Apple’s Address Book: its search was already broken. And now mine has *completely* broken
The other day I did a sync with my phone using iSync and Bluetooth. Ah, the “just works” experience for which the Mac is famed.
Until I looked at my phone. Hmm, all the phone numbers had been zapped. And so had all the contacts - about 2000 of them - in my Address Book.
No problem - I’ve got a backup of my address book. Which I made five months ago. OK, that’s annoying (actually, it’s REALLY REALLY annoying) but it’s not life-sapping. So I restored from the backup and did a sync again. Order is restored: my phone has all the numbers that it should. The calendars are there too.
And the Address Book is fi– no, wait. Any time I try to do a search, I get the SPOD. For absolutely any search. No matter how long I wait, it never finishes.
I’ve just had a look at the prefs, and checked them with Preferential Treatment (it’s nifty!), which identified that some of the system prefs were bust. OK, delete or rename those, and let’s try again. No, it won’t have it - still SPODs. OK then, delete all the address book files in my ~/Library folder and let’s try again.
Empty address book. Restore from backup. Full address book. Search? SPOD.
F***. F***. I’ve never liked the Address Book program. Compared to Palm’s one, which I used to use before Palm imploded, Address Book is clunky, slow, stupid, inflexible, and near-impossible to script (I’ve tried to script searching for contacts; it fails because you can’t search on any field in a phone field or name or address.) The trouble is that trying to sync from Palm to a phone is an even more huge pain, and I want to have my contacts dynamically updated and synchronised on my phone. So I’ve tolerated Address Book, with its multitudinous faults in its search facility (because search is what you want to do with addresses, by and large).
But it’s still rubbish. Compare the Palm search: you enter a string, hit return, it starts searching, and you get a list of contacts in a new window, for easy reading. Address Book gives you the search results in its monolithic single-window view. Single-window is soooo 1995 for something like that. And think: when you do an iTunes search, how do the results come up? In a list. Why doesn’t Address Book do that?
Anyhow, right now I’m stuck with an Address Book that doesn’t work, a list of contacts I can’t, and a head full of ire towards whatever it was that caused this glitch. The thing that irks me most, though, is that Address Book is such a rubbish solution to the task of filing and searching addresses, notwithstanding this praise from a Linux user trying to get KDE to have one as good. I’d have to say, aim higher, KDE people.
In the meantime, I will probably try to restore Address Book from CD (hello, Pacifist). But if anyone has any suggestions for how to get it to behave - and even better, to speed the hell up on searches, or point to any plugins that will make it useful, or who could kick someone at Apple to remind them that they’ve got one good search paradigm (iTunes) so it would make sense to apply it to the others - I’d be grateful.
Update: Thanks to Damien for the perspective :-).. and the suggestion from Mike (#6) (add your hard drive to “Privacy” in Spotlight to remove the search index; close the window; then open it and remove the hard drive from the “Privacy” list) seems to have sorted things nicely - Spotlight is quick again, and Address Book searches actually work. Good grief, I can even search the contents of Mail messages - which I never used to be able to.
Even so, I think that the search interface on Address Book could be substantially improved. It’s a core function.
- These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
- Gmail POP is broken - again (3 October 2006; score: 78.51%)
- Is Plaxo on OSX any good? Or, indeed, any use? (6 April 2006; score: 71.78%)
- When exactly did schools become rubbish at medical stuff? (14 July 2007; score: 67.29%)
![[Valid RSS]](wp-includes/images/valid-rss.png "Validate my RSS feed"){kind=small}
May 9th, 2006 at 3:17 pm
Hey - just read about your problems with Address Book, and while I can’t say I’m having the same, I have at least a suggestion for you to look at that I don’t think you have. Basically, if you are bound to a directory service through Directory Access utility (In Utilities folder) Address Book also can become bound to a directory for searching - all fine and dandy if you’re connected, but if there are network issues or anything it might cause problems like what you’re seeing.
To check, just go into Directory Access and go to the Contacts tab and see if anything is listed in the Directory Domains area.
