Beware When Pasting Phone Numbers Copied from Contacts

Article Comments
21

One of the recommendations in the article is to use the App, Cardhop. I checked into it but could not find pricing information from links on their website, and had to do a browser search to find it. Prices are only provided on a monthly basis for both monthly and yearly pricing. I regard this as a psychological trick to make the cost seem low rather than to provide the actual yearly cost with an annual subscription. So here is the information:

While Cardhop is free, the focus of the provider is to integrate it with another App, Fantastical a time management App of which is subscription software for at least $40/year for life. As for me, I am strongly opposed to ANY subscription software that stores my personal data given the fact that if I do not continue to pay I could be blocked from accessing my own data. Doing the math, if you use Fantastical, for 10 years that is at least $400, or more if they raise their prices. Not only that, if the company shuts down or drops the product, how are you going to access your data to transfer, it to another App? While the information is somewhat sketchy it seems that Fantastical will only sync with Apple Apps when the information is also stored on iCloud or some other cloud service such as Google. If you have local calendars on your Mac or perhaps reminders and notes, they seemingly will not be synced, Of course, this means that if your internet connection is down or unavailable your information will not be synced and it also raises privacy and security issues as these days, anything on the cloud can possibly be hacked or open to 3rd party scrutiny. despite providing promising to keep it safe and private. The good news about this is that Fantastical does allow exporting of information into ics, vcf or csv formats appropriately. For me, this would mean having to backup the data on a regular basis by exporting it. For me, the lack of local syncing on my Mac is a big showstopper.

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22

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 ā€˜paste specialā€™ 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 ā€“ 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.

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23

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. :melting_face:

24

Thereā€™s nothing new or hidden about Cardhop being free, with additional features available with a subscription. Itā€™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 donā€™t want to subscribe to a free app to get additional features, thatā€™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 Appleā€™s system-wide databases, thereā€™s absolutely no lock-in.

I honestly donā€™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, donā€™t use Cardhop and Fantastical.

The concern about the userā€™s Internet connection being down is a complete red herring. All calendar and contact data is stored locally, with changes being synced. If you donā€™t have Internet access for a while due to being on a flight or whatever, you just wonā€™t get changes. As soon as you have Internet access again, everything catches up. And again, the same will be true of Appleā€™s Calendar and Contacts and Reminders.

Finally, there are no significant security and privacy issues with Cardhop and Fantastical that arenā€™t shared by all other calendar and contact management apps that rely on online servers, including Appleā€™s apps. You can worry about it all you want, but I canā€™t recall ever seeing a significant breach of such services.

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25

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.

26

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 perfectlyā€¦

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 ā€“ feel free to move this comment to a new thread, Adam. Merry Christmas, one and all!

27

Interesting! Auto-filling from what app? Or do you mean in Safari?

28

Been there, tripped over that.

Solved it by pasting the contents of the copy buffer into a hex editor, which revealed the invisible and troublesome characters.

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29

Sorry Adam, yes I did mean in Safari using the AutoFill credit card details option in Preferences, sorry Settings!

30

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?

31

It makes no differenceā€”the Unicode characters are real characters, not formatting.

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32

I wonder if this has the same root cause that has been plaguing me with crashes in Contacts for years? Select a card - you donā€™t even have to go into edit mode. If your card is a member of any groups (manually created or smart), then pressing the āŒ„ [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 Mumā€™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 Iā€™m writing Christmas cards and using the Notes fields to record it), I guess Iā€™ll be deselecting Contacts under iCloud in System Preferences, so itā€™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).

33

Hi GaryS,

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 isnā€™t already in, the group doesnā€™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 donā€™t feel like starting again!

34

This has bothered me for yearsā€¦ 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 Iā€™ve entrusted it to Keyboard Maestro.

35

2 posts were split to a new topic: Contacts treating numbers with country codes as different

36

Exactly the same here. I do the same finger acrobatic almost automatically since many years and always think, Ā«when will Apple solve this bug?Ā». But as I read above, it is not necessarily a bug but a feature or something in-between :sweat_smile:

37

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?

38

This may be related (itā€™s for MacOS)

39

When I have encountered this, it is almost always a dimwitted web ā€œdeveloperā€ who is trying to use Javascript to validate input while the user types. A bad idea on so many levelsā€¦

There are workarounds. Keyboard Maestro, for example, has an ā€œInsert text by typingā€ command that can use the clipboard as its source and simulates typing instead of pasting.

40

I have KM, but I really need something that does the same thing with iOS so I can use it with my iPad.