New maintainer wanted! I don't have time to develop this application anymore. If you would like to pick it up, please send me an email: stepp@atistar.net. Multiple contact transfer is implemented; bluetooth transfer is mostly implemented, but untested.

Application Info

ContactXfer is a simple iPhone application that sends and receives Address Book data between iPhones. It accomplishes this feat by connecting over a network. What this means, is that you may only transfer contacts when both phones are on the same network (and by network, I do not mean Edge or any other cell network).

If you are on a university campus or enterprise network, however, the two phones could very well be separated by a large distance. ContactXfer uses Bonjour, so if you can see far away printers on your network, chances are you can transfer contacts to far away phones.

Unfortunately, an iPhone cannot create an Ad-Hoc wireless network all by itself. If it could, then all you would need are two iPhones, and you'd be set. Since it can't, there has to be an existing network (although that can be either Ad-Hoc or Managed).

Please send me an email if you have a bug report or feature request. My email address is available through the app entry in Cydia.

SDK 3.0: I am working on a new version for SDK 3.0, which will include Bluetooth pairing and probably the ability to transfer multiple contacts at once. This means you don't need a wireless network to do a transfer. Operation will fall back to the old way in case you are on a big network and want to transfer something to a phone that's far away.

If you have an opinion as to the best interface for transferring multiple contacts, feel free to let me know!

Sending

After pressing the "Send" button, your address book is displayed, allowing you to choose a contact to send. The next step is to choose who will receive this contact.

To choose a receiver, pick its name out of the receiver browser. After a selection is made, the contact data will be sent.

Receiving

Pressing the "Receive" button will cause your phone to begin listening for a sender. A message will also be sent out to the network, notifying possible senders that you are, in fact, listening.

If a sender picks your phone's name out of the receiver list, then contact data will be sent to your phone. Once this has completed, you will see a screen allowing you to edit the contact information before saving it to your address book.

Code

ContactXfer is free software, subject to the terms and conditions of the GNU General Public License. You may find source available for download in the distribution area.

The code is not terribly clean, as this was a learning experience for me (first Cocoa app). I'm sure it could use some fixing up; perhaps some of you veteran OSX/iPhone developers out there can make it into a real program.

Each source archive is signed with my PGP key, so that you may verify that you have a good copy.