Posts from 2013-06
Bye bye Address Book, welcome BBDB
What started to annoy me seriously about Address Book is a bug that makes the database and its backups grow over time, even if no contacts are added, because the images for the contacts keep getting copied and never deleted under certain circumstances. I ended up having address book backups of 200 MB for just 500 contacts, which is ridiculous. A quick Web search shows that the problem has been known for years but has not yet been fixed.
When I upgraded from MacOS 10.6 to 10.7 about a year ago (I am certainly not an early adopter of new MacOS versions), I had a second reason to dislike Address Book: the user interface had been completely re-designed and become a mess in the process. Every time I use it I have to figure out again how to navigate groups and contacts.
I had been considering moving to BBDB for a while, but I hadn't found any good solution for synchronizing contacts with my Android phone. That changed when I discovered ASynK, which does a bi-directional synchronization between a BBDB database and a Google Contacts account. That setup actually works better than anything I ever tried to synchronize Address Book with Google Contacts, so I gained more than I expected in the transition.
At first glance, it may seem weird to move from technology of the 2000's to technology of the 1970's. But the progress over that period in managing rather simple data such as contact information has been negligible. The big advantage of the Emacs platform over the MacOS platform is that it doesn't try to take control over my data. A BBDB database is just a plain text file whose structure is apparent after five minutes of study, whereas an Address Book database is stored in a proprietary format. A second advantage is that the Emacs developer community fixes bugs a lot faster than Apple does. A less shiny (but perfectly usable) user interface is a small price to pay.
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