I have just restored SL and abandoned Lion as I could not stand the address book being a heavy user of the three pane functionality. The only way to resolve this at the moment is through a gimmicky solution: opening 2 instances of address book side by side.
It is really puzzling to see how Apple managed to make the already worse native application in Mac even more abysmal.
There is a substantial worsening of functionalities as highlighted time and time again in comments here, in Twitter and in all Lion reviews that care to include the address book (not all do!).
In address book I would be looking to resolve these issues:
1- Revert to original 3 pane view (was available in SL)
2-Allow creation of new contacts directly in a group (was available in SL)
3- Restore the counter present for every folder to give number of entries in a given group (now you have to scroll to the bottom of the group to see it) (was available in SL)
4- Restore the icon to distinguish entries between company/person (was available in SL)
5- Possibility of removing of alphabetical letter grouping of entries
6- Option to change leather skin (revert to SL clean look)
7-When you check to see what groups a contact belongs to (by hitting the Option key while the contact is selected), the groups used to be clearly highlighted in bright yellow in OSX 10.6, but now the font just slightly changes colour from black to dark blue.
and desirable improvements:
8-Allow font selection to facilitate reading and page display and reduce waste of space (was not available in SL)
9-Option to display contacts in table view for quick bulk editing (was not available in SL)
10-Show which (smart) group each contact belongs to on the contact’s page (was not available in SL)
11-Facilitate the creation of a new contact from the same company (i.e a colleague) without having to copy across most details (was not available in SL)
12-The find duplicates function is as bad as it was--no chance to see the duplicates and choose which to keep or whether to combine.
It really seems Apple has given over the app to develop to some kids that could not think of anything better than making a book view. There are, unfortunately, no serious apps to compensate for this in the app store, address book is a real disaster with Lion. So developers should quickly step in!
Last point: Apple has not even bothered to de-bug the previous version and replicated the same bug that has been around for over 2 years: if you want to print a set of contacts (company type) that belong to a group in list mode and you want to see the name of the person along with the company basic request!) you cannot do that. By selecting “Name” in the print dialog list, the “Introduced by” appears instead. This I have written to Apple about 2 years ago and told the “geniuses” countless times... Pathetic.
Please can we at least have the SL version of the address book back?