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Snow Leopard Drops Palm OS Sync
adeelarshad82 writes "It's been just a little over a month since Apple blocked iTunes sync with Palm Pre, and now Apple takes that strategy one step further by blocking Snow Leopard sync with Palm-OS powered smartphones. Even though Palm has officially retired Palm OS and is now focusing hard on its next-generation WebOS in the Palm Pre, the company is still selling Palm OS-powered smartphones; two current models are the Treo Pro on Sprint and the Centro."
Stay classy, Apple.
From Palm! Oh Yeah
s/blocking/dropping support for/
Nothing, IIRC, is stopping Palm from doing the heavy lifting required to support their devices in OS X except Palm.
I'm really not happy with this interplatform bitching.
There should be laws against this kind of thing: the recent Google Talk blocking by Apple and this is an example of trying to maintain a monoply in my opinion.
We all have a go at Microsoft for lock-in but why does Apple get away with it?
Slashdot needs Geekcode | Can anyone recommend any good SCIFI? My tastes: Foundation, Startide Rising, CITY, Ringworld,
Palm dropped support for this YEARS ago. You can hardly blaim apple for not taking over support of a product that the manufacturer declared dead.
So why would Apple spend time developing a feature for it? Especially since all 3 of the people still using Palm OS devices can purchase an app that does the same thing. Looks to me like the press is making a mountain from a molehill.
Before anyone gets down on me, let me say I am a big-time Apple junkie. I have an iPhone, an iMac, a Macbook, hell, even an Apple TV. I code in Perl and Objective-C.
That said, this is totally unconscionable. Apple has an obligation to its users not to break things that used to work for no good reason, and suddenly killing Palm sync support with no good reason other than a big Nelson Muntz "ha-ha" is kind of a red flag.
Anyone who had a serious Palm jones already used The Missing Sync anyhow, but this is seriously irresponsible.
seems appropriate, this name was proposed by my Power PC Tower which is also left out of all the fun.
but I just saved 30 bucks!
Its a gift from Apple, so you don't have to use 2 horrible products at once!
Palm Desktop stopped functioning years ago, so Apple finally dropping support for it is not a bad thing at all. I'm sure Missing Sync for Palm OS will be continue to function or be updated to function in Snow Leopard. I know I had to use it with my Centro since the decrepit Palm Desktop didn't work for it. Windows Mobile and BlackBerry devices also rely on third-party software to sync in Mac OS X. Apple dropping support on their side is a non-issue.
ugh.
They block people from using their services and buying music, thus people will go download it else, possibly for free.
They reject apps for the iphone and ipod on grounds that it mimics functions, even if it does more than just that, and even when it does the mimicked functions better.
They install some sort of anti-virus engine thingy with their latest OS coming out, even though they continue to make claims that Macs do not get viruses.
This, is why I am a PC.
"Life without walls..." - XP
Just install Free Software and GNU/Linux and forget about all these stupid games! Take control of your computing with an platform created by the people, for the people. Use something which is designed to enable you, rather than restrict you - locking you in and exploiting you for cash.
Jesus, Jobs, have you no heart? First you killed off the floppy disk drive. Then you wiped out serial ports in favor of USB. Now you're blowing out syncing technology that barely anyone uses any more in order to streamline your OS... shame, shame on you.
Sorry, I'm having a real hard time getting worked up over this, or even seeing a nefarious scheme behind it.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
It's a feature.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
I have a Centro. It doesn't sync on Leopard either. Go google around. You'll find a bunch of "Buy MissingSync for Palm" forum replies. Apple even makes an SDK thinger for making iSync plugins. I tried to use it to make something for my Centro go. I'm not expert at mobile phone syncing protocols, but I'm pretty sure Palm (or ACCESS?) is retarded.
I wonder if Apple was licensing the software that allowed PalmOS syncing... possibly from Palm...
to punish all of a company's users for the "crime" of making it possible for its customers to buy Apple's digital music products.
Luckily, as a Linux user, I need not worry about it, jpilot or kpilot are plug-and-play on Palm OS products.
