Contacts in Tahoe

CardHop

Seconding Sean's recommendation of CardHop. I'm not even on Tahoe, and I can't tell you the last time I launched Apple's Contacts app on any of my devices.

It looks like a Leetcode hire's first SwiftUI project. Nails that "designed for iOS" vibe Apple is so fond of bringing to Mac (Settings, etc.).

Lower information density is one of my biggest LA gripes. I get that LA is designed for future touchscreen MacBooks, but it's a nerf for everyone else, esp desktop monitors. You'll soon need a 32" display to see the same number of things you could once view on a 16".

I'm sorry, EUR 5.84 _MONTHLY_ fee for a contacts app? Get out. Get out and don't come back.

That is just the other part of the clown car that the entire software ecosystem is becoming. An OS supplied contacts app that beachballs when deleting 3 contacts, or death-by-a-thousand-cuts through monthly payments for each and every app.

Admittedly, it has been a while since I last shipped shareware (2006), and I don't envy all the added requirements and changes developers face these days, so I probably can't fully relate to the experience devs have surviving these days.

Can we have Scott Forstall back now.

Microsoft looks up and wonders, where did all the Vista devs go? Oh never mind. I was compressing a folder of files and was greeted with an enlightened dialog “Couldn’t communicate with a helper application” just an Ok button, no additional information, well that was useless

> Can we have Scott Forstall back now.

+1.

I’ve discovered several issues in apps that don’t even use SwiftUI directly because Apple decided to bulldoze a perfectly fine house that rested on concrete and build a new one on sand. Whether you asked for it or not you get some SwiftUI related CADisplayLink firing underneath the covers and that state machine and all of its landmines are ready to blow at any time if your app takes a little unexpected turn that Apple didn’t anticipate.

System Settings and Contacts they can’t do properly. Wtf happens if they rewrite Finder?

Time for this thing to go bye bye.

OS 26 is garbage on all Apple devices, especially on the Mac. I'm avoiding it everywhere, not even able to use a new Apple Watch I bought because it won't activate unless I upgrade my phone to OS 26 which I won't do. Try dragging a Maps window around on Tahoe, the contents shift around constantly during the drag, weird as hll - probably another Swift UI "awesomness". I'm only running Tahoe in a UTM VM, for testing lolz, never on any actual device.

I think SwiftUI was a mistake

Has anyone else noticed the ‘First’ and ‘Last’ names do not display if ‘Company’ is toggled?

Example:
First: John
Last: Smith
Company: Smith’s Plumbers

Instead (with Company toggled) you see “Smith’s Plumbing” where you would expect to see “John Smith”. So, you see “Smith’s Plumbing” twice on the contact!
However, searches for First and Last name still work though.

If you un-toggle ‘Company’ you will see both First and Last name and Company when you exit Edit mode.

This as very poor software testing from Apple.

I posted the same to MacRumors with pictures. See: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/contacts-app-is-a-nightmare-on-tahoe.2465399/post-34237310

There's also BusyContacts, which works and is a one-time payment. But personally, I rarely ever open the Contacts app. What do people do in the Contacts app all day long? I own BusyContacts, but I couldn't tell you what features it offers over the regular Contacts app (apart from, I guess, the fact that it works).

> There's also BusyContacts, which works and is a one-time payment.

I wonder if a point of parity between competing OSs is contacts management. I think it is and would venture to say a private and privacy preserving Address Book is the minimum one user should expect as part of macOS in 2025 and beyond.

"I wonder if a point of parity between competing OSs is contacts management"

Well, I'm running KDE on Linux right now, and it comes with an app called KAddressBook. It's fast, has a very clean design, and supports features like a duplicates search and integration with all kinds of services.

Which seems like it shouldn't be noteworthy, but apparently now it is.

