I had heard that Palm was not going to port Palm Desktop to Mac OS X. That would have been a shame since it's a very good Personal Information Manager that tied into the Palm OS relatively well (there were some data conversion problems since Palm Desktop is an update of Claris Organizer which has nothing to do with the Palm OS applications). My fears proved to be unfounded as Palm has released a beta for Palm Desktop 4. I had a hard time downloading it because it wasn't an official beta and the ftp server was limited to 300 connections. But I downloaded it today and it looks as good as ever.

Apple ships with a fine Address Book application. It's intimately tied in to Mail and it's good-looking and easy to use. And yet I pined for the missing features. It only had room for one address, it created records for every email you received in Mail, it shows everything in brief mode initially which I don't use. And of course there was no corresponding date book/to do/ reminder application to complement it. But I stuck with it since it's an Apple product.

Now that I have Palm Desktop though, I realize that I would really rather use it than use Address Book. It makes me wonder whether I also secretly miss Eudora that much. Hmm, probably not. I liked Eudora, and it does some things much nicer than Mail, but you either put up with adds or pay the $50 and philosophically I don't want to do either. And it would only replace Mail. Palm Desktop replaces Address Book, MacJournal (which I used for my to do lists), and a little bit of Spindex (where I kept my important dates like birthdays). You just can't beat that.

Palm Desktop seems to be pretty much the same as before. I don't remember the different skins, and most of them are rather ugly, but a muted business look to the screens is rather pleasing. You can attach AppleScript buttons to various fields, which allows you to say launch ICQ and prepare to send a message to someone (assuming ICQ is scriptable). The Beta is a bit slow here and there, but for the most part it does seem to work (based on a few minutes of using it).

Unfortunately, when I try to import my old Palm Desktop file, first of all it imports quite slowly (or maybe I do have a huge amount of data), but then it quits unexpectedly. Oh well, I guess I have to reenter all my information again. That'll take a while. Oops, looks like it's stuck in the spinning cursor of death mode. And when I force quit and relaunch it, it tries to recover unsaved changes and goes into death mode again. Looks like I'll have to delete the preferences. Oh wait, it stopped. Beta bug.

In any case, there is the question of why don't I buy a Palm Pilot. Certainly it's a good idea to hook people to using Palm Desktop, then if they're going to get a PDA Palm Pilot is the natural choice. There are a few reasons why don't get a PDA. One is that there are no Apple PDAs. But even when they had the Newton I still didn't buy it. Back then I didn't have much money. Now I can afford a PDA, but why do I need one? Keepr track of addresses and phone numbers? Usually I don't need an address right away and the few phone numbers I need I either know them or I have them written down.

Keep track of appointments and to do's? That's a bit more useful. But then again, I have few appointments and most of my to do's are computer related so I'll have my computer with me. And that's the problem. I have my computer with me all the time, so what do I need a PDA for? Now, if it had instant Internet access available anywhere, that would be useful. Really though, a mini computer would be nicer. With an LCD screen mounted on glasses and some sort of hand pointing device. A wearable computer, though those look silly so maybe not.