BusyContacts

A powerful Contacts alternative

£39.99 Developer BusyMac, busymac.com

Requires OS X 10.9 or higher, iCloud or other contacts service

The maker of BusyCal is back, this time with its souped-up take on OS X’s lacklustre Contacts app. BusyContacts cleverly takes Contacts as its starting point, then adds the features you’ve been crying out for. For starters, it employs a similar multi-paned window, but adds a new Activity pane to provide a handy summary of your interaction with the selected contact, from your goings-on in BusyCal to conversations in Mail and Messages, as well as their Facebook and Twitter activity.

BusyContacts also allows you to tag and apply smart filters to contacts to help sort your list in different ways, and provides tools to quickly combine people’s different entries across multiple accounts, too.

There are gripes: we’re not happy that you can only link to the BusyCal calendar, and the asking price is too high for what’s basically a glorified contacts manager. A shame, because it’s definitely a step up from Apple’s tool. Nick Peers Powerful, elegant and easy to use, BusyContacts’ only real blemish is its high price tag.