With Mac Mavericks Mountain Lion Apple renamed the Address Book to Contacts and introduced a phone field filter that’s been annoying users and causing them to switch to third-party contact managers. An attempt to make a phone number more readable for humans by adding a dash, space, slash or brackets in the field is ignored; the ‘foreign’ characters are filtered out and an ugly unreadable string of numbers remains. I suspect this change is supposed to make the phone field machine readable, for dialing programs. But the main purpose of the phone field in my mind is to be able to dial a number and not lose your place — at least that’s what I use it for. Apple might have other ideas, but I’m not interested; I just want the text I write to stay put. Continue reading →