OD(e) 4 Contact

July 18th, 2004
Categories: Interface, OS X

I’ve been using Objective Decision’s OD4Contact, a full-featured contact manager and basic task manager for the last week or so.

Great Features

  • Rendezvous contact sharing
    This is perfect for small companies and homes that don’t have their own LDAP server, but need some of the functionality.
  • Tasks
    A good general task management system that works well for project overviews.
  • Sub-groups
    Hierarchical grouping is a nice option to have.
  • Integrated address searching
    Rather handy for filling in the blanks for your existing contacts.
  • Integrated mapping
    Having it integrated isn’t necessary, but convenient.
  • Multiple URLs per person
    For example, you can store addresses for a developer’s weblog and their company’s page. Handy.
  • Visually appealing notifications
    Customizable coloring and opacity levels.

Comments and Suggestions

Importing and Editing Contacts and Groups

  1. I have only about 100 contacts, and the application still takes about 30 seconds to import them (800Mhz G4 with 1GB of RAM). Displaying an indeterminate progress window of some sort while contacts are being imported for the first time would be a good idea. People likely to be looking for a contact manager more fully featured than Apple’s Address Book are more likely to have many contacts. You don’t want them to think that your application has frozen while it is busy importing their contact list. Not a good first impression!
  2. In the address card editing window’s Work section, what are Unit One, Two, and Three for? These labels don’t give me a good idea as to their purpose.
  3. What do the checkboxes in the contact editing window’s Emails and Phones sections do?
  4. Address card editing window toolbar display style should be customizable (without having to know the Command-click the Tic-Tac trick). The Show/Hide Toolbar (Command-Option-T, dynamically titled) and Customize Toolbar… commands belong under the View menu. Making these commands accessible via Control-clicking on the toolbar itself is another useful shortcut.
  5. The dialog that appears to confirm the updating of a card with information retrieved using the search facilities should have a question mark, not a period.
  6. Use only one term to refer to the process of removing a group; Remove or Delete.
  7. The Remove Group and Add Group commands in the contextual menu should have ellipses since they require further user interaction to be completed.
  8. When deleting a group, indicate whether or not the contacts within that group will also be deleted.
  9. For clarity’s sake, the Remove Contact menu item should be worded as “Move to the Trash”. If you could give the Trash icon two states (empty/not empty) that would help.

Miscellaneous General Comments

  1. Double-clicking the vertical splitter between the Sources and Groups section could collapse the Sources pane. Try double-clicking the Sidebar/folder content splitter in the Finder to see what I mean.
  2. When the splitter between the Sources/Groups and the People listings cannot be moved up or down any further, the cursor should change to reflect it.
  3. It would be nice if you could make the New Task sheet resizable in order to make it easier to see the contact list.
  4. Column auto-sizing controls like those found in iTunes might be useful.
  5. The help system should really use Apple’s Help interface, but if you are going to use a browser, it ought to be the user’s system default rather than insisting on Safari.
  6. The Preferences window does not remain on top of the main window when using the Dock to switch to OD4Contact from another application. OmniWeb 5 is the only other application I’ve used which exhibits the same (very annoying) behavior.

Preferences

Next and Previous buttons would be a welcome addition to the Preferences window.

Main
  1. “Empty the Trash when quitting“. Leaving is a somewhat ambiguous term.
  2. Drag and drop of what to the desktop will create single or multiple vCards? I’m assuming this is for when groups are dragged… Be explicit in your wording if it involves a very specific object and action: Drag-and-drop of a group will create:
    3. Individual vCards for each group member

    A single vCard including all group members
Contacts

Tasks
  1. The second option might be better worded “Color task check boxes and priority stars using category label colors”.
  2. What does “Strip Task” do? I’d suggest a rewording, but I don’t know what it does!

Print Deposit
  1. Option #1 reworded: “Save Print Deposit items before quitting”.
  2. Using inches as the displayed default in the margins section might be a better choice since most people have some idea of what an inch is, but not a point.
Reminders

For the SMTP configuration: “Outgoing mail server: smtp.mac.com”

Categories
  1. Renaming of categories does not appear to take effect immediately.
  2. Why not use the same labeling layout used in the Finder’s preferences? Place the color boxes to the left of the category titles and remove the unnecessary “Category #:” text altogether.
Appearance

If possible, make the Font Size: menus WYSIWYG so users can literally see what the sizing options are rather than having to guess based on the relative words.

Note: the above drop-down menu item titles will only appear differently sized in browsers (for example, Gecko-based) which allow CSS to control text sizing within option elements.

Dial Settings

“Add # before every phone number”.

Sharing

I think placing the contact sharing start/stop button and status indicator above the scope selection controls might make more sense. That way, when sharing is not active, you can desaturate both radio options while remaining clear.

Yellow Pages

“Remember successful searches”. If you keep the existing wording: searches, not searchs.

Map
  1. “Default Map Service:”.
  2. For the cautionary note below the second setting: “Enabling this setting is only recommended for users with broadband connections such as cable or DSL.”

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