I just lost my own Palm PDA after years of satisfactory performance. Since I mainly use it for e-books and mp3s, I was considering buying an iPod Touch to replace it for these purposes.
I think I'll look up a discounted price on another Palm PDA instead.
For Palm users who made the mistake of buying Apple, here's a tutorial on installing Linux apps on OSX.
As for digital tracks themselves, I recommend buying them from a company that has not reinvented itself as a "cooler" version of Microsoft.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Nothing is being blocked. Apple is simply discontinuing their own support for Palm devices. Palm itself stopped officially supporting Macs years ago. There's nothing preventing users from running third-party software to sync.
Apple drops support for legacy stuff from time to time. This might be a retaliatory move, but it's more likely they just don't want to waste the time and money on something a tiny fraction of their userbase needs, especially when it's something a third party (or Palm, you know, the makers of the OS in question) could write a sync app for.
By reading this you acknowledge that you have read it.
Apple have never supported Palm OS syncing in Mac OS X. All they provided was a conduit for Palm Desktop to access iCal/Address Book. There has never been an Apple Mail.app sync plugin. It needed Palm Desktop to work.
Palm Desktop is still a PPC app, it's also not a very good PPC app, there have been basically no updates to it since it was Claris Organiser (aside from Palm OS Syncing). Last time I used it was on my previous mac with tiger. It wasn't very good then.
I've not used the missing sync myself as I moved away from Palm OS when I switched to an Intel Mac, but from reviews and word of mouth I hear it is a better solution. From my understanding it makes no use of the conduits Apple was providing, so I see no reason for them to be kept.
Besides, if people are that annoyed they'll hack it back in. Then if you care you can use that. I don't see what all the fuss is about...
I've killed like about 1500 Snow Leopards now and I'll I've got is an arse load of Tiger Meat, a metric fuck-ton of Sharp Claws and some useless blue cloak pattern that gives Frost Resistance. Lucky bastard.
Just about all the PalmOS users still out there use Missing Sync anyways. It's the only Intel-native sync to begin with, since Palm themselves never bothered releasing an Intel version of their Desktop for Mac.
If Palm doesn't care enough to support it, why should Apple? There's not exactly a lot of PalmOS left out in the market nowadays - the Pre is the only Palm-branded phone that sells at all and even it's a virtual pimple on the body of iPhones and Blackberries.
(Blackberries that, by the way, are about to have their own native Intel-compatible Mac sync released)
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
I've read the article. It's definitely a different case to Google Talk.
I think one of the reasons they did this WAS because the Palm is now discontinued, they deliberately crippled functionality to maintain the purity of iTunes/iPod. They do not want other companies exploiting their software out of their control.
Palm used essentially an undocumented hack to trick iTunes into thinking it was an iPhone. This should go on the dirty code frontpage article. It saved Palm from having to write their own software and it allowed them to claim iTunes compatibility.
Even worse is probably that knowing how to pretend to be an iPhone proves that they may have been digging into the internals of the iPhone filesystem which they probably want to keep secret.
I still no hardware developer should prevent me from the software I use with my hardware though. Apple wants a monoply over its hardware and software and that's understandable from a business POV.
The summary is a little misleading...They didn't block, they just removed the carpet from under their feet, knowing full well it would cause an incompatibility.
Slashdot needs Geekcode | Can anyone recommend any good SCIFI? My tastes: Foundation, Startide Rising, CITY, Ringworld,
The Palm connector, maintained by PALM, has languished for years. It suffers from TERRIBLE limitiations on Mac OS X, and it always had (you can only sync ONE address per contact, etc.). It was broken and really not updatedy by Palm as long ago as Mac OS X 10.4.
If you want to sync a Palm device, buy "The Missing Sync" and you're good to go. Works fine. Sure, it's extra $, but that's what you pay for that boat anchor.
Who decides what technology has become "legacy"?
