Contactical

Dear users, thank you for your interest in Contactical for Vtiger CRM. 

The Contactical app is temporarily removed from the App Store and I hope its status will be restored soon. 

Native UI interface is coming soon! 

With support for Projects, Project Tasks and HTTP Basic Authentication, the latest update to Contactical is out now on the App Store.

Yes, Contactical for Vtiger already supports more paranoid methods of authentication such as SSL Certificates for client authentication, but thanks to customer requests, starting version 1.3 (soon on the App Store) you will be also able to access servers that request username and password through HTTP Basic Authentication. 

See how it looks like in Contactical:

You asked for it, we posted in our requests forum (hey, you can, too!) and now we are working on it. 

Support for displaying Projects from your Vtiger installation and Project Tasks (creating, editing and browsing) will be included in the next release!

By the way, which screen layout do you like the most? A or B? 

A new version of Contactical is headed for review on the App Store, featuring iOS8 support and improved support for Vtiger CRM 6.1.0. 

The introduction of the new high-resolution displays in iPhone 6 and, especially, the iPhone 6 Plus makes necessary to rethink how graphic elements are displayed within iOS apps. 

The 5.5" screen of the iPhone 6 Plus introduces the need to ship the .PNG files at a @3x version, at a price of app bundle size (and apps already weight a lot of Megabytes when downloaded from the App Store) and, as I want to mention today, quality. 

In Contactical, I use image assets very cautiously: icons are used where strictly necessary. When displaying the monthly calendar, however, there is the need to use graphic elements such as for the arrows used to move between months or the circles used to provide feedback on the selected day of the month. 

When moving to the 1920*1080 screen of the iPhone 6 Plus, however, including @3x version of the circle image did not help: the borders were not smooth enough. (On a note aside, if you want to find out more on the Points and Pixel discussion on the iPhone 6 Plus screen, this is a very good read ).

The approach I took was to replace the images with system-drawn (thus resolution-independent) lines and shapes. Technically speaking, the UIImageViews were replaced by UIViews that contain UIBezierPaths. 

The result is right in front of your eyes (going from images - Left- to paths -right-): 

Also, this saves space. In this case the advantage was of few Kilobytes, but it could be more for your app. 

I could in fact delete these files:

As by gixWorks's philosophy, the improvements were shared on GitHub at the calendar project's page. 

I hope this article provides suggestions to people that need to support high-resolution displays, and give a glimpse of the care I took in working on Contactical. 

New version of Contactical has just been submitted to the App Store and it's expected to land in about a week from now. 

Please enter you email address where we can email you a promo code to download for free the iOS App "Contactical for Vtiger CRM". The app can be downloaded here: https://itunes.apple.com/nl/app/contactical-for-vtiger-crm/id879934819

New icons!

I hope you'll love 'em!

CC-BY:

    User by Jens Tärning from The Noun Project

    Dart Board by Ana Lourenço from The Noun Project

    Campaign by Paul Souders from The Noun Project

    Buildings by Uri Kelman from The Noun Project

Choosing icons to meaningfully represent your content in a mobile app is never an easy task, but thanks to many icon packages (such as Glyphish or the many other alternatives) we can say that choice is abundant for this task: do you need an icon for the "Camera" functionality? I am sure you'll find one that you like.

However, what about Customer Relationship Management apps? In this specific domain, while representing entities such as "Contacts" may be an easy task, finding good icons to represent concepts such as "Leads", "Campaigns" and "Opportunities" can be tricky.  There are not so many apps of this type on the store to start with, and few of them actually offer a pleasant user interface. However, thanks to Creative Commons licensing, we have a broad range of authors publishing their works under a permissive license, requiring attribution (sometimes it's even optional, as in case of Public Domain license) and websites that help in finding those works. My favourite one is Noun Project and I invite you to check it out, as they are doing an amazing job.

Contactical needs to push the bar higher, and this is why I am currently working to improve the quality of the icons for each type of record that the application can manage: Contacts, Organizations, Leads, Campaigns, Help Desk Tickets and Opportunities. 

Here is my current selection, that will go live in the next update of Contactical:

 Contacts

 Organizations

 Leads

 Opportunities

 Campaigns

 Tickets

Any thoughts?

  Icons released under Creative Commons License.

A new version of Contactical for Vtiger (1.2.1) has been submitted to the App Store. You will see it available in a few days. Here's the cool new feature this time:

The application now synchronises appointments even when it is not running!

Contactical for Vtiger CRM is now available for purchase on the App Store! [iTunes Link]

A big "thank you" to all beta testers!

I truly hope it's going to be a helpful tool for your business!