apple's job for them. At least it looks nicer than Apple's implementation. Apple should buy them I guess.