Ever wonder why Amazon no longer includes an itemized list of your order when it sends email receipts via email?Except that Spark has horrible privacy practices (read the TOS) and basically sells all your information gathered out of your email.
Ever wonder why Amazon no longer includes an itemized list of your order when it sends email receipts via email?Except that Spark has horrible privacy practices (read the TOS) and basically sells all your information gathered out of your email.
I was literally about to post the same thing in this thread, so - yeah, you nailed it.I think apple prefers to keep their core apps as simple as possible and add maybe one of the power use features every couple of years as tent pole feature. Just like how Mail still lacks so many of the features third party apps have had for countless years.
Both Fantastical and Cardhop leverage 3 strengths: (1) UI design (subjective but many find them to be superior to Apple's), (2) natural language processing, and (3) fixes smaller but significant little quirks from Apple's built-in apps.I got CardHop when John Gruber sang its praises some years back. Never could really understand what was so great or useful about it though.
Can someone enlighten me?
I am still very annoyed by how they handled that transition for sure…I know many here despise how Flexibits handled the transition to subscription but, in my opinion, their app does what Apple has failed to do all these years and that is have a great calendar app.
I like that I can easily make calendar appointments on my watch via natural speech. Try that with Apple's calendar and it is a jumbled mess.
I loaded the cardhop a good while back and never saw that it served a practical purpose for me. I appreciate the added benefit to the subscription model, even though I probably won't make use of it.
There have been improvements to the app on a regular basis. New features have been added but, from what I have seen, they have been geared towards the office / team conference environment. I haven't really seen anything for individuals I could make use of.I am still very annoyed by how they handled that transition for sure…
But even outside of that. A family subscription to cover me and my wife would be $65 a year for a calendar app (and now a contacts app). CardHop has only had a handful of updates since it was released (I own it prior to today’s release) as it makes sense… What can you add to a Contacts app regularly? It is rolled into the sub to give it more value, but for people who already own it there is no real value add.
The $65/y is hard to swallow too when my Calendar & Contacts are all stored on my self-hosted email server...
I too like their natural language processing and a few other features, but that’s why I purchased the apps in the past...
What have they added to justify the high recurring price?
And you have to give them your password (!)Except that Spark has horrible privacy practices (read the TOS) and basically sells all your information gathered out of your email.
Thanks for this, I'm starting to see the point of CardHop.Both Fantastical and Cardhop leverage 3 strengths: (1) UI design (subjective but many find them to be superior to Apple's), (2) natural language processing, and (3) fixes smaller but significant little quirks from Apple's built-in apps.
My reasons for preferring Cardhop over Contacts:
- On the iOS, Contacts app is just the Contacts tab from the Phone app, lacking Favorites and Recents tabs. You might as well just delete it and use Phones app as the contact management app (just be careful not to tap outside the "i" info button as that would trigger outbound call
- On the macOS, Contacts app is equally limited, no Favorites and Recents.
- Cardhop shows the portrait image next to each contact.
- Birthday tab.
- Multiple business cards with QR code for easy sharing.
- Widgets
- Menu bar macOS
Thanks for adding these. I'm actually a big fan of Fantastical (the free version with its natural language parsing works great for me), but CardHop has never made much sense.I'm in the same boat. I liked it and sang its praises for a while, but eventually ended up reaching for Contacts more often than not. I don't even think I have it installed any more, despite buying it back in the day.
Likewise, I don't "get" Fantastical. I owned and liked Version 1, but was disappointed by both the new look and subscription pricing when it moved to version 2 (then 3), so moved on. I've since found I could get all the same functionality of the old version (which is all I ever wanted) for a one-time $15 fee from Calendar 366, which I now use religiously.
Chatology, also from Flexibits, was a godsend for a while as it provided a band-aid for sudden shortcomings in Messages, but Apple seems to have eliminated the need for it in recent MacOS updates.
I get what you're saying - subscriptions really do add up and it's hard to justify paying a monthly subscription for something as basic as a contact app that requires very little heavy lifting behind the scenes.I have both Fantastical and Cardhop on my iPhone, but there was no way I could justify the cost of Fantastical on my Mac - not as an one-off purchase, and certainly not as a subscription. Adding Cardhop for 'free' doesn't change my view on that.
I suppose, invariably, they will add email, in an effort to challenge Outlook - a product that has always had more hype than it deserves, and which has always been tied to an expensive bundle and, more recently, a subscription model for the app on 'real' computers. But that still doesn't mean a 'Premium' price should be paid for these Flexibits products.