Snow Leopard Killed My Address Book
Posted 09/11/2009 at 9:31am
| by Ray Aguilera
Since I updated to Snow Leopard, my Address Book has been more or
less unusable for anything other than browsing. Starting up the app
resulted in 30 to 90 seconds of spinning beachball before contacts
would populate. That clearly fell into the "annoying-but-tolerable"
camp, since I usually only open Address Book a few times a day, and
quickly learned to just leave it open to avoid the wait. But adding new
contacts, or editing existing ones resulted in the same spinning
beachball of doom.
My first instincts were to export the data,
zap my Address Book files and re-import, but the problem persisted. I
forced an overwrite from MobileMe. Nothing. I shook my fist angrily
and threatened my iMac with bodily harm. And the beachball continued to
taunt me.
Finally, I called Apple's tech support. After
multiple restarts, trashings of Address Book data, and forced MobileMe
syncs we nailed down the culprit: Smart Groups. After deleting two
Smart Groups from Address Book, the problem just disappeared. According
to a helpful Apple support tech "We know that Smart Groups are not
working with Snow Leopard right now. Hopefully we'll get it figured out
in the next update."
Until then, delete them.