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Apple OS X Lion – Finder, iCal and Address Book

June 20, 2011 By 2 Comments


With OSX Lion, Apple continues to focus on refining the finder through the use of multi-touch gestures and improving usability of the OS with some very nice file and folder manipulation improvements. On top of that when you look at both iCal and Address Book you can see how they are taking what they have learned from their iOS cousins to improve the look and feel of the interface plus add some new features and frankly sorely missing on the Apple side of the world.

For instance why are we just seeing Social Media integration into the Address Book? While iCal has some new views the interface to enter new appoints still is just clumsy to say the least. Please take a look at the screencast included with this post to learn more about these items and more.

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  • Anonymous

    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.

  • http://www.facebook.com/SkeeterHarris Skeeter Harris

    Thanks for your comments about Lion and in particular Address Book.   To me you pick on a very sore point with Mac OSX that I and friends of mine have had for years.    Coming from the Windows world I have come to expect and like an integrated Calendar, Contract, and To-Do organizer aka Microsoft Outlook or something more powerful like a customer management Tool.

    With regard to OSX Lion – The Address book is a utter Joke, and while iCal has seen a new skin it still is as bad as ever.  One app that I found that makes at least entry of appointments usable is Fantastical.   One solution you might want to look at is from Chronos which is SOHO Organizer, its combination Calendar and Address book are pretty good and they do sync with the native databases as well as google.

    With regard to Mission Control and Genstures – I use a trackpad on both my MacPro and MacBook and I just love them.  Yes it took me a little bit to get used to them but once I did I find myself a lot more productive across 4 – 6 desktops at any given time, along with apps that go into full screen mode.

    As far as going back to Snow Leopard at least for me – I love the new features overall, and speed on my Macs is noticeably improved.