The GW Micro blog has been discontinued. For instant updates on GW Micro products and events, follow us on Twitter, and like us on Facebook.
Review: Contact Keeper
by Aaron Smith on Wednesday, September 5 2007Windows Vista users have access to Windows Contacts. Microsoft Outlook users have access to the Outlook Contact Manager. But what about the rest of us? What better way to keep track of contacts than with software named ContactKeeper?
Created by Tim Pieters, ContactKeeper is a simple way to keep track of all your acquaintances, be they family, friends, business associates, complete strangers that hand you business cards at trade shows, or anyone whose contact information is important to you.
When you first launch ContactKeeper, you're placed in a quick search edit box where, aptly enough, you can quickly search through your existing contact information. Creating new contacts is as easy as pressing CTRL-A. The add dialog lets you enter contact information such as name, address, numbers, email, and birthday (ContactKeeper also includes a birthday reminder, although the birthday calendar is not keyboard accessible).
Once you have a plethora of contacts, you can navigate through them simply by tabbing through the various controls on the mains screen. You can choose to send selected contacts a single email using CTRL-M, making mass mailings a breeze.
ContactKeeper also comes in many different languages, allows you to password protect your contact database, let's you change the date format, whether the names display as first name, last name, or last name, first name, let's you export selected contacts to text or XHTML, let's you use your contact database to create labels in Microsoft Word, automatically checks for new versions, and is completely free.
There are only two accessibility issues that I noticed, both of which can be overcome with Window-Eyes. First, in the Add dialog, there are buttons that contain images for adding new email and phone numbers. The images are a plus sign for adding, a pencil for editing, and a minus for removing. Fortunately, each button has a tooltip with the associated task, so labeling the graphics is a breeze (note that the edit and remove buttons are only enabled once an entry has been added).
The second issue can be found in the email dialog. When you select an address, then TAB, you'll just hear, "button." The reason is because there's a greater than sign on the button, and math punctuation is off by default. Once you turn math punctuation on, you'll hear both the greater than sign (used for adding addresses to an email list) and the less then sign (used for removing addresses from an email list).
Aside from those two very minor issues, ContactKeeper is a simple to use, accessible contact manager that's worth checking into if you have contacts to keep.
