Compact Contacts 1.3: safer bulk cleanup, Merge Studio, and faster large libraries

Compact Contacts 1.3 is now available on Mac and iPad.

This release grew directly out of feedback from people with thousands of contacts, people who keep Notes search enabled, and people who wanted a safe way to standardize phone numbers and merge duplicates.

What is new on both Mac and iPad:

• Bulk Edit now covers names, organization fields, labeled phones, emails, URLs and relationships, postal fields, birthdays, groups and Notes.

• Literal and regular-expression transformations can be reviewed value by value before saving, including phone-format cleanup.

• Notes indexing and CSV export avoid repeated work and show clearer progress.

• Review flows are more reliable after validation errors.

New on Mac:

• Merge Studio lets you choose values field by field, combine multi-value data and select a writable destination account.

• Each merge creates encrypted on-device recovery first, with Merge History and verified undo.

• Merge previews load automatically, while pane resizing and table-column stability have been improved.

The iPad release includes the expanded Bulk Edit and performance work; real-contact merging remains Mac-only in this release.

Compact Contacts continues to work directly with the system Contacts database. Contact and Notes content is processed on device, with no developer account, contact cloud, subscription, ads or third-party analytics.

If you manage a large address book, standardize phone formats or regularly review duplicates, I would be interested to hear how the new workflows hold up for you.