iPhone Contact Management App That Displays Social & Email Interactions

No matter how much you like iOS, there are a few areas of iPhone which do need some improvement. One such features is the stock Contacts app, which is far from perfect. For instance, there is no option to delete your contacts in bulk. Fortunately, there are a lot of third party apps which fill the void created by these omissions. Smartr Contacts is one such app, and it will automatically pull all your contacts as soon as you connect relevant accounts with it. Not only that, the app will manage all the contacts for you too, so that they can be used more efficiently.

We have already covered the Android version of the app. For the iOS version, before you can start using Smartr Contacts, you will need to sign up for a new, app-specific account. To do that, all you need is any email ID and a new password. Once that has been done, two types of accounts can be linked to Smartr Contacts; email accounts and social networks. The ID you used to sign up for the app will be linked automatically to it, and everyone who has ever mailed you on that ID will be listed in your contacts list. The options for adding other email accounts to the app include Gmail and Outlook. If you are active on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, the app can pull those contacts for you too.

Once all your contacts have been pulled from the address book in your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch, the app will list them based on their frequency of use. This way you are likely to find important contacts without having to look for too long. Smartr Contacts also keeps tracks of your interactions with all the added users, and you are shown a graphical representation of your interaction. The app is also useful for integrating information for all your contacts, no matter on which service you are in touch with them. In the Common section of Smartr Contacts, you get to know if there are any communications in which you and that friend have appeared together. The app will also associate photos with all the contacts, as long as they have set one up on at least one of the linked accounts.
Smartr Contacts is a free app, and if you are looking for an alternative to the stock Contacts app in your iOS device, then this is just the app you need. You can download Smartr Contacts by heading to the download link below.
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Sync Android Contacts To Cloud & View Detailed Interaction History With Smartr

Smartr Contacts is a handy address book for Android users that not only keeps a detailed record of all your phone contacts but extends its support to your mail contacts and friends on various social networks with whom you’ve interacted in any way. With this app, you can scan your phone for numbers, contacts and email addresses and upload them to the cloud, sync your contacts (and events) from almost all the popular online services, view detailed interaction history with each contact (complete with bar graphs!), access their social profile pages, call, text and/or Email them and bring all your contacts to one platform for quick and easy access. In addition, the app sports a homescreen widget that serves as a shortcut to the app and some of its features.

The guys at Xobni (the developers of Smartr Contacts app and Outlook app for BlackBerry) seem to be quite upbeat about the capabilities of the app to sync and save all the aforementioned information for over a thousand contacts at a given instance. The claim alone is compelling enough to lure users towards trying the app out. But that’s not all Smartr Contacts has to offer. As of now, accounts/services that are supported on Smartr Contacts include Gmail, Google Apps and Outlook, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
But to access all this (and more), you need to login with a valid Xobni account. New users can avail the in-app registration facility by tapping the Create An account button. After you’re logged in, the app prompts you to select accounts from aforementioned services. Once you’ve picked all the preferred services to sync contacts with, you can specify the app to retrieve data from your phone logs, text messages and/or calendar events to help Smartr Contacts become a complete address book.

The app’s homescreen has a pleasant sight to offer with the profile photos of all your contacts displayed on tiles. Here’s the best part though, just give your device a shake to flip these tiles and replace them with new contacts. Tiles are flipped automatically even if your device is on rest (with the app’s homescreen open). Swiping across on the homescreen takes you to the events page. Also on the homescreen, you have your search bar. Tap on the search bar to manually find contacts and view them listed according to their rank (sorted by top 10, 20, 40 and even more). From the search screen, you can manually update and reload contacts, scan your phone to upload data to the cloud and more (just tap Menu to access all said features).
The app fetches any information attached to the synced contacts on your phone as well as from supported services and displays it on the contacts page under various tabs namely Details, Social, History and Common.

The Details tab shows you where the app ranks each contact on the address book (based on the frequency of your interaction with the contact). It contains all the phone numbers and Email profiles associated with each contact. From here, you can edit/update contact information (Menu > required option). Tapping on an Email address lets you send mails to the selected contact. You can also forward the same mail to multiple addresses. All you need to do is pick another recipient by tapping on his/her name. Once all recipients are selected, tap Next to send the mail.
From the Social tab, you can access social profiles of contacts and view their recent activities on supported services. The History tab is tightly knit with your Emails, call history and texting habits and displays in-depth statistical data complete with bar graphs of all your interactions with a particular contact. The Common tab lists out all Email accounts that you’ve used for sending mails to a selected contact.

The app keeps you apprised of all the updates made to any of your contacts through status bar notifications. It also offers a couple of homescreen widgets (in different sizes) that can be availed to browse contacts, view the total number of contacts, search for a required contact and quickly send an Email to him/her. To add Smartr Contacts widgets, tap on a vacant spot on your homescreen and select Widgets > Smartr from the Add to home screen menu.
Below is the official Smartr demo video that shows what the app has in store for you.

