Mac and the Call Using Your iPhone
If you have both Mac and iPhone, you may notice they are supplement each other so good nowadays. A Mac even can call using your iPhone. The call would happen on a Mac — via FaceTime app — thru the Mac’s mic and speakers, or headphones, Bluetooth headset, AirPods, or whatever.
But the problem was that FaceTime app has no dialer. And we made it. Let me introduce Numpad — a Dialer for FaceTime.
The app is pretty straightforward: type or paste a number → click Call button. Then the FaceTime app will offer you make a cellular call using your iPhone.
Get Numpad on the Mac App Store.
Privacy Policy
Numpad doesn’t collect any user data, address book contacts, or anything else. It even makes 0 network requests. Everything is offline. As it should be.
Development
Numpad recognizes country calling codes, and shows a country name on top. It even recognizes an identical dialing code for US/Canada, and Russia/Kazakhstan phone numbers.
On launch, the app will try to paste a phone number from the pasteboard. If there is not a phone number there, the app ignore it.
Most proudly I can tell about the typing a phone number using software buttons. It took a lot of attention to details to make it identical to a hardware typing. Delete key works as expected in a Backspace mode, and delete-selected-text mode. Typing in the middle of text field works as expected too. This behavior isn’t given out of the box, it should be carefully implemented.
User interface design took several approaches to become so nice-looking. Many thanks to my friend Den Talalá. A dark mode is already done, and will come with a macOS Mojave release in September.
