iPhone Search App Review
One of the few obvious deficiencies of our iPhones is the lack of a search feature. Many times have I wanted to look up a contact or find a birthday/anniversary etc. on my iPhone. For contacts I have to resort to the Phone app contacts list and for calendar events... well everyday has a dot in my calendar which isn't very helpful. Enter Polar Bear Farm's PBF Search - an iPhone Search tool.
PBF Search has a clean and simple interface whose Home screen provides you with three primary options the first of which, Go To Date is more of usability feature to improve on the iPhone Calendars lack of said feature. The real genius is in the Search Contacts and Search Calendar options below.
Before we cover those it's worth saying that I just can't understand why iPhone search was left out of the stock firmware and given the iPhone SDK's current restrictions it seems unlikely a 3PD app is going to be able to officially do it (*cough* spolight? *cough*).
Search your iPhone Contacts
The normal iPhone contacts interface would have you use the slightly out of place alphabet scroll bar on the right hand side to whiz through your contacts. Sadly if you have more than a hundred contacts it starts to become unwieldy. Worse still the list is sorted by last name this is fine for formal business contacts but a bit un-natural for friends or family.
As you can see above performing a search of your iPhone contacts is a simple matter of tapping in the first few letters. PBF Search will look for those letters in the name, numbers and notes field of your contacts displaying the best three matches until your tap Search. Thus searching for David may bring up results where you have noted a childs name and birthday for a contact.
The results are listed by your iPhone Contacts list entry name and tapping a name brings up an non-editable contact info sheet. It's smart enough to dial any number you tap, email any email address and has an additional Text Message button at the bottom.
Search your iPhone Calendar
Trying to track down an event on your iPhone's calendar is pretty slow and laborious. My month calendar has dots for every day - something to do with Outlook synching I think - so I can never tell when something is actually on that day without tapping it. Regardless of my issues it's hard work tracking down any calendar event if you don't know the precise day.
In a similar way to contact search the calendar search tool will search event name, summary, description and location fields of calendar records for your tapped in words or letters and give you the top three results as you tap. Tap Search when you are done with entering to see all the results. Unfortunately on the current versio you cannot go from a result to it's entry in Calendar if you want to edit. Hence you might want to Go To Date instead
The Go To Date tool is simple a great way to get to specific date in your calendar without spending ages tapping the month arrows or overshooting whilst holding down the month arrow. This tool lets you dial that date and then loads the calendar app straight on that date.
All iPhone search operations were quick, in fact there's no noticeable delay in searching over 750 contacts or 450 calendar entries (Plaxo insists on putting in birthdays for every new contact despite it being turned off). PBF Search does not use a data store or hashfile and requires no time to pre-process.
Future Versions
Polar Bear Farm say they'd like to use complete contact information for searching as well as localised version for international users; they mention a Spotlight type generalised search. This would be very welcome as I'd really like PBF Search to include Notes and maybe emails within the iPhone Search parameters.
Requirements and Installation
I have PBF Search installed and running fine on my jail broken v1.1.4 firmware iPhone.
- Jail Break your iPhone
- In Installer, install Community Sources from the Sources category (it's part of Ste Packaging's repository) and restart Installer
- You'll find Search in the Utilities category
- Install and away you go
I urge you to donate to PBF if you like PBF Search (and to remove the polite nag screen).
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however do you think it will be able to search inside emails as well?
If you try to use the iPhone as an enterprise gadget you often got over 100 emails and you have no way of finding a specific one unless you go searching one by one....
@myriam you'll need to refresh the respository. it should be listed under Search
@Filipe not yet. Might be in a future version. The problem is that emails can be huge and PDF Search does not store a cache, it searches in realtime. One way to do it would be have an email specific search i suppose. It would be very very handy as you say...
~ Simon
