Betalogue

Address Book’s autocomplete feature turns out to be a major pain in several situations. I’ve already mentioned the problem with it interfering with Canadian postal codes in a very annoying fashion.

There is also a major problem when a proper name already exists in the Address Book database and happens to have been typed in ALL CAPS. In that case, if you use the same proper name but type it only with a capital initial, Address Book insists on replacing it with the ALL CAPS version. This is particularly problematic when people import nicknames from Eudora, where they would frequently use ALL CAPS to differentiate between the first name and the last name in the nickname itself.

All these problems are compounded by the fact that the autocompletion feature doesn’t really ask for user permission before replacing the character strings. If you are looking at your keyboard rather than your screen when typing out the information (not everyone is a professional typist), this can be extremely frustrating.

Unfortunately, there doesn’t appear to be a way to turn the feature off in Address Book. I have search through the Mac OS X Hints site. I have tried to open the com.apple.addressbook.plist preference file with Property List Editor. But I can’t find anything.

I wonder if anyone has had better luck with this.

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Wednesday, March 31st, 2004 at 12:31 am and is filed under Macintosh. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.