Flexibits, the makers of Fantastical, have a new Mac app out for dealing with contacts. It boasts the same easy-to-use, text-driven intelligence that its calendar-based sibling does. The natural language input field at the top of the menu bar app can handle search, creating contacts, editing record information and more.
The app can also serve as a launchpad for contacting someone. The input field can turn “email Jason Snell” into a draft to the man with a spider in his iMac. It builds upon natural language input in a new way that I find clever.
While I do keep a fairly robust contacts database, I almost always start a new conversation with someone within the app I’m going to use for that interaction. Mail pulls from my contacts database as well as their own internal history, and Messages works in a similar fashion. Slack and Skype are already islands all their own.
If you do a lot with contacts at your Mac, it is well worth the cost of admission, which is reduced to $14.99 for launch.
Personally, I would love to see the addition of more CRM-focused information that could sync to my iOS devices. The app’s notes field is a great start, but a way to enter structured data about phone calls and emails to form a paper trail of communication would make it a real winner in my book.