Perhaps will help, perhaps not, at least something to try.
Good luck.
May 9th, 2006 at 4:16 pm
Nope, there’s nothing in the Directories listing. Never has been. I’ve gone through those at the file level - a few were corrupt, but I made copies from ones that were good and restarted the program. Now it doesn’t want to believe that I’ve changed the default way of listing phone numbers. I’m not feeling charitable towards it, to say the least.
May 9th, 2006 at 5:12 pm
I use Quicksilver to search for addresses quickly and easily. I only need to launch Address Book when I want to add or edit an entry.
May 9th, 2006 at 6:12 pm
I was a Palm Desktop user (great Claris Organizer, one of the best apps ever), and, a few years ago, when Palm threatened to discontinue Palm Desktop I switched to Address Book. And what you describe - zapping all the contacts, including me - happened for the second time today. The first time it was after a Mail crash (I also switched from Entourage to Mail when Tiger arrived), today, all of sudden Mail became slow, and then it was not auto-filling the new messages address. I had to force quit both apps, and just in case, restarted, alos to get rid of the 6 swapfiles created by the meager 512 Meg RAM of my one-week MacBook Pro 15″, that slows things down a lot (I already ordered another Gig, and as I write, think that I should have ordered 2 instead). And… ta-da, the Addresses were only “me” = my photo, address “United States”" (I’m in Rio. Brazil. listening to Chico Buarque), and Apple. The older data was gone. Unfortunately I didn’t set my new MacBook to sync with .mac. Fortunately I did move data from my old powebok to this new one via a Desktop HD, and last weeks’s ~/Library/Application Support/Address Book folder is still there in my home office network. Nasty bug!!
There must be a way (besides .mac) of automating AB’s File -> Backup menu.
May 9th, 2006 at 8:21 pm
> And think: when you do an iTunes search, how do the results come up? In a list. Why doesn’t Address Book do that?
Huh? When I do a search in address book, I get a list. The window is three a pane. First pane is custom sublists, second pane is search results, third pane is the data for any of the results I click on.
How is yours different? I’ve never modified Address book–have you futzed around with yours with some plugin or something?
May 9th, 2006 at 9:07 pm
You can make spotlight reindex you harddive which should also work with Address book. All you have to do is go to spotlight in system prefs. Click on Privacy, drag your Harddive into the window, close it then reopen it. Now drag it back out and spotlight will reindex the dirve. This may take a while but it’s worth a try.
Mike
May 9th, 2006 at 10:35 pm
What I can’t figure is how you say the search in Addressbook is slow. It is way faster than Palm. It is virtually instantaneous like any spotlight driven search. The window populates with results before you complete typing. I think your indexing system may never have been right. Do you get instant searches in the finder? You are using Tiger?
Stefan
May 9th, 2006 at 11:24 pm
Huh? When I do a search in address book, I get a list. The window is three a pane. First pane is custom sublists, second pane is search results, third pane is the data for any of the results I click on.
In iTunes, it’s a list in which you can see all the details of each result at once. It was the same in Palm Desktop. In Address Book, you can’t see the data for the individual searches - you have to click on each in turn. This means you can’t say “Oh, the Joe Bloggs who lives in New York” rather than the Joe Bloggs who lives in California - you can see that directly in a Palm Desktop/iTunes style result list. Address Book could do that.
Address Book is slow for me. I don’t find it instantaneous, never have. I am using Tiger - upgraded from Panther. (Was it Panther?) I do wonder sometimes if it would work better to start over again. Except do I really want to go over the whole process of backing up and installing and picking just the right Library items and so on? I’ve got MySQL and all sorts of other things going on here. It’s a real and vast pain even considering a reinstall. I’d rather it just worked, to be honest. I upgraded - and did it right. No tricks. (I did one reinstall already, early on, pre-Tiger.) That was over 12 months ago.
And that doesn’t get past the fact that the UI is a mess, and that starting searches before someone has finished typing seems rude.
