That's the good news. A down side to this glorious development is that in order to take advantage of Mac OS X's coolest features, Macintosh applications must be rewritten to some degree. A host of developers, including Palm, Inc., are slated to release Mac OS X-compatible versions of their wares by late summer or early fall. In Palm's case, the official word is that "Palm is hard at work on a 'carbonized' Mac OS X version of Palm Desktop and HotSync Manager software for release later this year." See http://www.palm.com/support/macintosh/mac_compatfaq.html.

Well, I figured that if Palm was "hard at work" developing a new version of Palm Desktop for Macintosh (which I'm assuming will be version 3.0), they might be interested in some suggestions--you know, just a few things they could do to improve the overall user experience for us Mac folks.

Now don't get me wrong, like any other Palm handheld-totin' Mac owner, I'm extremely grateful for all that Palm, Inc. has done for us over the last few years. As David Pogue pointed out in his November 1998 article, "PalmPilot and Macintosh: together at last" (at http://www.palmpower.com/issues/issue199811/macintosh001.html), the release of Palm Desktop 2.1 for Macintosh was a wonderful thing: Palm's remodel of Claris Organizer was not only a vast improvement over Pilot Desktop 1.0, but it also offered a number of Mac-only features that left "Windows users... looking over the fence with envy."

But as great as Palm Desktop for Macintosh (now at version 2.6.3) is, there is some room for improvement. After all, unlike Palm Desktop for Windows, the Macintosh program wasn't built from the ground up to work seamlessly with a Palm handheld, and it still shows in a few areas. Therefore, I'm hoping the talented software engineers at Palm, Inc. will grant a few of my wishes as they work to finalize the next release of Palm Desktop for Macintosh.

So what follows is my list of the "Top Ten" improvements I'd like to see.

1. Full support for repeating events
The first thing I'd like to see is full support for repeating events.

You see, although you can create all manner of un-timed repeating appointments on your Palm handheld (and in Palm Desktop for Windows), Palm Desktop for Macintosh only supports two types of un-timed repeating events: yearly repeating un-timed events without an end date, and event banners. That's it. Nothing else. Nada. Zip.