The folks at Swoosh Software let us know over the weekend they just released a new app for BlackBerry Smartphones that's both useful and fun to use. SwooshContacts automatically ranks your contacts based on activity making it quick to contact the folks you deal with most, letting you discover who is most important in your life (hopefully it's your significant other at the top by default, but if not you can at least favorite them to that position!). SwooshContacts features include:
- Tracks contact activity
- Automatically ranks contacts
- Sort by activity, date, rank, name or company
- Shows contact photos
- Quickly filter contacts
- Quickly send emails
- Quickly send SMSs
- Quickly place calls
- Quickly show maps
- Award stars to valuable contacts
- Award hearts to your absolute favorites
The app has a small memory footprint at under 40kb and a FREE TRIAL is available. if you like it after you try it, you can pick it up for $4.99 from the CrackBerry App Store.
Reader comments
SwooshContacts for BlackBerry Ranks Your Contacts Based on Activity and Makes it Quick to Contact Them
I've not found any documentation of Swoosh Contacts. Does anyone know what drives the Ranking number or the Activity % number?
its not a BAD app, its just not worth 5 dollars....why not lower the price and get more buyers?
Do we really NEED our contacts listed, when BB does that automatically....your last SMS are listed in order....ergo. 5 is too much for hearts
waiting for the xobni bb version
i had swoosh photo, it is buggy and never got updated, new release. so i already had xperience with swoosh ;)
The people that want to SwooshContacts to run instead of the stock AddressBook can simply move the application icon to where the AddressBook was and click it. If you want quicker accesss to SwooshContacts bind it to one of the convenience keys.
One of my convenience keys is assigned to the camera (for those spontaneous moments where one might need to get to the camera QUICKLY, and I'm not just referring to "memorable moments"...), the other to "QuickLaunch" (launch multiple applications from the one convenience key).
Now I COULD add SwooshContacts to QuickLaunch, but that brings two issues of its own - it's not as intuitive as having SwooshContacts open when trying to access the call log and/or contacts/address book, and depending on one's QuickLaunch setup, it will take 2+ clicks to launch SwooshContacts...
You MIGHT say that 2+ clicks isn't all that much, but you have to look at what you're actually using - it's an application SPECIFICALLY designed to enhance the functionality of the call log and to a lesser extent, the contacts/address book - two of the most commonly used functions on ANY telephone!
ANY time that can be saved using these two functions, no matter how small, is a MASSIVE benefit, ESPECIALLY if you're a heavy user of your phone...
Haha, I hide the address book. I access it by pushing the a button. So putting the swoosh contacts icon where the address book icon is would be useless without a hotkey. As for convenience keys, mine are used up.
Blackberry finally gets an interesting new app and it's overpriced. Just like that redicilous $15 mlb app. Sigh. It's not all the developers fault though, all BB apps cost too much.
The MLB app also costs 15 dollars from Android Marketplace
I have the same issue with this as I had with swoosh's sms app: I like it better than the default, but there's no hotkey. So even though it looks better (despite being harder to find a specific contact) it takes longer to use. And since it's less time effecient AND takes up extra space, I end up deleting it. If there was a way to switch the hotkey to this and delete the stock address book, I'd pay for it in a second.
Agreed - without the ability to replace the default (BlackBerry OS) call log or contacts/address book, this application is largely pointless... The developer doesn't have to "delete" the default contacts/address book or call log (not that this is even possible, as I understand it...), but instead present this application when trying to ACCESS those functions.
If this application could be made to display INSTEAD of the default contacts/address book and/or call log (particularly the latter), I'd buy it in a heartbeat at the current price (I could possible even be convinced to spend a little more!), but until such a time, I'm uninstalling it...
If you compare the price to other contact management tools, you will see that the price is comparable. I use Sensobi and think it does a better job with more analytics but it is twice the price. If you want a simpler contact tool, I $5 for this produce is fair.
I praise & give kudos to any developer that is smart enough to include free trials of their creations. So, even though I'm not buying your app, or even trying it out, I just want to say thank you for being reasonable developers. Buying an application and then later finding out it is buggy as hell or simply doesn't play nice with your personal device is one of the biggest disappointments you can have with your smartphone experience. :(
Thanks Kevin... I don't think $4,99 is too much to pay for this app - developers have to make their money somehow! Free trial is great.
After trying out the trial, this app seems very buggy. My most used contact is listed number 2 because their mobile number 2 is used as mobile number 1. This app only counts one number per category (mobile, home, work). Not very useful.
is it just me, or does this not load the contacts?
I've been trying, and it just says *please wait*
huh?
Lower the price to $2.99 and you'll get a lot more buyers. This reminds me of when Addonis was released with a $15 price tag. This isn't that bad, but you need to realize that $5 is too much for an application like this.
Nice app, I'm going to give it a try :) thanks
This thing fails lol. All my contacts are on my 2nd contact list, but this app only reads the database from the 1st database (not even all).
SO I open it up and it's got no contacts to display lolz
Wow. . . looked at xobni and it's kinda interesting but for all the features it's 29.95. . . and people were complaining about five bucks
I use Sensobi. It's a very good contact manager. One of the best I've seen.
But with the price tag on that your demand will be low. If you were a known app developer like poynt then you could attach a price tag like that on the app. You would make more money lowering the price because more people would buy it. As of right now I don't believe many will buy this because its a new app. You need to get a good rep within the app community before you can successfully attach a price tag like that. I'm not bashing your app it might be great but not many will pay that price to find out. Just my two cents.
All our apps have a free trial, click the link at the top of the article to see our other products.
Its a pretty cool idea and done well. I downloaded the trial and its pretty slow and didn't transfer all my contacts into the application. I'll keep an eye on it and if there's an update I'll give it another try.
The initial scan does take a little while because SwooshContacts will attempt to rank your contacts based on your email history and call logs. Once that has been done things should be pretty speedy. We have tested with a few hundred contacts.
Ok great. I love the trial so far. And it has gotten speedier. Quick judgment on my part. What about missing contacts in the SwooshContact application?
I am waiting for the xobni guys to release their app - what we saw at DevCon was really impressing
http://www.xobni.com/learnmore/mobile/
Follow the link to the product in the store and there is a list of similar products at the bottom of the screen.
sorry.
to be more clear, im trying to look for an analytic app. the part where they rank contact base on calls made, call duration and sms sent.
what are some other apps that does this too? i remeber i saw a few but i can't remeber.
i had swoosh photo, it is buggy and never got updated, new release. so i already had xperience with swoosh ;)
Adding a heart to a contact pins it to the top of the list which some people wanted. Stars are also awarded automatically for activity which is a useful visual visual indicator.
Seriously?
Not hearts and stars...but pink clovers...you bet
4.99 seems like a lot to rank my contacts.. Also when I go SMS it already shows my recent people I messaged which is just as fast... This seems more for the kiddies... Does anyone really have the time to "award" hearts and stars to contacts....
$4.99 is a bit too much. I like the idea. It would have been nice (or will be, if you can use actually pictures for your contacts. Drop the price and you have a buyer in me.
Add photos to your contacts in the BlackBerry AddressBook and they should show in SwooshContacts.
Sounds interesting.