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These are big. These are very big.

There's nothing worse than transferring a friend's data from an old mail client, noticing a duplicate, and not being sure which address is current. Think of all the places where something as simple as an address or e-mail address may be duplicated: e-mail software at home and work, Palm/contact software at home and office, phone numbers in the cell phone, etc.. Being able to sync contacts between work and home via the Palm was a huge step, but even now if I have information in a mail client or a cell phone it's a pain to keep it synchronized.

Donald Norman complained about this effort to "set up" stuff in The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design back in 1990, and this is the first time that I've seen an integrated solution to deal with this. Sure, things like my newsreader (MacSOUP) and mail client (PowerMail) will have to be modified to work with these, but this is totally sweet.

In a related matter, I'm totally psyched for iCal. Despite its lame name, this looks like it has the potential to replace my Palm desktop application (which took its own sweet time getting ported to OS X in the first place -- but as a longtime Mac user and former U.S. Robotics/3Com shareholder, I'm used to getting the shaft from Palm).

Now while I don't have a huge need to publish my calendar to millions of people or even within a large business, for several years I've been looking at something to simply allow my wife and I to compare Palm schedules so that we know what the other has planned before one of us tells others that we'd love to go to that party or movie. I guess we'd count as a small workgroup. Several Palm options exist, but they're all about US$50 and either require Windows (but of course the sites don't bother to say that until you're on the demo download page, do they?) or an Internet service that (a) I don't necessarily trust with my whole calendar, and (b) who knows when they're gonna go belly up. Being able to handle the whole thing behind my own firewall looks great.

In terms of the upgrade cost, I prefer to think of it this way: The upgrade is $129, but includes the features I've liked in the demo of the kick-ass application Watson ($29) in Sherlock, a workgroup-synchronizing Palm calendar (~$50), and a Unicode character palette (comparable to ~$9 shareware). So, as far as I'm concerned, the upgrade is really only about forty bucks, which while not free, offers enough cool features and improvements (multithreaded finder, finder search, spring-loaded folders, Quartz extreme) that I'm not too concerned. Heck, with iChat I might even turn into one of those instant message wankers.

Brittney Cleary has recently touched up her site, and let me tell you, I am not amused. How can such a young innocent piece of ass exploit the horrific terrorist activities of the al Queda network for profit?

Legal? If not, go for Brittney Cleary.

More sex for your enjoyment.

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