Sponsored mentions
I’ve been an avid reader of MacFormat since the first issue. It has been an incredible asset in making the most of my many Apple purchases over that time.
On the whole, I think it is well written and I generally trust the reviews, but recently I’ve become slightly suspicious that certain apps are being given prominence in return for payment. The latest example was in your tutorial ‘Make More of Contacts’ in the January issue, where ‘Start using Cardhop’ includes the line “That feature alone might be worth 15 quid”.
The feature it refers to is being able to save the names of children in a notes field, but this is also possible in Contacts: in its preferences, click Template, then Add Field and select Related Name. This is actually much more useful than just putting them in a notes field, as you can ask Siri to call your husband or wife, if labelled correctly. I was surprised that this very useful tip was missing from the main article.
I also know that there are many alternatives to Contacts on the App Store, but why were no others referenced?
It leads to the suspicion that Cardhop paid for this entry. Please correct me if that’s not the case. I wouldn’t actually mind if it were, provided that small section was labelled as an ‘advertising feature’ or similar. If I were ever to suspect that the reviews weren’t fair, I’d be forced to cancel my subscription, which would be a very sad day, both for you and for me! by Lee Bromley
Alan says…
Thanks for raising this concern, Lee. I’ll take this opportunity to assure our readers that MacFormat follows proper practice where paid-for inclusion is concerned; such content is marked with prominent mention of being ‘advertorial’.
That’s certainly not the case here. What’s happened is that the writer’s intent has become unclear. Craig didn’t intend to give the impression that this is a capability that Contacts lacks, rather that Cardhop’s presentation is more helpful – say, if you use the trick of storing details of your last in-person interaction with someone in that field. You can easily scroll down to the notes field in Contacts, but with Cardhop’s menu bar feature, when you highlight a search result, the notes field is shown prominently, even if it’s blank. In retrospect, we could have better illustrated this.