Apple award-winning Fantastical gains new meeting integration features

Fantastical calendar subscribers now get the newly updated Cardhop contacts app in their subscription

Flexibits, winner of Apple's Mac App of the Year 2020 for calendar app Fantastical, has revamped its subscription to add in its separate contacts app, Cardhop. The move comes alongside the release of a revised Cardhop 2.0, which includes more integration into Fantastical.

With the original Cardhop, on Mac or iOS, users could type phrases such as "Email Tom," or "Email Awards Group," and the app would open Mail with all of the addresses in place. Similarly, users could write, "Call," "Skype," "tweet," and so on.

Now in Cardhop 2.0, users can also type "Invite Awards Group." If they also have Fantastical installed, Cardhop will open the calendar app and begin the process of creating a meeting. All of the people in the contacts group will automatically be invited.

As well as typing into what Flexibits calls Cardhop's "magical, single input field" to invite, email, or in all ways manage contacts, Cardhop 2.0 now has widgets. On both iOS and macOS, users can choose to have favorites or recently contacted people shown in the widgets.

Significantly, choosing to show recent contacts will display people regardless of what way they were recently contacted. So rather than going to Phone to see who users rang recently, and separately to Mail to check Sent Items, Cardhop 2.0 displays them all.

Cardhop was previously available for Mac for $19.99 and $4.99 on iOS. Now Flexibits is making a limited version free, as it already does with Fantastical.

To gain features such as the event invitation integration with Fantastical, the new Flexibits Premium subscription costs from $3.33 per month. That fee gets users the full Cardhop 2.0, plus the full Fantastical, and across all devices.

Cardhop 2.0 requires macOS High Sierra or later, and iOS 14 or iPadOS 14, or later. Both it and Fantastical are available on the App Stores or direct from the developer, and come with a 14-day free trial.

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