If you always hang around your local calling area, then life it easy, because you store all your local numbers as local numbers, and all of your long distance numbers as long distance numbers.

However, if you travel frequently and are often in an area where calls back to your home city are now long distance, then you find yourself forced to deal with this issue by storing all your numbers as if they were long distance (which in North America means putting a 1 in front of the 10-digit local number). Virtually all service providers allow calls to be made in this way and they only charge long distance when it truly applies.

The above may seem like a reasonable solution, but it takes away the notification most providers give when you try to dial a long distance number as though it was local. Many times we want to know that we are about to make a long distance call so that we can decide what to do about it.

If that was all there was to the long distance issue it would probably have been a waste of time to write a program to fix it. However, it far from ends there. Service providers are notorious for charging long distance rates that are well above what you can get from 3rd party providers, who usually offer their services to cell phone users by means of a local access port that they call and then enter the destination phone number using touchtones.

Making calls through such a service is a royal pain in the posterior for most users, because they can't automate the process in any meaningful way. They could store all of the digits necessary to make the call and send the touchtones, but this would only work for one specific local access port. If they found themselves in a different city that used a different local access port their carefully-crafted numbers wouldn't work. Most users either resort to hand dialing (assuming they can remember the number they're calling), or they just don't bother with the services and pay the ridiculous fees charged by the cellular provider.

ContactsEx solves all of these issues by taking the long distance dialing functionality and separating it from the assignment of phone numbers in a contact. We now store all of our contact phone numbers as though they were local calls and let the program worry about how we dial them when they are long distance.

The program encapsulates the long distance calling services in a feature known as a Calling Card. Each Calling Card contains the logic needed to make phone calls through a touchtone-based service. If you don't want to use such a service, ContactsEx can also administer the addition of a your country code in front of numbers that need to be dialed as long distance.

This same feature can also be used for call-back services, which are used to take advantage of plans that offer unlimited incoming calls. Instead of calling your party directly, you dial a call-back service and then enter the number want to contact. You then terminate the call and wait for the call-back service to dial back, at which time they connect you with your party.