Address Book 4.0.1 Review and Suggestions

With a new version of Address Book out, I've decided to take a look to see if Apple has paid attention to any of my suggestions (as it's patently obvious that everyone from Steve Jobs on down at the Co. read my blog religiously). I'm gonna start with a look back at some of my suggestions for Address Book 3.1.2.

First, let's start out with the places in which Apple gets full credit: the suggestions I made that have been fulfilled:

Fix the undo function
Currently when you are working within a card and you hit undo it takes the card back to the state it was in before you started editing it at all. This is a huge pain in the butt when you just entered a bunch of data but you accidentally deleted one thing and just want to undo the last thing. This seems more like a bug that needs repair than a request for a feature, as it's just so obviously stupid.

Allow multiple URLs on each card
It seems very strange that the number of URLs is limited to just one. Both people and companies often have several related websites, so it seems patently strange to limit this to just one item.

Make it faster
Whatever was done to make iPhoto a helluva lot speedier needs to be done to Address Book. The spinning ball pops up quite often.

Next we've got the places where Apple gets partial credit.

Make a checkbox for old items
Let's say a friend changes his email. If you delete his old email from Address Book, Mail will no longer connect saved emails from his old email with his Address Book entry. For this reason, there should be a check box that lets you designate an email (IM name, address, phone number) as no longer in use. An item so designated should not appear as an option in Mail and other programs that call on data stored in Address Book. It should be visible in Address Book only in edit mode.

Apple sort of does this only with My Card and only when exporting as a vCard when info in My Card has been made private as per these instructions from Address Book help:

Making some information on your address card private
You can select which information on your card you want to share with your contacts when you send them your vCard. For example, you can share just your work information, and keep your home information private.

1. Open Address Book > Preferences and click vCard.
2. Select Enable Private 'Me' Card and close the preferences window.
3. Select your card in the Name column and click Edit.
4. Select only the checkboxes next to the information you want to share.

In the vCard preferences pane, select "Export Notes in vCards" to send the contents of the Note field. By default this option is not selected, and the contents of the Note field are not sent.

If another application won't accept vCards in the default 3.0 format, try changing the format to 2.1 in the vCard preferences pane, and send it again.

This, however, still does absolutely nothing for deprecating old addresses and such from other contacts. They barely deserve credit at all on this one.

Some kind of system for linking a contact to related data and files
The most obvious candidates for this are emails and iCal entries in which the person is linked, as well as photos in iPhoto, iChat saved chat files, iTunes songs or playlists, etc. This could by splitting the data pane and essentially having a Tiger Spotlight-like search displaying emails, iCal entries, chats and so forth in the bottom part. There should also be a way to link related files, such as PDFs, Microsoft Word documents, etc., that would show up in the same place. And it would be great if any file with this person's name in it could be included. This would make Address Book the one-stop needed to find anything related to a single given contact.

The reason they get partial here has nothing to do with Address Book and everything to do with Spotlight, which can basically do this by searching for the name, email, etc., across the computer. The next step is to integrate this right into Address Book so there's essentially a Spotlight window tied to each card that searches for all the contact info therein, including the name (and various permutations), the emails, the website, etc., of the contact.

Add birthdays and other dates to the calendar
While rumor has it birthdays are to be added in Tiger, let's not forget anniversaries and the other dates that can be added. There should be a checkbox next to each date to specify whether or not it should be included in iCal.

Birthdays should be started on the year that the person is born. In the section that allows other dates, "Died" or something similar should be a default date, and birthdays should optionally stop after this. The preference could be something like "Do not list birthdays of people who have already passed away."

True to the rumor, Apple took care of birthdays for us, but the other dates remain in Address Book limbo.

Allow easy changing of contact photos
The photo switching implementation in iChat seems perfectly suited for this. It would store any image that was associated with the user, including pics that the owner used as well as pics included in an imported vCard or sent from the contact via iChat.

Double clicking on an image in Address Book now lets you copy, paste, etc., the photo. However a simple selection mechanism is still lacking.

Fix the bug when you type over an autofill
When you are typing in a field, say a relationship field, and you type in "Bill" when you already have a relation in a relationship field that starts with "Bill", Address Book will insert the rest of the email in front of what you're typing, letting you use it if it's what you're about to type, or, if there are multiple relations that start with "Bill", it will give you a pulldown menu to pick the one you want. This is great. The problem is that if the thing is not the one you want your typing will often get screwed up. A few letters will get switched out of the order you type them in as the computer thinks about the autofill. This needs to be remedied.

Apple seems to have remedied this by getting rid of autofill. This is a disappointing solution.

