Flexibits, makers of Fantastical and Cardhop, for the first time ever, are having a sale on their subscriptions. From now until November 30, you can get 50% off an annual subscription or 50% off your first month of a monthly subscription!

I like Fantastical so much that I’ve produced videos about it. Having a power-user calendar app can really help you up your game. Purchases need to be made through flexibits.com directly to get the discount.

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Today Flexibits announced the release of Cardhop 2.0. Cardhop has always had the Contacts app beat because of the Cardhop search bar, where you can access, create, modify, and act on contacts. (Flexibits also makes Fantastical, also known for its similar search/create bar feature.) The new version of Cardhop adds a lot of useful features, including:

• The ability to take a picture of a business card and have the app extract the relevant data for your contacts database.

• Diagram relationships between co-workers and family members.

• Add multiple images to contacts

• A full suite of auto-created and customizable widgets.

• The ability to set up group invites in Fantastical with your Cardhop groups. It’s an impressive update. I did several videos for Flexibits showing off the new features. The overview video is below. In addition to the Cardhop update, Flexibits announced that Fantastical subscriptions are now converted to Flexibits Premium accounts. This means that if you’ve subscribed to Fantastical, you’re now also getting Cardhop for no additional cost.

The new Cardhop is available now for free for Mac, iPad, and iPhone. The free version has limited features. A paid Flexibits Premium subscription enables all features for Cardhop and Fantastical on all devices and is available with monthly and discounted annual options.

Subscribers of Fantastical Premium are automatically converted to a Flexibits Premium subscription and will instantly receive all of Cardhop’s premium features at no additional charge. You can learn more at Flexibits.

Finally, I want to pass my congratulations to the Flexibits team for their ten-year anniversary. The company was built on productivity apps that make capture and data management easy for users. I remember meeting one of the company founders in the aisle at Macworld when Fantastical was a brand-new menu bar app built on the quick entry bar. In the ever-changing app market, they found a way not only to make it work but to flourish.

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But the process of creating a new contact card for each project is tedious, particularly with the Apple Contacts app that requires much clicking and typing. So I made this script that queries me for the project name and then grabs the magic email address from my clipboard to create a contact in the Basecamp Projects group in my contacts database. Cardhop’s quick entry system makes all the difference.

You can download the script here:

KM Script Download

And see the script in action in the below video. Note there is a discount code for the Keyboard Maestro Field Guide at the end of the video.

Also, here’s a screenshot of the script.

View fullsize

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For a while now, I’ve been using Cardhop on my Mac to manage contacts. Today marks the release of Cardhop for iOS. Made by Flexibits, the same team behind Fantastical, Cardhop is better than the native Contacts app in just about every way. It has a smart parser that lets you find, modify, and act on contacts without diving into the button pressing hell that is the native Contacts app. It allows you to actually move contacts among groups easily, it looks beautiful, and it has wicked Siri Shortcuts support. The icon is even better looking on your home screen. You can buy it today.

I made a whole series of videos for the app that you can watch on the developer’s website. Consider it a free, mini field guide on this cool app. Here’s my overview.



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• Support for French, German, Italian, Spanish and Japanese (including full text parsing and localized address and phone formats)

• Smart groups: create dynamic smart groups that automatically update based on specific search criteria

• Template preferences to customize fields and labels for new contacts

• Printing support: print customized envelopes, labels, and lists of contacts

• Quick Action for printing: type “print” or use a Quick Action button to quickly print a contact or group

• “Add Notes with Timestamp” option to quickly insert the current date and time into the notes of a contact

• Typing into a related name field now suggests other names in your contacts

My favorite feature continues to be how fast the app is. I can access or add to my contact data with just a few keystrokes. This makes Apple’s Contacts app feel very old and fidgety. Best of all, I made a video for them of the new features.

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