I don't really like venting about software developers -- I know, especially in the case of software as ambitious as this, tons of time has gone into development, etc. So what I'm saying here, believe it or not, is weighted somewhat with that in mind.

Which is: you may want to try the demo out before trusting your data to anything more than the minimal claims Marketcircle makes. Especially if you'd like to use a rudimentary client/server setup vis-a-vis their Touch Server. Especially further if you have more than a couple dozen contacts or calendar entries you'd like to keep synched up.

The program looks great. It's a design marvel. And I have to believe that prior releases were more solid than the current (as of 01/14/10) "Snow Leopard Compatible" build.

But my own experience has been dismal: for any increase in productivity I thought I'd get, the numerous problems -- hard crashes, the resulting reinstallation and retooling of data -- have made this a terrible waste of money, resources, and time.

Like I mentioned already, the server/client/iPhone Touch implementation has been especially craptastic. It's not that it's necessarily impractical, or slow, or bloated. It just fails -- as in, hangs and needs to be forced-quit (with a requisite reboot), sometimes losing data, sometimes duplicating or triplicating contact info, sometimes just causing mail to crash, or sending the computer into an effective slow-mo spinning beach-ball meltdown.

This, despite dozens of troubleshooting attempts: i.e., erasing and replacing plists and/or various builds of the software itself, to simpler fixes like permissions repair and using Diskwarrior. I did all this initially with the recommendations of tech support (the plist, reinstall stuff). But after a bunch of thoughtful back-and-forths (to their credit), I was told that the latest crash log I'd sent indicated the problem was a bug in Snow Leopard. Something that Apple would have to address, and which might take a while. Only a couple of days later I saw on the Marketcircle site that Daylite was now fully Snow Leopard Compatible.

I guess in the world of software development, all rules about what's true and what's simply plausibly deniable add up to about the same thing.

Occasionally I try this program again -- after, say, an OS X software update comes out -- and it is still disappoints. The only difference is that now I wouldn't dare really trust it to begin with. If I hadn't been through so many weirdly awful iterations of trying to get this to work, I wouldn't write this. But really, be wary. I can't believe how much money and time I've wasted.