And finally we turn to the unfortunate places where Apple completely dropped the ball by not listening to me and gets no credit at all:

Allow nested groups
This could be implemented just like the mail folders in Mail. You could have a "Work" group with people like the secretary who may not fit anywhere else and subgroups like "Marketing" and "Sales."

Smart copying of addresses
There seems to be no way short of copying an entire card to copy all the elements of an address without doing it one at a time. When selecting the address type, there should be an element "Copy address." Then if you paste it into another document it should come out as a multi-line address. If you paste it into any address field in Address Book, it will replace whatever was there before with the entire address that was copied.

Automatic country selection
Instead of requiring that the country be selected from the "Change Address Format" submenu in the address type pull-down menus, the format should change automatically based on whatever is listed in the country field.

Allow reorganization of items
As is, things are just listed in the order you enter them. This is a pain, for instance, as Mail by default simply selects the first email of a contact. You can work around this by reordering things by cut and paste, but this is a huge pain. They should be sortable by 1) alphabetical category order, 2) alphabetical data order, 3) user-selected category order, 4) manually, or 5) most recent use.

Allow more space in date fields
Currently items are cut off with certain date formats. Using my custom date format, for example, dates read something like "1939 May 06 (", which should be followed by the day of the week and the end parenthesis.

Allow more subdivisions for organizations
Currently all there is "Company" and "Department." It would be much more useful with big organizations if it were "Organization," "Subdivision 1," "Subdivision 2," etc., with the same green + sign used to add additional entries to other places.

Store contact photos in an iPhoto album
As is, there's no way to edit a photo once it is in the card and they are stored in some strange format. Address Book should take the easy route and store them in some format that can be accessed via iPhoto.

Automatic relational linking
If V is listed as A's son, daughter, or child in A's card, then A should automatically be listed as V's parent on V's card instead of having to do everything separately in each card. There should be a range of automatic pairs: father/mother-child, son/daughter/child-parent, friend-friend, partner-partner, spouse-spouse, etc. There should also be a way for the user to create new automatic pairs. For instance, at my school the upperclassmen can mentor lowerclassmen, creating a mentor-mentee pair.

Add an extension field to telephone numbers
As is, extensions must be included as part of the number. While this is a reasonable work around, it would be preferable if it were a completely separate field.

Calculations related to dates
Next to birthdays, Address Book should calculate the current age. (24 years old)

In a contact with both a birthday and a date of death:

• Next to birthdays, Address Book should calculate the would-be age (Would be 24 years old)
• Next to date of death, Address Book should calculate age at death and how long ago the death was (1 year ago at age 23)

Next to other dates, Address Book should calculate how many years ago it was (24 years ago).

Address Book should calculate the age for easy reference. If there is a "Died" date, iCal should calculate next to that the age at death and next to the birthday "Would be X years old" or something similar.

Allow partial dates
You should be able to add 1) a year only, 2) a year and a month only, 3) a month only, or 4) a month and a date only. In the case of the 1)-3), they should not be placed in iCal. In the case of the 4), it should be placed in iCal with no start or ending date (the user may add one if so desired). In the case of 1) and 2), iCal should make calculations as normal, using the first of the relevant year or month as the base date.

Edit default pull-down menus
The pull-down menus for type of phone number, email, etc., should be customizable instead of each time having to add a new custom item. Instead of just "Custom..." there should also be an "Edit menu..." option.

And now finally I'll turn to my brand new suggestions:

Bring back the autofill function
If my theory is correct, removing this was a cop-out to get rid of a bug. This should be brought back.

Use the country in the address to automatically set other items
The first obvious thing to set using the country of the address is the address format, as I've mentioned before. But this should also be used to set the country code and format for telephone numbers.

Allow customizable country-based telephone numbers
Following with the above suggestion, I should be able to set exactly how I want telephone numbers to appear. For instance, in the U.S. I would be able to choose whether it's 202 456 1111, (202) 456-1111, +1 (202) 456-1111, or whatever, rather than just having a single global format and then custom formats when the numbers don't fit.

Add Skype to the list of default IM services
Skype is getting more and more popular. It's time to add it to the list.

Allow customization of the list of IM services
And while we're at it, users should be able to put whatever they want in these services. And, again, default pull down menus should be editable.

Fix the bug of rendering cards with a lot of data in Card Only view
When you put Address Book in Card Only view and then use the Previous card and Next card arrows at the bottom to go through the cards, very long cards will screw up the view. When this happens, any future cards you scroll through don't render properly. This can be fixed by closing the window and then selecting Address Book from the Window menu. This is an annoying bug and just needs to be fixed.