The Address Book application in OS X Lion is sorely lacking in its ability to sync & combine contacts from different sources. Does anyone know of a good replacement?
Update – My Holy Grail:
- I use a personal Gmail account and a work Google Apps account.
- I'd like to have the same info available on my iPhone, iPad, work Mac, home Mac, and Google via a browser.
- While I'm at it, let's throw in connecting to my contacts in Twitter and Facebook, though those are much lower priority.
- I'd like a local copy of all the info in case the cloud isn't available.
- iCloud syncing isn't really a priority, since I use Google for that, but I could see switching what I can if things would work better.
- Ideally, groups would be sync-able, in addition to contacts, but I don't think google exposes that via their APIs yet.
Currently, I'm seeing a lot of duplicates, or near duplicates in both iCal & AddressBook, and it's very difficult (impossible?) to see where a given contact or appointment is coming from. In the past I used Spanning Sync to keep google and the local in sync. Perhaps that + iCloud is where the dupes are coming from.
Update 2: My current set-up is working fairly well on the iOS devices w/ Exchange connections to google. It's the macs where I find myself tempted to abandon the desktop apps for doing everything in the browser.
Best Answer
You could have a look at Cobook. I've just started using it and it seems like it unifies things pretty well. It uses the default OS X address book as a backing so that everything syncs nicely to your iPhone. It will also pull in data from your social networks so there's your added functionality.