We tested Smartr Contacts on our HTC Desire Z with just a handful of contacts. Provided the somewhat slow response of the app, occasional Force Close issues and its inability to retain connection with the server, one can hardly expect Smartr Contacts to pose any immediate threat to some of the other handy contacts management apps out there (especially GO Contacts).
However, the the app is still in beta and so it is normal for it to have a few glitches here and there.
Download Smartr Contacts (Beta) for Android

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GO Contacts EX Adds Transition Effects & More To The Original [Android]

The stock contacts/ People app that comes bundled with Android is, quite admittedly, pretty impressive, but when it comes to extensive customization and ease of access of your contacts, as well as contacts management, things are not quite the same. To address this issue, there have been several attempts at providing the users with a better and option-packed alternative. It seems as if the famous GO Dev Team – developers of many useful apps for Android – are on a mission to take over the Market. When GO Contacts was initially launched in the Android Market some time ago, users greeted it as a worthy replacement for their stock phone dialer and contacts. To the utmost delight of dedicated GO Contacts users, here is a better and graphically enhanced version of the app launched with the name GO Contacts EX. Based on the same lines as its predecessor, GO Contacts EX adds eye-soothing transition animations and a few new features that are surely going to enhance the way you are used used to interacting, managing and handling your contacts on Andorid.

The app is essentially a slightly enhanced version of GO Contacts. To begin with, the famous animations that we are so used to enjoying in GO SMS and GO Launcher EX have been added to GO Contacts EX as well. Scroll through the list of diverse transition effects (Menu>Settings>Display Settings>Transition effect) and select the one that attracts you the most. Swipe across the screen and you should be able to see your selected effect in action as the app switches from one tab to another. A rather handy aspect of GO Contacts EX is the way in which it lets you handle your contacts, and place them under respective groups via drag and drop gestures.

As evident from the screenshot above, once you’re on your contacts list, all you need to do is select the contacts that you wish to assign to a specific group. To help you achieve this goal effectively, the app presents you with the list, with the batch-select mode enabled. After you’ve selected all the contacts, all you need to do is hold down anywhere in the middle of the screen, and drag all the way to the desired contact group in the left.Also, with GO Contacts EX, users can merge contacts according to their email address in addition to their names and phone numbers .
Download GO Contacts EX for Android

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GO Contacts For Android: Ideal Alternative To Stock Dialer & Contacts

The acclaimed GO Dev Team, after receiving satisfied nods from Android users all around for GO Launcher, GO SMS and GO Weather, has added another peach of an application to the Android Market. Go Contacts is a free contacts manager and dialer app that is, as claimed by the developers themselves, good enough to replace the stock Contacts and Dialer applications, perhaps even better in some respects.

The interface is user-friendly and easy on the eyes. At first glance, you might not notice much of a difference in functionality between GO Contacts and your stock Contacts/Dialer application. The Call Log and Phone tabs in the stock dialer have been grouped into one tab and labeled Dialpad, an additional shortcut to which is provided in the app drawer upon installation of GO Contacts.

In addition, the application provides the option to group contacts into default or custom (user-defined) groups from within the Group tab. To do so, simply tap the Edit button on the top right of the screen and begin picking contacts to add to or remove from a group selected from the list on the extreme left.

You can then send SMS and emails to a whole group of contacts with only a few taps (Menu>SMS All or Menu>Email All).

Another notable feature that the application offers is the ability to merge duplicate contacts by name or number. An addition that we would like to see added to said feature is the option to group all duplicates with a single tap. As of this writing, duplicate contacts have to be merged one by one. To access the merge contact option, press menu while on the Contacts tab and tap Merge Contact.

The freeware also provides easier, faster access to essential features such as adding a new contact, searching for existing contacts, adding and calling/sending messages to favorites. Also, in the list of  options displayed on holding down on a contact you will find additional handy options such as sending contact info via SMS (Send contacts by SMS).

You can grab GO Contacts from the Android Market for free via the link provided below.
Download GO Contacts
Update: A slightly more feature-packed version of the app is now available for free on the Android Market. Like all other ‘EX’ versions of GO apps, Go Contacts EX too is free. For further details, read our
GO Contacts EX review.

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StartDial: Choose Default Menu On Launching Phone App In iPhone [Cydia]

Cydia is all about making the overall iPhone experience more efficient and productive for users. The developers strive to do that by working on every little aspect of iOS, and bringing something new to the table, no matter how small the change might be. StartDial is one such tweak, which is all about giving you more control over your iDevice. It makes the stock Phone app smarter, so that it will know which section to display each time you launch it. In addition to its own decision-making power, you can also choose any section as your default Phone display using StartDial. Of course, there are many third-party apps that acts as standalone dialling options (and come with a lot of extra useful features), but having a tweak that customizes the stock Phone app is certainly something a lot of people can use.

