Address book names are now sorted by first name.

Question

After installing Snow Leopard my mail it is now sorted alphabetically by the first name, not the last. How do I change it back?

Answer 1

I just talked to an Apple Product Specialist about the change in Address Book searching with Snow Leopard. Here is where it stands right now:
In all previous versions of Address Book, the user could simply type 'T' to instantly go to contacts with last names that start with 'T' (and businesses that start with 'T').
In Snow Leopard, Address Book can no longer search with one letter the way it did before; it uses a 'Spotlight' type of search where the user must type the full name in order to get an exact match. This type of searching is useful for finding documents on the Mac or searching the Internet, but is totally inefficient for finding contacts in Address Book.
It sounds like someone at Apple decided this was a better way to search for contacts, because this change in search method is described in the new Address Book 'Help' file; it says, "As you type, Address Book begins to search all the information on the cards, including notes, and displays matching contacts, with the matching text highlighted in each card." For example, let's say someone used to type 'T' to search for a contact named Bill Tilman. Now what happens is that Address Book stops at the first person who's first name starts with 'T', and highlights all the T's in the person's card (the T in 'telephone', the T in 'Street', etc. The user must now scroll through all their contacts manually to find Bill Tilman, or else manually type out the complete name 'Bill Tilman'. (If they just type 'Bill', they will only get the first person named Bill.)
I hope Apple will reconsider and will allow Address Book to do the quick one-letter searches by last name (as opposed to 'Sort' by last name, which it still has) like it used to. (Or at least make this a choice in Address Book Preferences.) This would also be more compatible with the way iPhone searches for contacts; when you select a letter in the iPhone's contacts, it finds contacts who's last name starts with that letter, as well as businesses, just like Address Book always used to.