Contacts

Apple’s contact framework doesn’t understand how we actually connect. In my previous post, I wrote about how Apple’s Contacts app treats your relationships like a filing cabinet — a flat list of static cards with no context, no history, and no awareness of how people actually matter to you. That’s a product problem. But it’s also a technical one. Underneath the Contacts app sits a framework called CNContact, introduced at WWDC 2015 as a replacement for the widely despised AddressBook.framework. AddressBook was a C-based API with no Objective-C layer, opaque types like ABRecordRef, and virtually no error handling. When Apple announced its deprecation, the WWDC audience cheered — one of the loudest reactions in the conference’s history. ...

And it was never that good to begin with. When I was a kid, my dad carried a Filofax everywhere. A thick leather binder stuffed with business cards, meticulously organized. It was his most important professional tool — his grail. He could flip to any section and find exactly who he needed, with notes scribbled in the margins about when they’d last spoken and what they’d discussed. I sometimes wonder if he had a better handle on his network than any of us do now with our phones. ...