If you had seen Steve Jobs Keynote address to announce the iPhone in January, you would have been sold on buying the jesus phone when he demonstrated the scrolling of contacts with a flick of a finger.

However, if you have many contacts on your iPhone and find flicking through the contacts laborious; then you will be interested in reading about the latest iPhone app.

iPhone hackers over at Polar Bear Farm have released “Search” a native third-party iPhone application that enables searching for contacts and searching a specific date in the calendar application on your iPhone.

olar Bear Farm is a software development company which is into designing applications for the iPhone, they call themselves “Creators of Innovative iPhone Applications”.

Their first iPhone application called “Search” enables searching for contacts on an iPhone and searching a date under the calendar application. So you longer need to flick through your long list of contacts or months in case of calendar instead you can quickly go directly to the contact or date desired.

Their application is based on a simple idea and addresses a real problem. It works exactly as described above and I loved the user interface of searching for specific dates (very iPhone-like) as can be seen in the screenshots below. The search results that are return only show the phone number(s) of the contact selected, however future enhancements will enable you to see the complete contact information such as email addresses, physical addresses, contact pictures etc.

The iPhone hackers are looking to monetize through donations so you will be prompted with the “Please Donate” popup every time you want to use the App, though once you have donated you will probably be given a license key which I am guessing will stop the popups.

You can install Search using the cool Installer app, in case you don’t already know; Installer app is also installed when you use the single-click method jailbreak method for iPhone or iPod OS v1.1.1.

Once you have Installer app installed on your iPhone, tap on the Installer icon on your iPhone’s home screen, then tap on the Utilities category, Tap on Search and then “Install” to install the third-party iPhone application.

The iPhone app is still in beta and the iPhone hackers are looking to add the following features in future versions:

• Complete contact information, email addresses, physical addresses, contact pictures etc.
• Ability to set the default screen on start up. So if you want Search to open straight to the contact search screen you will be able to set that as an option.
• Extend search fields for contacts (beyond just first, last and organisation name).
• Calendar event searching.
• SMS searching.

Another feature that will nice to have would be to extend search for all media types as well like Songs, videos etc to avoid scrolling.

Folks at Polar Bear Farm, thanks for “Search”.

Posted on November 2nd, 2007 by admin
Filed under: iPhone News, iPhone Tips