Face Contact - New Contact App w/ Today Plugin

[bedoig]

Here's a pretty cool new contacts app called Face Contact. It has a Today screen plugin that has a cover-flow like effect. For 15 bucks, I might pick this one up after the 10 day trial ends. Check it out:

http://www.cnetx.com/products/contact/

Also discussed at XDA (with a lot of comments from the developer):

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=378145



Quick description from the site:

Contact Management with a Visual Touch



Face Contact adds a new dimension to contact management. It combines the effectiveness of browsing contacts using an intuitive 3D visual interface, with the kind of control and features you would expect from a text-based Contact application, such as the ability to:

• sort contacts by different criteria, at any time;
• jump instantly to specific positions in the contact list based on the contact’s initial;
• keep full control of index/position in the list even when rapidly scrolling through your contacts;
• initiate common contact-related tasks, such as starting a phone call, sending text messages and email, or browsing the personal web page of a contact;
• perform all kinds of contact management operations, such as adding, editing or removing contacts.

[InvincibleLiving]

looks tight!! i'll give it a try later...

[winmobilelawyer]

trying it out now. it looks and functions great! It is SLIGHTLY gimmicky though. I mean when I really want to quickly dial up a specific person I prefer to just pull up the Mobile Shell dial screen or my pocket plus tab that has 15 static photos on it. and bam one click dials the person i want, no scrolling to fast or two slow and trying to land on the right face

But that said, this FaceContact app is fun and works and looks great.

[neodorian]

Originally Posted by winmobilelawyer

It is SLIGHTLY gimmicky though. I mean when I really want to quickly dial up a specific person I prefer to just pull up the Mobile Shell dial screen or my pocket plus tab.

Agree. It's a lot easier and the whole cover flow thing is getting kind of overused Still it's a neat looking app and I'm sure plenty of people will get use out of it. For now I'm sticking with Mobile Shell too.

[gabibbo]

Originally Posted by neodorian

Agree. It's a lot easier and the whole cover flow thing is getting kind of overused Still it's a neat looking app and I'm sure plenty of people will get use out of it. For now I'm sticking with Mobile Shell too.

Hi guys. Just a quick clue (if it helps).

Contacts are kept sorted, exactly as in your text-only contact list: so knowing if you have to scroll forward or backward to reach a given contact should be just as intuitive, whatever the number of contacts you are dealing with.

While scrolling (when contact names wouldn't be readable), there's an index-tracking mechanism that tells you where you are in the list. This can be set to reflect the instantaneous letter/position in the list, or the letter/position where scrolling will stop (you can alter this setting in the Motion Control dialog box).
So if you overshoot, you have immediate feedback of where you are, and you can correct easily (once again exactly as when you are scrolling a simple list of names).

You can jump instantly to any letter/position by pressing the corresponding letter on your thumbboard (or via the software input panel). So no matter how many contact are in the list, you can jump around easily (exactly as in a text-only list).

Because of all this, even if you add contacts that don't have a photo, you will still be able to find them easily at their alphabetical position in the contact list. Exactly as when you are dealing with a text-only contact list.
Of course, if contacts have a photo (or icon) they get even much easier to "spot".

We gave a lot of thought to such features, because we didn't really mean this to be just another photo dialer or FAVES app, that can only cope with handful of contacts (and if you add more than that you get "lost").

Our idea was to provide the same kind of indexing, sorting and navigation of a traditional text-only contact list, and combine it with the easy of use and intuitiveness of visual interface.

Maybe we didn't succeed. Or maybe our product description is not good enough.

Cheers.

[shelovezlaw]

I LOVE IT...this will definitely be purchased after the 10 day trial.

[bedoig]

Hey, glad to see you here too gabibbo! Personally I love the app. I've always liked photo dialers, but found most of them too limited in the number of contacts you could display. This one is almost perfect for me.

One thing I would like is the ability to automatically import contacts based on criteria like category (business, personal, etc), wether or not they have a photo, call frequency (if that is even doable). It is just kind of burdensome to have to import all your contacts into another program. Not too big of a deal though. Keep up the good work!

Edit: Actually what I think would be really cool would be the ability to have multiple rows/stacks of contacts based on category. One row has business contacts, one row has personal, etc. Maybe I'm just spoiled by UltimateLaunch though, I don't care how much screen space the plugin takes up It would definetly be cool to have the option of multiple rows though. Just my .02

[gabibbo]

Filtering by category (or adding contacts by category) is something we have had in mind for quite some time, and should indeed increase usability with large contact lists.

As it is now, the plugin can only be instantiated once (and the name of the file it opens cannot be changed). But by simply supporting multiple instances, each associated to a different "data file" or a different "contact category", it should be possible to achieve something similar to what you suggest.

We will see...

Thanks for your feedback and ideas!

[winmobilelawyer]

I hope I didn't make it seem like it was HARD to get to the contact you are looking for. It isn't difficult, if you overshoot it is easy to scroll right back to where you wanted, and yes if you have a decent amount of contacts that you use fairly frequently and like the visual interface this is PERFECT. But I have only about 10-12 contacts that I use regularly so the static mobile shell and/or pocket plus tabs are really great for me.

I think the ability to setup multiple rows in this plugin would be awesome! Because essentially my mobile shell/pocket plus rows are setup in this fashion, i.e. family, school, business, etc. so to have multiple cover flow rows for user defined contacts would be the best of both worlds i think.

But again, the response of this app, and its visual interface are extremely well designed and respond exactly the way it should! Keep on keepin on!!!

[Fresh2Death]

goes perfect with everything on my today screen