Frickin' Palmsource
I'm not really a PDA kind of guy. I've used them off and on for years, and Bonnie swears by her Handspring, which I bought for her as a Christmas present a few years ago to replace her bulky DayPlanner.
There are a few reasons for this -- what limited information management I actually do I find more convenient to do on my Mac than I do with a handheld; then the handheld becomes one more fragile, delicate and heavy thing to carry with me everywhere I go.
Now there's another reason for me to avoid them: It looks like PalmSource, the business unit that develops the operating system used by Palm PDAs, is ready to leave Mac users out to dry when it launches Cobalt, the new operating system it has developed as an advanced multimedia/enterprise solution.
Larry Slotnick, PalmSource's Chief Products Officer, recently provided an overview of Cobalt to attendees of the PalmSource Conference, and he said in no uncertain terms that PalmSource is leaving it up to third parties to develop connectivity solutions to support Mac OS X and Cobalt.
Getting support from Palm has always been an uphill battle for Mac users -- market share and all that. Palm Desktop is a squirrelly application that still doesn't work completely right in Mac OS X v10.3 "Panther," by Palm's own confession (they plan an update sometime in the first half of 2004 to compensate for these problems; meanwhile Mac users are just expected to suck it up). We're the redheaded stepchild, to be sure.
Palm's third party developers aren't much better. Countless really cool apps don't support the Mac because of their lack of conduit support for the Mac version of the Palm Desktop app.
Apple's tried to compensate a little bit -- its iSync software works well enough to shunt data to and from a Palm PDA via Address Book and iCal, but it's still dependent on Palm's HotSync technology to work.
Now, Slotnick is telling developers that with Cobalt, those days are behind them -- it's going to be up to Mac-specific third-party developers like Mark/Space to create software that Mac users will have to buy for the privilege of being able to exchange data with their PDAs.
This just sucks, especially since Palm was, at one time, and still is, to a lesser degree, populated with ex-Apple employees, many of whom worked on Apple's own ill-fated PDA, the Newton MessagePad. I'm really sad to see it go this way, because it's yet another nail in the coffin of Mac marginalization in enterprise and consumer environments.
I'm hoping that either PalmSource will change its mind and continue to support the Mac directly, or that this will give Apple the impetus they need to develop a less half-assed synchronization solution than iSync affords right now.
Comments
This is terrible news....no Acrobat, Documents to Go and as you mentioned even iSync won't work because of the reliance upon Palm's hotsync technology. I don't see 3rd party helping out much....which of the potentially multiple technologies will Acrobat support, what about iSync or Documents to Go. What a mess. Hopefully Apple will step up and add full Palm support to the OS giving a definitive one-stop-shop to the mess that is coming.
Posted by: Mike | February 11, 2004 09:39 PM