For years I have used TexEdit (set for plain text format) as a convenient filter to remove extraneous junk before pasting data, especially data from web pages. The total UI interaction for ‘paste special’ in Excel is longer and more complex than using TextEdit. I often keep a document window open just for this use.
Today, I checked out the Terminal app for hidden character display. It shows that TextEdit works for removing these.
I am disappointed at how many expensive web sites do not filter inputs – except for password entry which result in rules displayed only after a trial entry. It seems that quality checks on these sites consist of appearance checks by the marketing department without functional checks with real web browsers.
US federal and Michigan state income tax forms differ on Social Security number entry. In other sites, mm/dd/yyyy date entry are sometimes one input field and others are three fields. Programmers are often lazy.
There’s nothing new or hidden about Cardhop being free, with additional features available with a subscription. It’s bundled with Fantastical (which is a calendar app, not a CRM), on macOS, iOS, and iPadOS, as we covered in the article I linked at the end, and as Flexibits makes clear on its pricing page:
If you don’t want to subscribe to a free app to get additional features, that’s your prerogative, but given that you have no experience with Cardhop or Fantastical, it comes off as mean-spirited to speak so negatively of them.
I do use and recommend both Cardhop and Fantastical, which sync well with the system-wide contacts and calendar and to-do databases used by Contacts and Calendar and Reminders. Even ignoring the fact that both apps can be used for free, because they tie into Apple’s system-wide databases, there’s absolutely no lock-in.
I honestly don’t know what the situation with local calendars or contact sets is, but since I want to access my data on all my devices and share with other people, I would never use them or recommend that others do. Most people use iCloud, Outlook, Google, or other calendaring and contact servers. If you want to keep everything local, don’t use Cardhop and Fantastical.
The concern about the user’s Internet connection being down is a complete red herring. All calendar and contact data is stored locally, with changes being synced. If you don’t have Internet access for a while due to being on a flight or whatever, you just won’t get changes. As soon as you have Internet access again, everything catches up. And again, the same will be true of Apple’s Calendar and Contacts and Reminders.
Finally, there are no significant security and privacy issues with Cardhop and Fantastical that aren’t shared by all other calendar and contact management apps that rely on online servers, including Apple’s apps. You can worry about it all you want, but I can’t recall ever seeing a significant breach of such services.
Thank you. Perhaps calling it a CRM was a bit broad. I could only find the pricing page with a browser search as I could not find a like to it from the companies home page after searching for a link to it from the CardHop marketing page nor was actual pricing mentioned in the App Store. It felt to me that they were trying to hide it. I just did another check on the App Store for Fantastical and found it but it does not indicate that it is a subscription. However it does indicate a subscription for Flexibits under Cardhop on the App Store. Missed it on the first check as it was not obvious. As such I have just edited my comment to reflect all this new information to insure its accuracy.
Thanks for this heads-up. I wonder if it is a similar problem to another that I have suffered recently when auto-filling credit card details into some websites. Usually, it works brilliantly but I have had it fail occasionally. Manually typing in the details works perfectly…
Whilst we are talking about the Contacts app on Mac, I have to quit and restart this app more than any other. When creating a new contact, it either tries to edit an existing one or crashes halfway through the data entry. This is true on my Mac Studio and M2 Macbook Air, both of which had completely clean installs to try and solve this issue, but it persists. How can such a relatively simple but essential app be so troublesome? This problem has existed for several years. Sorry to hijack the thread – feel free to move this comment to a new thread, Adam. Merry Christmas, one and all!
What happens if instead of Paste you use Paste And Match Style? If the web form field only accepts plain text, that is what should be pasted in. If the web form field is set to receive input in some special format, such at left-to-right, will those formatting characters be properly interpreted and the text entered correctly?
I wonder if this has the same root cause that has been plaguing me with crashes in Contacts for years? Select a card - you don’t even have to go into edit mode. If your card is a member of any groups (manually created or smart), then pressing the ⌥ [option] key should normally highlight those groups in the side bar. My manually created groups are synched from my desktop Mac to my iPhone, my iPad and the old Mac at my old Mum’s home. However, the smart groups live just on my desktop Mac - and a handful of those groups are corrupt. When Contacts tries to access one of them to see if it should highlight the group, or if you simply click one of the groups to see the full list of contacts, it crashes Contacts.
If you have any degree of muscle memory developed over the years, you could often be using the [option] key without thinking about it - and triggering the crash.
In my case, when I finally get around to it (this only tends to be a problem at Christmas time when I’m writing Christmas cards and using the Notes fields to record it), I guess I’ll be deselecting Contacts under iCloud in System Preferences, so it’s not longer synched; locating and deleting the remaining locally stored copies; then reselecting Contacts in iCloud to resynch the cards themselves along with the manually configured groups (and then manually (re)create some of the smart groups from scratch).
Many thanks for taking the trouble to reply on Christmas Day!
I think you could be on to something here. I frequently encounter another bug with Contacts whereby if it has been open for more than a few minutes and I try to drag a contact into a group that it isn’t already in, the group doesn’t highlight and the procedure cannot be performed. If I quit and restart the app, it works correctly but the bug soon returns (I suspect when the app goes into the background).
However, I am experiencing exactly the same issues on both my Mac Studio and M2 MacBook Air, so if there is a problem with my data, it is being stored in iCloud and with 2,184 cards, I don’t feel like starting again!
This has bothered me for years… so frustrating. My solution: cmd-V, right arrow, backspace, up-arrow, forward-delete. I have to do it often enough that my fingers just do it, but not often enough that I’ve entrusted it to Keyboard Maestro.
Exactly the same here. I do the same finger acrobatic almost automatically since many years and always think, «when will Apple solve this bug?». But as I read above, it is not necessarily a bug but a feature or something in-between
Maybe this is a problem with Cut and Paste of numbers into web forms on iOS. I just noticed this twice this week where a Copy and Paste of a number was not registered as a valid entry (the Continue button did not get dark) but me typing the number from my keyboard works.
In my work I have to copy a 6 digit number from Symantec VIP and paste it into a web form pretty regularly. Is there a program/keyboard whatever for iOS that will execute a script or clean up my numbers for me?
When I have encountered this, it is almost always a dimwitted web “developer” who is trying to use Javascript to validate input while the user types. A bad idea on so many levels…
There are workarounds. Keyboard Maestro, for example, has an “Insert text by typing” command that can use the clipboard as its source and simulates typing instead of pasting.
I have experienced this issue in a number of different scenarios on different websites. Copying and pasting email addresses, passwords, phone numbers etc simply does not work occasionally, for some reason, but typing in exactly the same info does. It is almost as if the website is prohibiting you from copying and pasting for security reasons but doesn’t actually go to the trouble of stopping it from working altogether.
