FIGURE A

The Pilot Desktop software is in a Pilot Desktop 1.0 folder and in your Control Panels folder. Click picture for a larger image.

Now it's hard to talk about this software without expressing disappointment. I use both a Macintosh and a Windows machine regularly, and I HotSync my PalmPilot Professional to both. It's good that the Mac support exists at all, and I'd be very unhappy if it didn't. On the other hand, the quality of the Mac desktop software lags behind its Windows cousin on every measure.

Take features, for example. The name of the desktop software is the first giveaway. The Mac desktop is only at version 1.0, while the Windows desktop is at version 2.1 and counting. This means that the Mac software is limited essentially to supporting the features of the Pilot 1000 and Pilot 5000, omitting support for the new features of the PalmPilot Personal and PalmPilot Professional, let alone the Palm III. Expense, Mail, and TCP/IP are all unavailable on the Mac Pilot Desktop.

What does this mean for you, as a PalmPilot user? Well, first it means that if you use the Expense application on your PalmPilot Professional, you can't get at the data on your Macintosh. If you read email on your Macintosh, there's no way to HotSync this down to your PalmPilot. There's no Network HotSync.

But even the features that are there on the Mac aren't implemented as well. The Desktop application takes 50 seconds to boot up on my 133 MHz PowerPC-equipped PowerBook 520. That's certainly too slow to be convenient, and slower than other software of comparable complexity, such as a simple word-processor. Just opening the HotSync control panel takes 12 seconds on my PowerBook. By way of comparison, even my geriatric 486-based Windows computer beat these times, and my 133 MHz Pentium-based computer leaves them in the dust.

Finally, there's unreliability. I've almost never had problems HotSyncing to my Windows machine. In contrast, I frequently have problems HotSyncing to my Macintosh. Sometimes, I get a message that the PalmPilot lost its connection with the computer. Sometimes, the Macintosh just hangs. In any case, once this happens I rarely get the use of my Macintosh back -- I need to restart.

One of my hobbies is singing opera. So of course I want all of my rehearsals -- about 20 of them -- entered as appointments in my Date Book. I tried this once by running the PalmPilot Desktop application on my Mac and entering them one by one. The more I entered, the slower and slower the Desktop got. After a dozen or so, it finally got to the stage where I was sure my Desktop had hung. Fortunately, it hadn't. I stopped entering appointments, quit out of the Desktop application, and re-started it yet. All the appointments were there, and the application sped up to its original molasses pace.

This, then, is what it's like to use a Macintosh with a PalmPilot. The basics work, just barely, and with a lot of effort. It's not enough to kill you, but you wonder how it's making you stronger.

Some shelter from the storm
But in this gloomy picture, there is a bright spot. Here, as elsewhere, Palm Computing's brilliant decision to throw open the PalmPilot to software developers means there are many resources for the Mac user to tap. Plus, Palm Computing has released one or two things which no Mac and PalmPilot user should be without.