The tweak can be downloaded from the Big Boss repo in Cydia store, and once it has been installed, you can start customizing the Phone app from the Settings app in your device. StartDial will appear in the Extensions tab in Settings. First of all, you will have to make sure that the tweak is Enabled, via the first option present in the menu. You can choose any of the 4 menus as your default Phone.app launch screen, including Favorites, Recents, Contacts and Keypad.
However, as we mentioned earlier, the tweak is smart. This is because there are options like Check Recents in it. If you toggle that setting on, the Recents section will automatically show up every time there have been some missed calls that you have not seen yet.  Also, not a lot of users ever open the Voicemail section in the dialer, and it can prove to be a nuisance while you are trying to dial a number quickly with only one hand, as people keep hitting it mistakenly due to its placement. Due to all these reasons, StartDial has an option titled Disable Voicemail, which makes the Voicemail menu go away completely. Obviously if you often use voicemail, this is a feature of the tweak that you will want to stay away from.
The tweak is free, and with the level of usability it offers, jailbreak users must give StartDial a try. The best thing about the tweak is the customizable options and Settings it offers, as you can choose the functionalities you want to keep while enjoying some really cool new stuff on your iPhone.

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Create, Edit, Convert PDF Files & Export As EXEs With PDFCool

We have covered plenty of PDF editors for desktop, web and mobile platforms like PDFzen for Windows, Web, iOS and Mac OS X that allowed editing and sharing PDF files in a collaborative manner. PDF Mod was a another comprehensive option for Linux. In a nutshell, there are many PDF tools out there, all offering their own feature-sets and functionality. Should you be looking for another one to try out, give PDFCool PDF Editor a go. It’s a free PDF viewer and editor for Windows that bundles a variety of PDF-related tools in the package.

You can edit existing PDF files, create new ones from scratch, or extract certain elements like images and text from existing ones. Likewise, you can insert your own images into the document currently loaded in PDFCool. In addition, it allows you to convert PDF files to various image and text formats and vice versa.
Unfortunately, the application comes packaged with bloatware in form of in-app advertisement for the developer’s other tools, which can continuously nag your workflow. This is one of the major annoyances I faced during its testing. The interface carries a toolbar at the top that lets you navigate the document and zoom in and out of it.

The menu bar further extends the tool’s functionality by providing features like bookmarking and document conversion. The Convert menu is one of the most promising features of the app, as it lets you access many PDF-related tools from one place. For example, ‘PDF to Any’ allows you to convert a PDF file to a host of formats like DOC, HTML, PNG, JPEG, RTF, TXT, XLS, PPT, POT, EMF, WMF, SVG – in short, whatever format you might need to convert a PDF file into, PDFCool has you covered. It also contains an EXE builder that can a convert PDF file to an executable one for viewing on any Windows computer regardless of whether it has a PDF viewer installed or not. And if your PDF files contains graphical elements like objects and images, you can make use of the ‘Create Graphical PDFs’ option.

Manage Images is another nifty little feature that instantly extracts user-specific images from selected pages in a document. This feature opens up in it’s own window and exports the extracted image files to a user-defined directory. Apart from images, PDFCool PDF Editor also makes it possible to extract selective pages from a document. The Page menu provides different options for trimming, merging, copying and duplicating pages.

One more nifty feature of the app is its ability to convert web pages into PDF, and even allowing you to annotate them before you do so! Just select ‘Create PDF from Webpage’ in the File menu to launch this window (that can be considered a mini browser of sorts), and enter the URL of the page that you want to convert. The application fetches all the required information from the page and lets you export it into the main editing workspace, from where you can add annotations  and convert the page according to your preferences.

Although it’s plagued with some annoying nagware that may incessantly disrupt your workflow, the sheer number of PDF-related features that it packs make PDFCool PDF Editor an interesting application of its kind. It works on Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8. Both 32-bit and 64-bit OS editions are supported.
Download PDFCool PDF Editor

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Modify PDF Documents in Ubuntu With PDF Mod

PDF Mod is a Linux based application that allows comprehensive modification of PDF documents. Some features include the ability to reorder, rotate, remove and edit (title, subject, author, and keywords) PDF documents, as well as, the choice of exporting images from document. PDF Mod makes it extremely easy to combine separate PDF documents via drag & drop.

After installation, PDF Mod can be accessed from Applications –> Accessories. A document can be opened in this application either by opening PDF Mod separately and adding documents via the Open a Document button or by right-clicking on a document and selecting Open With PDF Mod option.

Once a document is opened, users can extract, remove, rotate, match page(s) via the right-click context menu. A new doucment can be opened from the Open a Document button located on the top left corner of the main interface. Other options from left to right include Save This Document To a New File button (for saving the edited document separately), a button for editing the title/key words, Save All Images button (for saving all images from the document), Insert button (for inserting new pages), Extract button (for extracting a specified page sperately), Remove button (for removing a page) and rotation buttons ( for rotating pages left/right).

The File drop down menu can be used to perform some of the above mentioned functions, to view recently opened documents or to see document properties which include the title and keywords.  Editing options can be accessed from the Edit drop down menu, whereas the View menu allows managing zoom options for the selected document. Any PDF document can also be dragged & dropped for adding it to the current document.

This application was tested on Ubuntu 10.10 and worked seamlessly.
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