Flexibits, the developer of Fantastical, which I use as my primary calendaring app on macOS and iOS, released Cardhop in 2017. Previously, I mentioned it in Mac Mondays: Contact Lenses.

I’ve long appreciated Fantastical’s natural language smarts for event creation and I jumped at the opportunity to experience the same in a contacts app.

Along with the language engine, Cardhop adds smart labeling to ease the process of adding, managing, and contacting people in my address book. I find it especially convenient for calling people on the phone—yes, using my Mac. Read on…

Basic Interface

Cardhop lives in the menu bar and I invoke it with a keyboard shortcut. (I use Shift+Control+Space.) It displays as a popover that uses the full height of the screen — though it can be resized to suit your preference. The display shows birthdays first, followed by recent contacts. Optionally, I can see all my contact groups on the left.

The app can show a list of all contacts with an alphabet to jump through, similar to the Contacts interface on iOS, but I find search way more efficient. A selected contact appears in another elegant popover with buttons to easily contact by text message, email, phone, and/or video, depending on the contact info on file.

Cardhop sources the existing contact records on your Mac, provided by the Internet and/or local accounts you have set up.

Add or Update a Contact

To add a contact, just type their name and info. Email and physical addresses, phone numbers, websites, and birthdays are all intelligently parsed and placed in appropriate fields.

All types of contact info can be labeled as desired just by typing the label, such as home, work, or mobile. Based on your settings in the app’s Template preference, it distributes details to the default labels unless you specify otherwise.

For example, suppose my template says the first phone number is “mobile” and the snail mail address is “work.” When I type Amy Smith 6313513089 451 Northern Boulevard Huntington NY 11743, Cardhop formats and labels Amy’s info just the way I expected.

To update a contact, just type their name and the new info to add to the matched record. To delete a field, just type delete, then the name and field name/label.

Copy Info

As a business networker, Cardhop is one of my oft-used apps. Often as I’m making professional introductions, I need to share contact info.

I just type copy, then the name, and indicate which detail I want by typing and/or tabbing. Press Return and it’s on the clipboard. Since I have a clipboard buffer (see Mac Mondays: Thrilling Text Tools), I can copy several bits and have them all queued to paste.

Missing, though, is the ability to copy multiple bits at once and have them parsed and formatted for easy pasting. I’ve submitted this feedback for possible future development.

Call a Friend

One of my goals for 2021 is to catch up with old friends with at least one phone call a week. Fortunately, I’ve accumulated their contact info over the years so it shouldn’t be challenging for me to reach out.

With support for the iPhone Cellular Calls feature of Continuity, Cardhop makes this really easy. I can initiate a call just by typing call followed by the person’s name or nickname (and the label of the desired number, if necessary).

This invokes FaceTime, which connects to my iPhone. I can continue the call on my Mac, iPhone, or any other linked device.

And there’s so much more. This 1-minute demo shows how you can select contact info in other apps and use the embedded contextual menu service to send it to Cardhop. You can also get directions or dictate instead of typing. There are more short demos near the bottom of the product page.

The app cleverly uses color as visual feedback for various actions: email, text, and directions are blue; phone and video calls are green; copy is orange; and delete is red. I think directions should be yellow (or gold) like roads on maps, though that might be too faint on a light background, but I’ve sent the feedback anyway.

If you adopt Cardhop, I’d love to hear how you make use of it. And as always, if you want to try it out and need help getting acquainted, let me know.

Here’s hoping 2021 is a year to remember while 2020 floats away into the annals of history as a less appreciated time. (Though, in the world of Apple, it was pretty great.)