Fairly often it is Apple - for better or worse. They're not always the first but when Apple decides something is no longer worth including in their computers, other PC makers often follow suit. They really were the big influence that finally got everyone to drop 1.44MB floppies even though everyone knew for years that they were a technology well past it's prime. They also were ahead of the curve on eliminating 1.2MB floppy drives, DB9 and DB25 serial ports, and a number of other ports. There are other examples besides. Apple isn't always right and not always first, but they are almost always influential.
What about MP3 players?
What about them? Apple is the dominant player but they aren't by an stretch a monopoly like Microsoft has with Windows. Might get there someday but they sure aren't there now. Frankly the dedicated MP3 player market has probably peaked and will slowly but steadily decline. MP3 players are going to get increasingly integrated into cell phones. As popular as the iPhone is, Apple has no where near the pull in the cell phone market they do in the MP3 player or even PC markets.
The iPod and iTunes don't exactly play nice with other software or hardware.
And there are plenty of other options available so that really isn't a big deal. ITunes is nice but hardly the only way to sync an MP3 player with your song collection. Apple has to be careful. They've gone too proprietary before with their PCs (resulting in 10% marketshare) and it would be easy to make the same mistake with their music businesses.
It is not heavy lifting either. Requirements for developing Sync support on OS X is as follows:
1) Mac Mini (as in cheapest Apple and good developer machine)
2) OS X Install DVD (has developer tools)
3) Double Click Developer tools and install them
There are examples included, debugging tools specifically designed for iSync and even some packager. Of course, if Palm decides that PalmOS devices should act like iPhone and sync with iTunes, it is their decision and insanity :)
Its not a niche market, its every single palm phone except the absolute most recent one. Every single palm sold before June 6th, 2009 is affected.
Even Palm does a crappy job providing integration with computers for their own devices and has for years so I don't see why this is Apple's fault. I dropped my palm years ago because they fell WAY behind the curve on keeping their software modern and it was a pain to communicate with my PC. Unless I happened to use Outlook (I don't) or the near useless Palm Desktop I couldn't sync the address books which pretty much made their PDAs and phones useless to me since there are plenty of smartphones on the market which are much more capable and modern than the Treos. (I'm not about to tie myself to some third party integration tool either) Furthermore Palm themselves declared PalmOS dead. If you purchase something which the maker itself is telling you that it has a limited future, that is just dumb.
The Palm Treo Pro runs on Windows Mobile 6.1...
Neither Mark/Space Missing Sync nor Palm Desktop required Mac OS X support. Presumably, what's announced here is dropping the Palm iSync plugin developed by Apple.
This was always useless to anyone using Datebk* as a PalmOS calendar, or any of the later Palm device calendars with support for categories, as the iSync plugin never had any category support for the calendar. There are no currently supported PalmOS models that lack calendar categories (you have to go back a long way), so I really doubt there were many happy users (if any users at all) of Apple's PalmOS iSync plugin.
Anyone still using PalmOS can and should get Missing Sync, which actually works.
Apple is run by a guy who saw employees staring to legendary macs and decided to "throw them away" to computer museum saying they should look to future instead of past.
Like or not, that is the attitude and in fact, if you ask me, it always pays off.
Just an entry from my system.log
" Warning once: This application, or a library it uses, is using NSQuickDrawView, which has been deprecated. Apps should cease use of QuickDraw and move to Quartz"
In Apple land, if you ignore it enough time, one day your application will simply won't launch or crash (informatively) and of course, that time, blogs are open handedly waiting for your whining and slashdot submission :)
"Palm has officially retired Palm OS and is now focusing hard on its next-generation WebOS in the Palm Pre, the company is still selling Palm OS-powered smartphones; two current models are the Treo Pro on Sprint and the Centro."
Considering I have 14 Sprint Treo PRO in my phone fleet, I can tell you someone didn't do their fact checking - The unit DOES NOT run on PalmOS - it's Windows Mobile Pro 6.1
http://nextelonline.nextel.com/NASApp/onlinestore/en/Action/DisplayPhones?phoneSKU=PTR850HK
Way to go, Appscout.
I don't guarantee anything but, as Leopard which you boo boo is a Unix 03 compliant operating system with entire toolchain to support open source software, Fink Project and Macports did considerable amount of work to make automated package management.
