Jeff: November 2008 Archives

Happy to announce that SD2.5 is now available on the AppStore, in record time I might add.  Took 3 days for approval this time; great to see Apple making progress on this.

There are a ton of new features in this version, based entirely on feature requests from users.  First, I made some changes to how and what its searching.  At the highest level, SD does two types of searching: "Contains" and "Begins With".  They are what you probably think they are, and i'll use those terms to explain the changes.

I've included Notes now, so it does a Contains search on your notes for the search term.  This can lead to a lot of search results so you can optionally turn it off.  Also, I now do a Contains search on the full name and Company name rather than just begins with (search by initials still works).  This was done to accommodate middle names and multi-word names better.  Also works for entries like "Bob and Sue".  I now am ignoring all punctuation when searching, so O'Brian can be found by typing "obrian".  Also works for people who use punctuation to group contacts together.  Note you can also search with the punctuation - works either way.

One big improvement is full extended character support.  There are many users who's entire contact database is in a localized language requiring unicode characters (Russian, Hebrew, Greek, etc).  This now works - I store and search UTF8 characters.

In addition to these search changes, there are a few significant new features.  You can now View/Edit contacts directly within SearchDial.  When you click the Blue Arrow from the search results table, it takes you into this view:
From here, you can click the Edit button and edit the contact as if you were in the native Contacts app.  Any changes you make here update your main address book as well as the SD cache so you don't need to refresh.  There is no default support for Delete but I'm working on that for a future release.

Also, you can now search using T9 syntax on the dialpad.  This lets you quickly find things using bigger buttons - much easier to do one handed.
Notice how hitting the numbers 5 2 find both John Appleseed (JA) and Kate Bell (KB).  That is because 5 searches everything with a JKL and 2 everything with JKL.  This means 52 does JA, JB, JC, KA, KB and so on.  Its actually very efficient once you get used to it.  This is a mode you have to turn on in the Settings.  Its off by default, giving you a normal keyboad.  But if you enable this setting all 3 modes will use this keypad.  The only limitation is that you can't use DirectEmail while in T9 mode.

One cool new feature is that SD will remember your last search only when you call, SMS or Email someone.  This means if you search for Jeff (and it returns a Home and Mobile number) you can dial Home.  If they don't answer, you hang up and when SD reloads its right back where you left off so you can just hit Mobile.  When you do a normal exit without calling anyone, it clears this and starts with the default AutoFavorites screen.

Also, in addition to choosing your default mode (Call, SMS or Email) you can set it to remember the last mode used.  This will always start up SD in whatever mode you were in when you exited.

There have been numerous minor fixes that I hope you notice over time.  As always please email me at support@ibranc.com if you have any issues, questions or requests.

One final note: there are a number of comments on iTunes from the inital 1.0 broken release.  If you made one and SD is now working for you, I'd appreciate it if you updated it with your current thoughts.  Thanks!

 

There are a few sites out there for iPhone apps outside of the AppStore itself.  They offer a lot more in terms of community features to rate and discuss apps.