App to lock certain address book contacts?

[shonamelissa]

Hi all,

My address book contains family and friends but also contains clients who I would rather not call or sms accidentally!
Does anybody know of an app or something I can use to lock certain address book entries? That way before I send an SMS or making a call to a client it might say "are you sure you wish to continue" or something like that... then if I'm sending an SMS to my husband and accidentally click a client it will try to stop me first!

This hasn't happened.. But I feel that there is a chance it very well could in the future. Just want to be prepared in case.

Thanks for your input!
Shona

 

[-MRB]

Why don't you prefix the names of your clients with something, so they are all bunched together at the bottom of your contacts list

 

[Small White Car]

What do you sync your contacts with? (G-Mail? Apple address book?)

Most services allow you to create different lists (a lot like iTunes playlists). It will help to have a "Friend" list and a "Work" list. The Contacts app on the iPhone refers to them as 'Groups.'

So that's halfway there, at least. But of course that doesn't help with auto-complete. If you're typing a text to Jill Sims and you miss a letter and it corrects to Jill Simpson, well, I can't think of a way around that.

You just have to double-check everything before hitting send. It's a good idea in general anyway.

 

[shonamelissa]

Thanks for your replies!

MRB that is a great suggestion however I use a program called iBiz for all my client tracking and invoicing which shares my Address Book and keeps everything synced. If I were to make a prefix then all their invoices would come out with it in their names.
It is a good idea though so maybe I could use it as a last resort and just manually remove the prefix every time I create an invoice or write them an email.

Small White Car, I use the mac Address Book and I do have lists. One of them being a client list. As you mentioned though, this still doesn't stop me from calling or smsing them. I of course check everything twice. Just wondering if there is an app out there for automating as a 3rd option.

 

[shonamelissa]

Does anybody else have a suggestion?

 

[vettori]

No app can affect how other apps works. This means that you can't use an app to mark a contact as "protected" and expect this contact to now show or require confirmation on Apple Messages app, for example.

What an app can do is some form of protection when you're inside the app.
For example, on my ABContacts app there's an option to filter contacts; once filtering is active, you don't see the filtered contacts and you can't call, email or sms that contacts. But this works only when you're using ABContacts.

For your specific request, current version of ABContacts can filter by company, notes, addresses. So if you add a "tag" on your notes field you can actually do what you're looking for. You have to add something like "SECCON" (any word is ok) to contacts to show, activate the filter using the word you've entered and it's done. When you want to see and use all contacts, just remove the filter and they will reappear.

The link for the app is on signature, user's guide is here, if you need further help, just ask

 

[shonamelissa]

Great! Thanks Vettori. Really useful, I'll look into that now

 

[DIGITALiam]

How about a space infront of all your clients names. That way it would put them all at the bottom but wouldn't look that much different when emailing them or creating an invoice. Or you could but a prefix infront of all your family and friends names (like 'A') to move them all to the top.