BusyContacts (and BusyCal) are on sale until 11/30. I might grab both.
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BusyContacts (and BusyCal) are on sale until 11/30. I might grab both.
Looking at BusyContacts. Note that it's not really a perpetual license. Your purchase gets you the version currently out plus 18 months of updates. You can keep using it after that term expires but you will not get any more updates unless you pay again.
Renewing the license for another 18 months costs $40 instead of $50. (And renewals are also on sale right now.)
Still, cheaper than Cardhop.
Renewing the license for another 18 months costs $40 instead of $50. (And renewals are also on sale right now.)
Still, cheaper than Cardhop.
I believe most consider this to be a perpetual license. This flavor or perpetual license is in vogue now - guaranteeing updates until a time period has expired. The older flavor guarantees updates until a new major version is released.
I do prefer the older flavor which gives the developer the option to release fixes (but no improvements) to an earlier major version, even after a new major version is available.
Years ago I used BusyCalc. I remember liking it. It was much better than Apple's Calendar at the time. I've never tried BusyContacts.
I just upgraded to Tahoe two days ago. Agree, Tahoe contacts is USELESS -- huge, graphic interface. Waste of space. I tried to copy a phone number and it placed a call. Absolutely terrible.
Cool. How do you do that? I use GoodSync.
(Have used GoodSync for ~ 10 years to do peer to peer sync between Windows and Mac laptops and systems.)
iCloud. Currently all my contacts are synced via iCloud, though previously they were all in Google -- which might play better if you have PCs in the mix. Either way, once you get them loaded in it all works very well... except (IMO) for the ugly new UI in the macOS and iOS Contacts apps. But one can use other software to get around that, while still accessing the same synced database.
I didn't see this posted here, https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/11/21/contacts-in-tahoe/
Sounds to me like Apple is continuing to try and force SwiftUI onto macOS, trying to "merge" iOS and macOS.
Sounds to me like Apple is continuing to try and force SwiftUI onto macOS, trying to "merge" iOS and macOS.
SwiftUI is not the issue. It's possible to make wonderful things with it, like with every other UI toolkit. The issue is that someone decided to make such a crap UI/UX and ship it half-finished and full of bugs.
I agree, and if SwiftUI was the issue then Apple surely has the best people to get the most from it.
The wasted space and 'flckering' in the luminosity of the background image when not scrolling - just randomly - are infuriating. I have over 200 contacts, the vast majority used for my work, and it's now harder to find the information that I want because everything is contained with oversized bubbles.
A big part of the problem is that Apple idealises the way people use their contact cards. They believe everyone has a profile photo set to share, they set a background image to share, and beyond the actual choice of doing such that said images somehow enhance a contact card. I don't know about anyone else, but when I'm navigating countless people from one central workplace, I just want two things: their name and their contact information. If they want their cat as their background image then let me choose whether or not it wastes my screen; and if they don't have a cat, I don't want or need a pointless purple background to fill that area. It's not jovial, quirky, or clever - it's just plain stupid.
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You mean you'd like to see an option to use either "classic" Contacts (my preference as well) or the "Photo & Poster" version? Since Apple provides many of its apps with customization options, why not here?
Maybe not directly, but there are performance issues with it, it's far worse to work with compared to AppKit, the fact alone that they decided to rewrite the UI means you'll have issues (as all projects that get rewritten end up having new & worse bugs while losing feature parity), and of course there's the big fact that SwiftUI is Apple's way of merging the platforms, and iOS isn't built for "work" at this point, it's built for flashiness, hence the massive images, text, borders, whitespace, "Liquid Glass" nonsense.
Maybe it's possible to avoid the performance issues with SwiftUI, but when every app that uses it comes with all these issues, especially from Apple themselves, I don't have high hopes. My M1 MBA still stutters in System
I do wonder how Apple employees use the contacts app. Do they just not add contacts for anyone that's not their friend (as would be personal enough to bother adding such things?) Or do they have reams of contacts of suppliers and business partners and coworkers that are just gray letters inside a gray circle?
And liquid glass is just another example of the idealization, they believe that somehow every thing that could possibly be in the background of any transparent UI will be ideal and not make it hard to see the UI. This "idealization" is in everything Apple does nowadays.
I don't see how using SwiftUI correlates to having to make a layout with 90% of white space. And if SwiftUI performance is not enough (and it's enough, unless they have no idea of what they are doing), they can just wrap some AppKits view.
SwiftUI has the esame exact default metrics as AppKit. Don't blame the tools, blame the people.
That's still a perpectual license. You get to keep using the version you bought forever, unless you do an OS update that makes it not work anymore. By contrast, CardHop is pure rental software: the second you stop paying, it reverts to a basic version.
In my case, I'm almost a year "out of date" on my copy of BusyCal, but since it's still working fine under Tahoe and I don't see any features (yet) that are compelling enough to update. But when it hits that point -- or if macOS 27 breaks it-- I will buy another version. The key difference is that it's up to me when I want to upgrade. Agenda does it a similar way. I really appreciate the flexibility and am always ready to support developers with honest licensing systems.
This below is what a basic contact looks like out of the box in the Contacts app in macOS 26. Objectively, this looks like absolute sh*t. It's not much better when a contact does have a photo -- it just picks some color from that and gradients it behind everything. Atrocious design.
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Agreed. I’m not even sure why the blank profile photo needs to be glass, given it has no functional purpose.
One of the main reasons I rolled back to 15.7.2. I wish they would add a toggle to turn off contact photo altogether and get rid of the gradient. I have a lot of businesses in my contacts and none have photos. Half the window is wasted space, looks awful and gets a zero for functionality. Who in there right mind thought this was an acceptable design choice?
You are correct. This is the worst piece of s/w ever from Apple.
It worked before. Now it doesn't. The company checkbox can be used to select whether the card shouldbe sorted by Company or by Last Name. But in both cases, name and company should be displayed.
There is no reason to remove features, or go backward. In Medicine, the fundamental principle is "first, do no harm".
I have switched to BusyContacts. When switching off the extra columns it looks very similar to the old Contacts.
I will add this: if you go to iCloud.com and view the contacts "app" there, it's got the old design and looks way more usable. In Safari you can also use the Add to Dock feature to make it more like a standalone app. It's not bad.
This is that same contact card I posted an image to above, in the web interface (redacted for privacy)
This is that same contact card I posted an image to above, in the web interface (redacted for privacy)
I just updated to Tahoe last night. I just am posting to add my voice to the outrage. It's flickering. It's ugly. It's ineffective.
For me, the saving grace is that I don't use the app that much. If I did, I would immediately buy BusyContacts.
I've never considered Apple developers to be aligned with what I want in the client applications. But, I can't think of any way to justify this application except that they just had to rush to produce something that looked like the iOS version.
And why the heck is it flickering?
For me, the saving grace is that I don't use the app that much. If I did, I would immediately buy BusyContacts.
I've never considered Apple developers to be aligned with what I want in the client applications. But, I can't think of any way to justify this application except that they just had to rush to produce something that looked like the iOS version.
And why the heck is it flickering?
Apple is a complete and total disgrace. There are no words, in any language, to describe my contempt for Apple.