Contacts in Tahoe
So Tahoe apparently has a new Contacts app.
Unusably slow.
So slow that you think it has crashed.
Why am I not surprised that
otool -Lshows a SwiftUI dependency?[…]
Oh, and it flickers and has visual glitches.
Not just when scrolling, also when just sitting there.
It really is incredibly slow, especially resizing the window, even on an Apple Silicon Mac. And, yes, the pane that shows the contact details has a distracting gray gradient that takes a split second to flash into place each time you click on a contact and then proceeds to sit there flickering.
The information density is way down. Each contact in the list takes three times as much vertical space because it now shows a photo. There doesn’t seem to be a way to turn this off, even though most of my contacts don’t have photos.
The details pane wastes a huge amount of space at the top for a giant photo (again, usually blank) and giant text for the name. Then it puts a thick bar on every contact, prompting you to edit the photo and poster. I have to make the window huge to see all the details. With my 14-inch MacBook Pro’s display at the highest resolution and the Contacts window maximized, the actual contact info (e.g. the first phone number) doesn’t get displayed until well below the top half of the screen. It also has messed up horizontal margins, like the Weather app.
Navigation in the list is all messed up. The arrow keys (and Shift arrow keys) sometimes stop working. Trackpad scrolling sometimes gets stuck. Page Up/Down and Home/End don’t work at all.
I selected 3 contacts at once and deleted them, and it beachballed for 10 seconds.
The Smart List editor doesn’t seem to have been tested since adopting Liquid Glass. The buttons literally overlap, and you can’t prevent this by making it wider.
See also: the MacRumors forum.
Previously:
- Shipping Liquid Glass
- macOS Tahoe 26 Developer Beta 7
- iOS 16.5 and iPadOS 16.5
- Contacts.app Skipping Export of Some Contacts
- Cardhop 1.0
- BusyContacts 1.0
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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.
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.
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.
