Take, for example, this sad story from my personal journal. Shortly after I got my first Palm handheld, I seriously messed up my desktop Address Book while trying to import a batch of addresses. No problem, I simply set the HotSync Manager to "Handheld Overwrites Macintosh," and I was back in business. Or so I thought. You see, because the Secondary Address field doesn't synchronize, all the secondary addresses disappeared from Palm Desktop, although they were still safe on my Palm III.

A couple months later, when I began synchronizing my Palm handheld with my Windows machine at work, I managed to scramble my categories. I think you can see where this is headed. When I got home, I set the HotSync Manager to "Macintosh Overwrites Handheld" in order to restore my categories. In a matter of minutes, my categories were restored, but the secondary addresses that had been on my Palm handheld were gone.

Now, I love extra features as much as the next guy, but a buggy feature isn't really a feature, is it?

8. Protection for secondary categories
Yet another feature carried over from Claris Organizer is support for two categories. And while this is mighty nifty, it is also quite fragile.

You see, at one time I had set up a wonderful collection of secondary categories that I used to sort my contacts. It was working great until I had to HotSync with the "Handheld overwrites Macintosh" setting selected. That was all it took; all of my secondary category settings were promptly erased.

I know (from my experience synchronizing with Outlook) that there is a way for the programmers to protect this second category from being erased during a special HotSync operation. I just hope that it can be implemented without too much trouble.

9. Give us a View Details pane
When Palm Desktop 4 for Windows was released, I was pleased to see that many great features from the Macintosh program were implemented. My next wish is that a staple feature from the Windows program will make it over to the Mac side, namely, a View Details preview pane in the Contacts module, as in Figure D.

FIGURE D


A View Details preview pane would make browsing contacts so much easier. Roll over picture for a larger image.

Ah, yes, a View Details preview pane just like the Windows version has would make browsing through my contacts so much easier.

10. Reorganize the add/edit contact window
Rounding out my list is one more interface issue. The add/edit contact window is rather poorly laid out, as you saw back in Figure C. First of all, the AppleScript enabled email field is located near the bottom of the window, in the pane that includes most of the items that are synchronized to the note on the Palm handheld.

Secondly, there's no way of telling at first glance that many of the items in the add/edit contact window will not synchronize at all. For example, Palm Desktop for Macintosh supports up to eleven custom fields, but only the first four can be synchronized. Additionally, there are four non-synchronizing fields in the name area: nickname, suffix, prefix, and division.