I’m a fan of Coverflow – I really like navigating my stuff by flicking through pictures. Admittedly, it’s not ideal for every situation, and it some it slows things down. In May, I wrote in “Embracing Coverflow” about the suitability of Coverflow-style browsing for Contacts – pictures are how you recognise people, so in this case I think it’s a natural fit.
Now, Plausible Labs has released Peeps, which embodies many of the ideas I wrote about. After a bit of initial confusion with Apple (over the perceived use of the private Coverflow API), the app was finally published to the App Store in late December. Peeps is able to talk to your built-in Contacts list, so there’s no maintaining another list of people. It pulls in all the photos on first launch, and keeps them updated.
It has three modes:
In portrait:
- (1) Text list of groups
- (2) Photo list of contacts within a group
In landscape:
- (3) Coverflow-style list of contacts
(either all contacts or those within the group that you were viewing when you adjust the phone’s orientation).
In Coverflow-mode, you can flick through contacts visually, as you do with music within the iPod application. Tap a contact, and it turns over to reveal phone numbers and email addresses. At this point, you can also set a photo by tapping on the owl icon. Tap on a phone number and you get the option to Call or SMS, or tap on an email address and it’ll launch Mail.
Enhanced contact management
Peeps also adds in contact management functionality that should already be present on the iPhone – the ability to add groups, manage their members, and delete contacts entirely. All of this works very well, and you can tell that a lot of work has gone into this app – not only the coding, but the thought behind how people want to interface with their contacts.
The biggest problem for Peeps is that, if you don’t have a lot of pictures filled in, you’re left with a lot of greyed-out Peeps icons. Perhaps they could take a cue from the Palm Pre and pull pictures from Facebook and other social networking sites. Or is this too much to ask for a contact management app that is restricted by its sandbox?
My wishlist
This app doesn’t do everything on my wishlist from my May article. There isn’t a Recents mode, that shows the last people that you’ve been engaged in conversation with. This would be very useful to visually display the most recent conversations, whatever the medium used (although the sandboxing issue may prevent this). Nor is there any presence, so that you can see who’s online and who’s not.
This is where the Palm Pre seems to excel – in bringing everything together using Synergy, and letting you knows who’s available to be contacted right now. I’d recommend Rui Carmo’s excellent post on the Pre’s interface over at the Tao of Mac.
It would also be nice if you could set defaults – on Nokia phones you can set a default number for various actions, e.g. always call the landline, always send a text to the mobile.
It doesn’t work so well as a dialler, as it’s a bit too slow to make a quick call. The developer, Landon Fuller, does have search and quick-jump by letter features in the list of requests. Those improvements will make the app more of a contender for first choice when initiating a call/text/email with one of your friends. Also under consideration is a list view with pictures, as a whole application or per-group setting.
I would much prefer if Peep’s functionality was built in to Contacts, but it isn’t. But I find myself regularly turning to Peeps, not for dialling but for keeping my contacts properly organised. In providing an alternative that provides additional functionality and is visually appealing, Peeps is certainly a better contact manager than Apple’s built-in functionality, and with a few tweaks and additions could be a better dialler as well. With a few more, it could provide an excellent interface to visually keep track of all your conversations.
Peeps is available for £1.19 from the App Store.
Unusually, there is also a demo available for jailbroken iPhones, and you can sign up for beta testing at the Plausible Labs site.