[NewsPoster]

In February 2015, we said that the then brand-new BusyContacts 1.0 was so good we were willing to call it the best address book app for the Mac. We knew we were being rash but we meant it –– and one year on, it's gone the distance for us.

That's not to say that using it day to day has turned out to be quite the way we expected. For instance, BusyContacts is very much a sister title to the longstanding BusyCal and we assumed we'd use them together. We haven't. BusyCal is a powerful calendar app and it literally has all the features we had been looking for since its predecessor Now Up-to-Date died away, yet it's not for us. It's a case of being careful what you wish for. The old Now Up-to-Date was and the new BusyCal is great at combining your tasks in with your calendar but even during the years we mourned the old NUTD, we came to find that this is a rubbish idea. Some of your tasks do belong on next Tuesday, that's fine, but most do not and you're spending a lot of time dragging tasks around.

More significantly for us is how BusyCal has both the look and the feel of the older app and now we find that just too gaudy. We ended up switching off a mass of features just to fiddle with the look of the thing and of course that removed much of the point of having it. BusyContacts doesn't not look a great deal better and by not using BusyCal with it we lose the benefit of how these two apps integrate well. We're okay with that, though, and there is enough left in BusyContacts to keep us using and liking it a lot. While we haven't intentionally launched BusyCal in the last year, we also haven't launched Apple's own Contacts app. BusyContacts does two things for us that have proved useful over the last year –– though to be fair, not as useful as we'd imagined. That's not quite right: these two features are useful, we just didn't use them as much as planned. The one we expected to use the most is the genuinely superb way that whenever you look up a contact, you can see your last email conversation with them. It's a small thing but it's huge: with a glance you are reminded where you were with them even if it has been weeks or months since you emailed. We'd love a way to sort contacts by when we last contacted them: that would be transformative and would make BusyContacts really be a business tool. That's the kind of feature you get in fully-fledged customer relations management apps but we'd like it very much, please.

The other feature that if we haven't used it daily, we've at least used it every single time we've wanted to do a certain thing, is group emails. Groups are an excellent thing with BusyContacts: rather than actually having groups as Apple's Contacts does, it has tags. You can set any tag on any contact and it sounds like a difference that makes no difference yet it somehow speeds everything up. Creating a group is as quick as typing the name of a tag or dragging a contact to one. It's clear how to have multiple tags, too, and the whole thing syncs back with Apple's groups so you gain the convenience of tagging and you lose nothing. When we want to email a particular group, for instance, we can just click on the tag they have in common and then press a couple of keys. We can start a new email that is now pre-addressed to everyone in the group, for instance. We use that for agendas, committee meetings, for fun. There is another option we can't fathom ever using but it's there: you can click on a group and have one new, blank email opened up pre-addressed to each person separately. If you have 80 people in your group, BusyContacts is willing to open Mail and launch 80 blank emails. It's your choice but if you can think of a reason to choose it, do let us know. We're still not keen on how BusyContacts can't do circular photographs for contacts but that is an Apple restriction. Plus since we got this, Apple has brought out iOS 9 and removed the recent contacts circles that used to appear every time you switched apps. It's really iOS that we want next. There's no reason to expect that there will ever be a BusyContacts for iOS but if there were, we wouldn't ever open Apple's Contacts apps on iPhone or iPad either. -William Gallagher (@WGallagher)

[DrSkywalker]

Flashback time. Wow. Now-Up-To-Date and Now Contacts. How I mourned their loss. They were great in their day. I'd forgotten all about them. Didn't they start off as Beagle Bros or something...?

[Mike Wuerthele]

Maybe. Now was at one point Smethers/Barnes, IIRC, but that was a very long time ago.