I don’t know why Apple’s iSync is sooo bad! For years, I have suffered with duplicate entries whenever syncing between two or more devices or services. Whether it’s Address Book vs. Palm, or .Mac vs. Google, a huge number of my contacts turn into duplicates. Even things I haven’t changed in years are affected.
On looking at the duplicate entries they are apparently identical. Why oh why can’t Apple’s iSync be smart enough to recognize these automatically?
Right now, I’m trying to clean up my address book which now has hundreds of contacts which have 2, 3 or even 4 duplicate entries. That’s a lot of work that I shouldn’t have to do. This stuff should just *work*. This is not rocket science.
I’m currently on the newest version of MacOS, Snow Leopard, MacOS 10.6.2, but as far as I can tell, nothing has improved on this front in many versions.
When syncing, it will also randomly pick some items that are in “conflict”. When you click Details, it asks which version of the contact you would like to save. However, in a horrible user-interface bug, it usually fails to show any of the contact details which would allow you to make an intelligent choice! You just get “John Doe, .Mac”, “John Doe, Address Book”, pick one. How do I know which one is right? It doesn’t show the phone number, email address or anything else! UI Fail.
I can’t be the only one. Anyone else have these problems too?
-Jamie Cox
P.S. It *is* nice that Apple added sync with Google contacts as an option, but it doesn’t work any better than the other options.
Update: my contacts list may be returning to normalcy, but not because Apple fixed anything — Google introduced a feature into gmail contacts to find and delete duplicate contacts! It works pretty well, and allows you to see what it thinks the duplicates are before anything happens.
Thanks, Google!
yes, I do have problems with isync too.
Isync doesn’t send all events to the phone (N81).
it really sucks
So, you’re not the only one that has problems with iSync. I thought I would share this new tool Scrubly http://www.scrubly.com as a possible quick solution to the problem of duplicate contacts inside Mac Address Book. Hope this helps.
Bob