I know Fink and it has some Palm related software but I have never,ever saw a Palm in my life to begin with so I can't guarantee anything.
http://www.finkproject.org/ (official site)
http://pdb.finkproject.org/ (Package Database web interface)
So, no need to go Linux just to have Palm support. While people buy OS X, they also buy UNIX.
I know one way or another, you can get Sync support under snow leopard but let me tell you something. If I was a Palm owner, I would be having very nice and polite communication with Palm Inc. over this. They should spend money to hire couple of Cocoa/OS X developers rather than renting some astroturfers and shady blogs.
I have a Palm OS device, a Sony Clie, and there was no support for it in iSync on any version of OS X I used (10.2 through 10.5). When Palm declined to update Palm Hotsync for Intel I switched to Mark/Space.
So what is this mysterious component? What did it sync? Was it something for the phones only?
AT&T + ( iPhone + iPod ) + Mac OSX
Are any one of those allowed to mess with the business of the each other's competitors? AT&T + iPhone may be more obviously collusive by crossing company boundaries, but Microsoft's taught us that desperate product lines used in collusion can still get you in trouble ( I.E. is a minority web browser ).
Sure, OSX may be completely innocent in dropping PalmOS support for age reasons. The article also comes across as dramatic. But as a curious bystander it still looks a little funny. While Apple may have a minority OS, they certainly aren't minorities in the phone or music player business. In light of the Palm Pre-iTunes issue and now Google Voice/iPhone debacle (also apparently "a supportability/customer experience issue") Apple certainly isn't making itself look too friendly. Compared to their usual "i'm a mac, what me worry" public face, anyway.
1.) Apple updates OS, modernizing and streamlining the codebase.
2.) Some legacy app that hasn't been maintained in 4-5 years breaks.
3.) Apple must have deliberately broken the software in an anti-competitive move.
I'm an ace at logic.
One of our people wanted a pc notebook to replace his dead macbook.
Since I don't deploy notebooks with less than 4 gig of ram, that left few options.
I've decided to bypass Vista, and the driver support for xp64 is sparse.
After testing win7 on a trash box, I gave it a shot on the new notebook.
The gui doesn't follow exactly the same design choices I'd make, but it's adequate, and the performance is better than xp or vista, especially running memory hog software.
So, in the end, it's an incremental overall improvement over xp, and supports my strategy of jumping over vista.
everybody including normal Apple users loathes Apple fanbois. You're one of them. Sane people think that the more devices a web app like iTunes can connect to, the more useful it is.
As for me, I'm voting with my money against a business practice I don't like. You can buy all the Apple products you want to. I hope you bought an iPhone and the AT&T calling plans, but that's only because I don't like you, either, and I don't mind in the least knowing you've been burned.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Palm Treo Pro is winmo
Treoâ 755p and Centro are Palm OS
A friend of mine recently got a Mac. He is a longtime Palm user and has a Palm Treo 680. I assumed that iSync would support the Hotsync and thus all devices powered by Palm OS.
I was wrong. If you take a look at this:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2824
You will see that the Tungston and Zire family of phones is supported. No Treo at all. According to him (I only had him on the phone) iSync didn't sync to his phone. He has a roommate who is a Mac fanboy (main reason for the Mac, because he is not a computer geek and onsite support at home is pretty cool) who initially set up everything so I suppose he would have set up iSync if it had worked. So Apple support for Palm seems to be rather spotty at best. No Centro or Treo Pro like the website/blog that Slashdot links to were supported anyways. How can Apple drop support for something they never supported in the first place?
Palm has a very good PIM (actually used to have unfortunately, since developement seems to have stopped). So good that I used to give it to people looking for a simple PIM for their computers who never heard of Palm. They also have a version for the Mac:
http://www.palm.com/europe/en/support/palmdt4_mac.html
Hopefully this will run under Snow Leopard, or maybe Palm will put another revision out if it doesn't.
Anyone here who got his Palm Treo or Centro to run with iSync? And if so, how?