Also, for “instantaneous” searches - how many contacts you got? As I said, I’ve got 2000+ - more than two thousand. It’s not light.
May 10th, 2006 at 12:15 am
Yikes, that does sound a bit scary. Thankfully, it’s never happened to me. Yet.
I do wonder about Address Book, Mail and iCal. iCal often eats up all my processor cycles after I’ve just clicked on a To-Do item, clearly that’s not right. I wonder if it’s anything to do with XML - I think each application stores ita data in one XML file, and I remember reading a drunkenblog.com post mentioning some inside Apple information that at some point they’d hired a bunch of people who really didn’t know much about XML to do some XML work.
Just thought I’d empty some random scraps from my brain there, I’m sure we all feel enlightened.
May 10th, 2006 at 12:34 am
Hey, sorry to hear abot your problems, I’m not sure what happeend with the numbers being erased, although I suspect that it was one of the settings for the phones first sync. Whenever I have a new device to sync I always make sure that isync is set to erase and fill it with the info from the computer, no merge and definately not to erase the computer and use the phones info. Anyhow,
About the broken search feature, I had the same issue, what you need to do (hopefully) is replace the spotlight index because it might have been corrupted. If you dont know how to fix it, just get Onyx and go to the maintenence section. Theres a checkbox to replace it. Good Luck =)
May 10th, 2006 at 1:22 am
Have you considered trying Plaxo? Apart from the features for updating addresses by email, it has a good web interface and syncs well with Address Book, Outlook on Windows and some others (not sure about Palm). Very useful, and web interface can be left open for long periods (dotmac’s auto logout makes it less useful for use as access to your addresses from a central source).
Through a rather circuitous route I’ve got the dynamic syncing across work and home, and through Outlook, to a smartphone. Works fine despite having far too many addresses.
Agree that address book has some major weaknesses - it also infuriates me that I can’t edit more easily. Outlook (which I use only for contacts due to plaxo/phone sync) allows you to make changes directly, i.e., without hitting a separate edit button. I’m now doing more of my address editing in Outlook.
May 10th, 2006 at 4:08 am
aww MUFFIN!
May 17th, 2006 at 10:28 am
Yup, Address Book is awful even when it works. I keep all my address data in Notational Velocity, nothing is faster. Simson Garkinkel’s SBook5 (sbook5.com) is a very impressive alternative to Address Book, but of course when you leave Address Book behind, you lose much of the sync goodness.
I recently experienced some equally weird problems on my machine and solved them all with an erase-and-re-install, going to extreme of re-installing every app I needed manually rather than migrating everything back in from a backup. Time-consuming, but the machine is snappier and more working than before.
July 12th, 2006 at 11:01 pm
Problem, ibook 1.33ghz powerpc g4. address book
I had an address book that was obviously causing problems with apple mail, ical and address book itself, which just spin & spin. so made backup using address book and then selected and deleted all. everything started working again. Then tried too reimport the backup file, and it gives warning message about writing over my current database, which I ‘ok” but nothing happens. Like the backup file is corrupt too. Are there any other programs that can open this file?
September 6th, 2006 at 9:16 am
I have problems with my address book too same as Mike Allen. How come Apple will not extract a digit to fix what to them would be dead simple?
My address book worked much better than Outlook and Entourage but now is sick. Is there an address book subtle virus that is causing these problems?
November 20th, 2007 at 11:35 am
Mike, I did what you suggested to make spotlight reindex the harddrive. First off, dragging the hard drive back out did not work (in my 10.4.10). I “subtracted” it from the Privacy list. Then… nothing happened. No reindexing seems to be going on here.
Any info?
(quote)
# Mike Says:
May 9th, 2006 at 9:07 pm
You can make spotlight reindex you harddive which should also work with Address book. All you have to do is go to spotlight in system prefs. Click on Privacy, drag your Harddive into the window, close it then reopen it. Now drag it back out and spotlight will reindex the dirve. This may take a while but it’s worth a try.
Mike