For a loooooong time I have had a battle against my iPhone. Today, I won.

As everybody -I guess-, I have contacts which I want to name my own (e.g. Mum, Dad, $GIRLFRIEND_NAME, etc) However, one of the functionalities introduced by Apple long time ago, when iCloud started, prevented me from doing it permanently. I describe the scenario:

I set a new contact name -let’s say “Dad”- in my Contacts. I use my iPhone for some time and eventually I get and e-mail from my dad. Let’s say his name is “Dennis Ritchie”. So, just a few seconds after, my iPhone would “help me out” and complete my dad’s name, being the result of this “Dad Ritchie”.

Not that I am against surnames, but I guess I am not the only one who finds this extremely annoying. I looked around for a solution in my iPhone, in my Mac, in Google… But nothing. Surprisingly though, I have found it very difficult to even get in a forum where people asked about the problem (I found 3 so far, so it is not anything special of me). Today, inspired by one of the proposals I read, I came out with a solution. It is not perfect, but it is simple and it works.

Open Contacts in your Mac and look for the person yo DO NOT want iCloud to auto-complete whenever it can deduce any information for. Edit the contact and go to the “Surname”, then press Option+Space. Solved!! 🙂 What Option+Space does is introducing a  non-breaking space (aka &nbsp), making iCloud think that we already have a surname and therefore preventing it from changing it. Think that before this, the Surname tag was empty, and by completing it iCloud is supposedly helping us.

Hope this can help somebody out there. Otherwise, I’ll just take this post as a demonstration of my victory today 🙂

–javier