Filed under: Tips and tricks, iPhone, iPod touch
Use 'Company' field in iPhone's Contacts app for tagging
The social media movement has trained us well to tag just about everything we see. The presence of tags on photos, videos, blog posts and even to-do items has become ubiquitous.So this simple tip, from reader Greg F., struck me as an obvious, easy trick to help categorize contacts inside the iPhone's Contacts app. It involves using the Company field in Contacts to record tags -- just put in your tags, separated by a space, instead of a company name.
First things first. Why would you want to categorize contacts with tags? Consider Greg's example. When using the contact search feature to make a call, send an email or text message, he enters a tag, like 'drinkingbuddies,' instead of individual names. In return he's presented with a full list of contacts he can invite out for a beer.
Simple, powerful and a great way to prevent leaving anyone out when sending a quick, after-work invite. Other useful tags that come to my mind are 'family,' 'taxis,' 'pizzaplaces' and 'therapists.' It's not ideal, obviously, for contacts that actually have a real company name associated with them.
There's more to this though. Often I find myself sending photos from my iPhone, through email, to my Flickr, Facebook, Tumblr and Twitpic accounts. So I tagged each of those contacts 'Photos.' Now, it's a simple task to look these addresses up and pick the appropriate ones.
It's unfortunate the iPhone doesn't allow you to select more than one contact at a time, though. So even with this tip, it's still a time-consuming process to add multiple contacts to an email or SMS.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Nick L said 12:05PM on 12-11-2008
The rapists? What sort of people are you hanging out with?
Good idea though, and definitely one I'll be using :-)
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Johnny said 12:08PM on 12-11-2008
Tobias Funke
Anal-Rapist
arrested development fans? :)
emil said 12:16PM on 12-11-2008
A few of the address book tricks I like:
1) Some of my friends who call me from work will have a caller ID # show up that is not their direct line; e.g., 212-555-8000 is the general number to call the receptionist, but their number is 212-555-8005. Because address book and the iPhone support custom labels (beyond the standard work, fax, home, mobile), I store the 8000 number with the number label "CID".
2) Leveraging on that first tip, I have one contact called "zzDNA" (zz stuffs it at the bottom of the list of contacts, DNA = DO NOT ANSWER). All of the numbers for this contact are those that show up when telemarketers or other people I'd rather direct to voicemail. It's sort of a caller id blacklist.
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Dan Fellini said 4:58PM on 12-11-2008
Nice tips!
Brian said 12:30PM on 12-11-2008
I've been using a similar trick by adding a "nickname" field to my Address Book entries. This also allows voice dialing by saying the nickname with iPhone apps "Melodis Dialer" and "SayWho".
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matthew said 12:29PM on 12-11-2008
I do something along these lines in my contacts, but I do it in the notes field and I use a delimiter to allow for multiple tags and to save confusion from matching on actual notes I might type in. So I might for instance have [Friend] or [Restaurant][Indian] in the notes. Then I have Smart Groups that organize my contacts based on these tags. What drives me crazy is that the iPhone only supports static groups, not smart groups, so I can't leverage this on my iPhone. I've submitted a suggestion to Apple to add Smart Group support, but who knows if that'll ever happen....
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akatsuki said 12:53PM on 12-11-2008
Why wouldn't you just use notes? I actually use the company field. Often.
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antiorario said 1:18PM on 12-11-2008
Exactly the same here. But I guess the problem is that the iPhone contact search doesn't look inside notes. Heck, it doesn't even look in the nickname field.
Christian A. Stroemmen said 12:36PM on 12-11-2008
You can use nickname tag instead of company. Much better.
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Namdnal Siroj said 5:44AM on 12-12-2008
I adopted Apple's keyword logic, that they use on their website, which is to preface keywords with the letter "k". kfamily, kclient, etcetera.
That way regular words are left out from searches and smart folders.
Josh said 1:35PM on 12-11-2008
The "Beer" link is perfect.
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kc! said 12:39PM on 12-11-2008
Isn't that what Groups are for?
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Grodesh said 1:01PM on 12-11-2008
Exactly my thought. I use contact groups thoroughly for this task!
mark said 4:22AM on 12-13-2008
Exactly. I put my tags in the comment section, and create smart groups in address book (on my mac) for each tag.
For example, I have smart groups for "friend1," "friend2," "dates," "former faves," "family," etc. You create the smart list once, and from then on, they're always available on your iphone.
Advantages:
(1) The "company" field is left free for actual company names, and (2) you never have to type a tag into a search field in order to search for it.
Javid Alimohideen said 12:41PM on 12-11-2008
The solution I came up for sending emails to multiple people, it to write my own application called "Mail2Group" I use email a lot to send emails to groups of people so frequently that I ended up writing an app that could help me do it with ease. I am not trying to market my app here. But, just wanted to comment on how bad I missed the group mailing feature in the first place.
http://javid.alimohideen.googlepages.com/aboutmail2group
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Hank said 12:42PM on 12-11-2008
Well the problem would be solved if Apple just made the search function on the iPhone work like the manual says it's supposed to. Then you could enter the tags right in the note section. Searching on city doesn't work either. Now, for example, if you find yourself in Chicago and want to see what contacts you have there, you're out of luck.
From their User Guide:
"You can search the contacts synced to iPhone by name, address, or other information included with the contacts."
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Eric said 1:32PM on 12-11-2008
Use the NOTES field...
Company field for tags? Maybe for kids
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Eric said 1:39PM on 12-11-2008
While I know you need to do this on a computer, why not just use contact groups?
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sm said 2:08PM on 12-11-2008
Nice Dr Horrible reference. =)
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Dan Fellini said 5:02PM on 12-11-2008
A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do.
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