In Snow Leopard's Address book, the view one got by opening the application included a list of the different contact groups I created and I was easily able to determine if a particular address was on my Exchange account or MobilieMe. How do I get that same view in Lion's Address book application?
The only way to resolve this at the moment is through a gimmicky solution: opening 2 instances of address book side by side.
Personally I have just restored SL and abandoned Lion as I could not stand the new address book being a heavy user of the three pane functionality. There is no way of restoring it in Lion. It is really puzzling to see how Apple managed to make the already worse application in Mac even more abysmal.
In address book I would be looking to resolve these issues - there is a substantial worsening of tools in this new version of the app:
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)
and desirable improvements:
7-Allow font selection to facilitate reading and page display and reduce waste of space (was not available in SL)
8-Option to display contacts in table view for quick bulk editing (was not available in SL)
9-Show which (smart) group each contact belongs to on the contact’s page (was not available in SL)
10-Facilitate the creation of a new contact from the same company without having to copy across most details (was not available in SL)
The only way to resolve this at the moment is through a gimmicky solution: opening 2 instances of address book side by side.
Personally I have just restored SL and abandoned Lion as I could not stand the new address book being a heavy user of the three pane functionality. There is no way of restoring it in Lion. It is really puzzling to see how Apple managed to make the already worse application in Mac even more abysmal.
In address book I would be looking to resolve these issues - there is a substantial worsening of tools in this new version of the app:
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)
and desirable improvements:
7-Allow font selection to facilitate reading and page display and reduce waste of space (was not available in SL)
8-Option to display contacts in table view for quick bulk editing (was not available in SL)
9-Show which (smart) group each contact belongs to on the contact’s page (was not available in SL)
10-Facilitate the creation of a new contact from the same company without having to copy across most details (was not available in SL)
Thanks enricus28 for your thoughtful and detailed response. I just went to http://www.apple.com/feedback to complain about Lion's deficient address book app. There isn't even an option for address book on the feedback form. I submitted feedback under the iCal category. I than tried copying the address book app from my Snow Leopard backup disk onto my Lion disk, but alas, it did not work. Sigh!
Thanks Stanley and Enrico. Hopefully Apple will bring back professional level features to AddressBook and iCal.
There is one more feature which should be brought (back) from SL to Lion:
- by pushing the "alt" key it was possible to see to which group(s) a given address belongs (this obviously requires the 3-pane view)-- by the way this feature is badly missing in iTunes
And here is a feature to be added to AddressBook not available in SL:
- when uisng groups for sending emails it should be possible to get a predefined order of the group members in the email address, e.g. highest boss first, people grouped per departments etc.
Thank you Rene, indeed that covers point 9 in my list and I forgot to say that:
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. So the issue is really in the hightlighting on this point.
Thank you enricus28 for the concise answer which exactly mirrors my own experience!!!
Apple, why all this dumbing down? We don't want simple and cute, we want functional, feature rich and customizable! Maybe a choice between a simple and a rich interface?
I was complaining to an apple tech while trying to solve another problem, and he mentioned that some of the SL functionality was returning to Mountain Lion. But after losing so much in Lion, it makes me fear what else I'll lose in ML...
Remember D-I-C-E where the D stands for deep -- Lion just gives us shallow apps!
How do I set up Lion's Address book to display groups and servers like it did in Snow Leopard?