You guys are seriously unbeleivable how you manage to crawl up apples ass no matter what decree of vile scum they're flinging at you. These guys are the single most anti-competitive, communist, and plaugerising company in I.T to this present day, they haven't come up with anything they have "invented" themselves since Woz left in 1987 and you sing they're praises as if they are the greatest thing since sliced bread. Put it this way, since the macintosh/windows war microsoft has actually invented and innovated countless products while apple have managed to rip off open source something awful. What's going on here?
No, that's only the iExplodePhone.
Those Palm Treo's are not being sold much, but they don't disappear just because they aren't stocked any more.
I don't think I've seen a slashdot post so littered with errors before. Did the break.com writers get a hold of the controls?
WTF, why are they still making an otherwise modern mouse using PS2 connectors!?
As a Certified Bean Counter my guess would be that the cost of USB still is higher that of PS2 connections. PS2 connectors have been around so long the fixed costs have basically gone to zero and the machinery to produce them is fully depreciated. They're cheap and do the job. It's probably only a few cents difference per unit, but in quantity that adds up to real money. You have to remember too that margins are quite tight. (Dell's net profit is presently around 2-3%) HP might only make $25-50 profit on the machine - possibly less.
Since HP doesn't make any money because of the keyboard or mouse but still needs to include them sometimes, some accountant probably told the engineers to use PS2 connectors because it saves a little bit per unit. That's why you almost never get a decent keyboard or mouse with a PC. There's simply no margin available to include them because few people have proven willing to pay extra for a decent keyboard/mouse. Especially on a sub $500 PC.
Now you could argue that the added complexity of keeping the PS2 ports is adding expense back and you would be right but probably it's still currently cheaper to include the PS2 ports because of the cost of including the keyboard and mouse. Eventually that equation will change but PS2 ports are going to be with us a while longer I think.
Treo Pro runs Windows Mobile, not Palm OS.
Agreed. Actually I would call this competitive rather than anti-competitive. Why carry legacy support for old hardware? We don't need OS X turning into another Windows history lesson regarding legacy support. There is nothing preventing Palm from updating their software. Why is it suddenly Apples responsibility to write software that allows third party devices to sync? There is absolutely nothing preventing Palm from doing so, but even Palm has dropped support of PalmOS.
Millions of users have to go to vendor sites for drivers on Windows to allow it recognize their hardware and to download the vendor supplied software. Why should Apple be required to provide this functionality? Especially one that even the vendor doesn't care to support any more?
I started reading this and I just have to wonder, how do so many people have an opinion on something so unimportant?
Can you still use Missing Sync though?
I actually thought the Apple Palm Sync stuff was horrid and I use MissingSync on my 10.4 MBP. It was far, far better. Also I never liked Palm Desktop, it was a pain and always broke easily for me.
~Petaris "The world is open. Are you?"
Maybe I don't know, Palm could write their own Mac stuff instead of relying on Apple to do it for them ? I don't see how this is anti-competitive, Palm OS is not a Apple product, they don't have to support it, write software for it or update legacy code to work with their new OS.
Palm can do the work themselves if they think it's worth it. Apple isn't stopping them from downloading Xcode and writing a Cocoa based app to sync with their own hardware.
What bugs me about this story is I have no idea what the nature is of the "support" which Apple has dropped. Is it the customized USB serial driver for communicating with Palm devices? Was Palm Desktop previously bundled with Mac OS? Did Apple block Palm Desktop from interacting with their apps, thus preventing synchronization with iCal and such? I haven't used my Powerbook in long enough that I don't know what Apple had provided themselves, and TFA doesn't say what it is they removed...
Bow-ties are cool.
Open source advocates get off their asses, do something for the reward of just doing it and give you their tools for free, to do with what you will.
Well, Opens Source programmers do that. And not necessarily "for the reward of just doing it"... Open Source Advocates don't necessarily get off their asses at all. :)
Bow-ties are cool.
