Review: The Missing Sync for Palm OS 5
- Article 4 of 89
- MacFormat, December 2005
Now you can make your Palm PDA your Mac's best friend once again
The Mac PDA experience is not all it could be. Compared to the Windows experience, it's actually pretty poor. Thankfully, Mac developer Mark/Space has leapt to the rescue with Missing Sync for Palm OS, a complete replacement for the standard Palm HotSync software. Previous Missing Syncs have brought to the Mac Windows-only features such as WiFi syncing, as well as new features including mounting SD cards on your desktop. Version five adds a list of capabilities that Mac users have been clamouring for.
Top of the list is a set of conduits for syncing iLife and OS X applications with their Palm equivalents. The iTunes and iPhoto conduits are excellent, allowing you to pick particular tracklists and photo libraries from within Missing Sync itself. The iPhoto conduit will resize photos on the fly for display on your PDA and sync back to iPhoto any new PDA pictures.
Tiger users get Events, Contacts and Tasks conduits to replace Apple's inept iSync conduit. In particular, Missing Sync's Contacts conduit syncs just about every Address Book field, while the Events conduit finally makes it possible to use calendar categories.
There are also minor improvements throughout the rest of the program, the most notable being a slightly improved version of the Palm Backup conduit and a new conduit for syncing folders on your Mac with your PDA.
Unfortunately, the initial release of Missing Sync has problems. All the new iSync replacements have had serious bugs resulting in data loss and duplication; some have even made it impossible to use the PDA's own applications. The latest beta at the time of writing has stamped out the majority of these problems; further betas are set to squash yet more.
So, hold off from buying Missing Sync for now. By the time version 5.0.3 comes out, though, it should be a must-have for anyone with a Palm PDA.