Image: Addappt
On Wednesday, Addappt, makers of a smart address book application by the same name, rolled out new features that utilize Apple's 3D Touch feature in iOS and enable easier sharing of contact groups. Mrinal Desai, Addappt's CEO and co-founder, said that a big focus of the release is on standalone usability.
Addappt's core value proposition is its ability to update your address book automatically. So, if your boss changes her email address in her own contact profile, it will change it in your address book as well. The goal is to make it easier to stay in touch with friends and business contacts, and eliminate the use of business cards along the way.
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The new features start with Live Favorites Widget, which is an improved way to setup and manage your favorite, or most accessed, contacts. On iOS, users can enable the widget from the Today screen without any additional configuration required. Android users, however, also have the ability to share their information as well.A growing trend in smartphones is listing an "In Case of Emergency" (ICE) number as a point of contact if the user is found in a compromising situation. In this release, Addappt is addressing ICE in two ways.
First is that it will display a user's top-listed number as an ICE number on the Addappt Widget. This way, if the phone is lost and found or there is an emergency, the person who finds the device will be able to quickly reach out to the ICE contact. Second, Addappt is making ICE available on Apple Watch so that, even if the watch is locked, users will be able to send messages to their favorites who are connected with them on Addappt.
Business users will also notice some updates that could prove useful as well. For example, a new action extension called 'Email Me' allows users to send an article from the web, or text that has been copied, back to himself or herself with a single tap. This lets users save articles to read later more easily than saving the URL or creating a bookmark.
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Addappt also announced a slew of new features that make use of Apple's 3D Touch capabilities, which debuted w
Image: Addappt
ith the iPhone 6s and allows apps to react to different levels of pressure on the phone's screen.For starters, Addappt now has 3D Touch Peek and Pop for contacts and groups. Peek and Pop are ways to preview content. By lightly pressing, you can get a small "Peek" at a contact or group, and by pressing harder you can make the contact or group "Pop" to reveal more information. This is a great feature for quickly remembering how you met someone, or what organization they work for.
Users can also share a group of 25 contacts or less via a VCF file, but an in-app purchase that will allow sharing of larger groups is coming in the future. Desai said that the group functionality will be helpful in managing leads, clients, and employees.
There are also four 3D Touch app Quick Actions that Addappt is including in this release:
- Add a Contact
- Search
- First Favorite and
- Share My Info
Image: Addappt
The "Share My Info" action simply allows you to share your contact with someone else quickly and easily via text message. This is one of the key features for Addappt "kill the business card" strategy. Desai said the feature respects your personal privacy settings."This is also available to send to all of one's contacts (not on Addappt) when they have new information (like new company, new email new work number etc.) from the 'Me' tab (by tapping on the top right 'share' icon) in the app on both platforms," Desai said.
Finally, Addappt is adding emoji customization in this release as well. While there aren't a ton of business use cases for this, it is pretty fun.
The 3 big takeaways for TechRepublic readers
- Smart address book Addappt released a new feature set including new productivity features and ways to leverage the 3D Touch functionality present in the latest generation iPhones.
- Business users can use the one touch "Email Me" feature to send themselves articles and web content for later reading, without creating a bookmark.
- Using 3D Touch, users can more easily search their contacts and share them with others. This could prove a useful feature if you work with teams that are consistently assigned to new departments and need a way to get in contact with other employees quickly.
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