Apple has a monopoly on the voice chat features of its phone. It banned Google Talk to maintain the monopoly. It means you have no choice but to use the iPhone's own build in voice chat. They're purposefully locking you in, without competition. Monopoly means:
1. A company or group having exclusive control over a commercial activity.
2. A commodity or service so controlled.
Apple lets other Applications on its platform but as soon as something competes with their monopoly, they block it! Is this not obvious?
Microsoft gets into the same problems with antitrust, why not Apple? I find it funny how I was modded up to 3 insightful then modded down by the Apple fanboys.
Slashdot needs Geekcode | Can anyone recommend any good SCIFI? My tastes: Foundation, Startide Rising, CITY, Ringworld,
The only one that didn't want Palm products to succeed was Palm. Horrible products. Support EOL for all their products were the day they shipped. Rarely got any sort of bug fixes, never any additional features. Palm Desktop for Mac is still a PowerPC only application (runs on intel via rosetta). Why bother trying to support something the vendor has no interest in supporting? I'll never make the mistake of buying another Palm product (I've had 2, Palm Pro and Palm T5). I've never heard anyone say a good thing about their Treo so I never went there. I don't expect anything will change with the Pre. I also don't understand the Pre hype, it's not bringing anything new to the table.
Well, I've enjoyed my Treo 650 - though perhaps more because of the hardware than the software. The combination of a good screen and a dedicated keyboard area was just the right design for me - and the Treo was one of the first products to do that well in a smartphone format.
After the way Palm has handled PalmOS over the last several years I'm more than a little hesitant to buy any new Palm devices myself. I mean, there was the never-ending reign of PACE, followed by the adoption of NVFS (which was great, in a way, since it protected the device from data loss due to power failure - but in older revisions it could lose entire databases if your device crashed while the database was open - and it changed a fundamental assumption about how databases work on PalmOS...
Had Palm rolled out a new OS platform... I don't know... before they allowed PalmOS to degrade into a complete joke... Before it completely ceased to be a reasonable fit for the devices on which it was running... Then I would be a lot less skeptical about the stuff they're rolling out now... I'm with you on the Pre - I can't understand the hype of it.
Bow-ties are cool.
But then Apple fixed the problem by simply cloning the entire Palm and calling the result the "iPhone".
Palm? Oh right, they're the company that cloned the entire Apple Newton and called the result the "Pilot." ... just illustrating how idiotic your statement was.
Can I just say how totally ridiculous these two statements are?
I mean, the Pilot was so far from being a Newton clone... Newton was overstepping what the hardware could actually accomplish. Pilot was much less capable, but the OS was well-fitted to the hardware and the hardware was well-fitted to realistic expectations of usage and battery life. The Pilot was pocketable - and Graffiti, while it did require training of the user - was reliable and quick as a method of input. It was one of the first cases of a computer being both truly portable and truly useful.
And then, saying the iPhone is a clone of the Palm? That's ridiculous. What I do find very interesting and actually a bit cool is that (non-phone) PDAs in the vein of Palm and PocketPC were basically dead - and yet Apple has been quite successful in selling theirs, by marketing it as a continuation of the iPod line. But anyway... Palm from the era of the iPhone's creation was... very unlike the iPhone. At best you had the late PalmOS Treos - running an OS several years old, emulating an m68K processor, with underlying assumptions throughout the OS tuned toward the needs of PDAs from the previous decade. The Treo's web browser was pretty good for a phone in 2005, but it had all kinds of flaws. The iPhone had a much better OS and a much better web browser. To the extent that iPhone and (PalmOS) Treo are anything alike, the iPhone is far superior. If you want to think of the iPhone as a clone of other PalmOS devices, that's a bit silly, too - iPhone has a whole different approach to input (doing away with the stylus or keyboard and the notion of writing on the device) That being the case it seems silly to say the iPhone is a "clone" of Palm. It's very different and a whole lot better than anything from the PalmOS era.
Bow-ties are cool.
Uh the treo pro is a winmo device not palm is...and pre did and does sync with itunes currently and on release
That was my intent--the first statement was idiotic, so I made an equally idiotic statement using the same "logic" to highlight it.