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. It is really puzzling to see how they managed to make the already worse application in Mac even more abysmal. I found most “improvements” in Lion quite gimmicky and not real functionalities. Mission control and Launchpad are pure gimmicks, they don’t really ass much. Some gestures you have to learn are ridiculous (try the one to get to your desktop – you will succeed 1/5 times and will be swearing by then). The only real improvement I found in mail – except the search which drove me crazy as it did not yield the same results as in SL…go figure.
In address book I would be looking to resolve at least these issues:
1- Revert to original 3 pane view
2- 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)
3- Restore the icon to distinguish entries between companies/persons
4- Offer the removal of alphabetical letter grouping as option
5- Changing that horrible leather skin for both address book and ical
6-Allow font selection to facilitate reading and page display and reduce waste of space
7-Option to display contacts in table view for quick bulk editing
8-Show which group or smart group each contact belongs to on the contact’s page
9-Facilitate the creation of a new contact from the same company without having to copy across most details such as website, address and tel
10-fix the list printing bug issue (see below)
11-more contrast please, everything is grey as one user puts it
really seems they have given over the app to develop to some kids that could not think of anything better than making a book view. The long awaited table view for quick editing is still missing. And no serious apps to compensate for this in the app store, address book is a real disaster with Lion
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.
