[hacker]

Originally Posted by Pride Of Lions

Truth be told, I came across your AvantGo solution several years ago when AG dropped support for OS X, and it was very buggy and there were no responses to my support queries.

You must have me confused with someone else. We don't have an "AvantGo solution" at all. At least, not anything has ever had our name on it, or shipped with our project, or our source code.

So, if a company wants to provide a user-friendly third-party solution with proper support, then I don't see what's wrong with waiting for their product to evolve with the latest technologies.

We are not a company, we are an ever-evolving group of Free Software authors who work on the code because its a fun project. We don't get paid, and we definately don't get support from ANY of the vendors (well, except Handspring a couple of years ago). Everything we've done, we've had to do by reverse-engineering every single byte of data, either on the wire, or in the data API on the device itself. Believe me, this is no fun task, but its pretty amazing how far we've gotten by just using that approach. Dozens of projects and products rely upon and use our code every single day; commercial and free.

Maybe your consortium provides better tech. support now, maybe your product(s) don't require your customers to be fluent in Perl and C++ and whatever.

I'm not sure what you're speaking of here, or what "consortium" you're referring to, but if you've submitted any bugs in the bugtracker, they are assigned and accounted for. We don't let bugs slip through the cracks, when they are reported with useful information.

We're also available on irc (irc.pilot-link.org in #pilot-link) for your real-time debugging needs. One of the library maintainers uses OSX as his primary platform, and he's the main reason the code works so well on that platform (he's also the author of SyncBuddy; v2.0 was just released, you should try it, its an amazing product).

I would argue that we provide exponentially better support than most of the commercial companies, and we always have. Ask any of our loyal userbase of several thousand users, and they'll tell you.

That being said, you definately don't need to be fluent in Perl or C++ or C or any development language to use the code provided. In fact, you don't even have to use the interactive conduits provided with pilot-link at all, you can use the GUI tools that are developed on top of it, such as J-Pilot, KPilot, gnome-pilot, Evolution, PilotManager, SyncBuddy, and others.

But, as for me, I'm invested in Mark/Space's Missing Sync and until a BETTER product comes along, I'll just have to wait for their product to help me sync this mythical future PalmOne PDA with my Mac.

Missing Sync also relies upon pilot-link's core libraries; it wouldn't function without them.

You can be assured that when/if this mythical PDA is released, we will support it, and the other applications, such as MissingSync, SyncBuddy, and so on, will inherit that support.