I regularly have to quit Contacts to work with it, but it has been like this for some years now. Contacts is easily Apple’s worst app – just about functional and ridden with bugs no one at Apple cares about. One that has meant a lot of extra work for me when handling groups is this: 1. Open e mail message and click the mail address and chose Show Contact Card, 2. Chose Open with Contacts. If Contacts is not open it will take you to the card in list view from where you could drag it to your group. If you repeat this without closing Contacts, it will then instead open the contact in a separate window which is not helpful for anything, so you have to close Contacts between every contact you want to add in this most obvious way. Also adding another contact after another to a group most often requires a force quit of the app as the very common spinning beach ball will show up.

>Has anyone else noticed the ‘First’ and ‘Last’ names do not display if ‘Company’ is toggled?

iOS has done this since at least iOS 17. I learned quickly to not enable the Company option because multiple people from a customer of mine would text me and it was problematic not knowing who specifically sent the message.

@CowMonkey - I agree, I don't think I'd pay that much for just CardHop but it also covers Fantastical, which I use and like over the built-in Calendar. The free version of CardHop may well have enough features for you to beat the built-in Contacts in its current incarnation as well.

Under Michael's articles under the Previously heading, I read the 2015 piece from when BusyContacts was released. Of note was how it and Apple's Contacts are not helpful for reordering information within a contact card, like if you want a person's phone numbers in a different order. For a while now I've been had the US $1 Reorder It! app for iOS. Works well.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/reorder-contacts-reorder-it/id583700229

What were they thinking? This app might be great if you had 20 contacts. It is useless for a large contact list wtih detailed info on each person.

I was quite happy with the old Contact app.

I am now using Cardhop, but it is not totally my cup of tea, either.

Just like the Music app, they keep making macOS stuff worse to stuff it into the iOS code base.

@Harald - I installed 10.4 on a white 24" iMac two weeks ago. Whatever version of iTunes it had on it, it was just... peak.

Everything was clearly defined. It was fast. No UI lag. I never had random playback skips and pauses in those days (of local files, at that!).

I'll say it again, we're getting off light considering what's happening to every version of Windows that isn't an Enterprise SKU, but it juts makes me wonder if anyone at Apple ever used the old stuff? It's miles better. Just opening the old iTunes application is a world of difference (improvement), and you recognize it in < 20 seconds.

@Ben - The Music app can never remember its window size or position for me. It drives me insane. Never had that problem with iTunes. Also, I've dealt with the same bug where if an album finishes playing, and I hit the play button on my keyboard, Music then starts looping through all the songs in my library and fails to play each one with an "Unauthorized" error where I have to Quit the app, sometimes force quit it to recover. Both issues happen on two of my machines, my personal and work laptop. Not sure if I'm the only one that has these types of problems, but sometimes it feels like no one inside Apple actually uses the Music app on the Mac.

@Anonymous - Yep, I have that same unauthorized issue, and yep, I have wondered the same (if anyone at Apple uses Music.app on Mac).

I thought it was maybe just Apple Music (I was on a trial offer they sent me at the time), but I get similar issues with playback of my local legacy tracks that ripped from CDs years ago. I upgraded to Tahoe and the issues persist.

I ended up renewing my annual YT Premium sub recently and went back to using YT Music PWA for discovery (it works pretty well with Safari > Add to Dock...). I have my own legacy collection also hosted on Plex and still sometimes add stuff to it from Bandcamp. The Plexamp app works miles better than my local Apple Music library.

"I ended up renewing my annual YT Premium sub recently and went back to using YT Music PWA for discovery (it works pretty well with Safari > Add to Dock...). I have my own legacy collection also hosted on Plex and still sometimes add stuff to it from Bandcamp."

With yt-dlp, you can just dump your favorited YT Music songs into your Plex library. There are plenty of great frontends for self-hosted music libraries for all platforms.

In one regard Contacts under High Sierra, Mojave, and Sequoia—and presumably everything between those last two—along with iOS 17 and 18, lack the most rudimentary and original Mac feature: Users can't paste an image for a profile picture. I regularly do this because it particularly helps me (when calls come in and when scrolling through Messages) to have everyone at a company I work with have their company logo as their profile picture. I now do it through CardHop, but I can't think of a reason why Apple no longer allows this.