Great Aunt Gertrude, we never thought we'd see the day-- but it's finally out! Well, sort of. It's just a public beta, so it's not really out, out. And your odds of successfully downloading it before the next Ice Age arrives currently look pretty slim, since at broadcast time the server on which it resides was being flooded with a torrent of so much pent-up demand from long-suffering users that it makes the Slashdot effect look like a dripping faucet by comparison. Still, in at least some sense of the phrase, "it's out," and for that we're supremely grateful to faithful viewer Victor Agreda, Jr. for delivering the good news.

Oh, did we forget to mention what "it" is? "It" just happens to be Palm Desktop for Mac OS X, baby. That's right; as Palm puts it, now there's "one more reason to upgrade to Mac OS X!" That may be laying it on a little thick, since it's not like Palm synchronization doesn't work in Mac OS 9 anymore, or anything like that; indeed, as far as we can tell (and, seeing as our download of the software is currently progressing at a blazing 83 bytes per second, we won't be able to test for ourselves until sometime next year), we're going to be better off sticking with the Mac OS 9 version of the software for a while, yet-- conduits for Vindigo, AvantGo, etc. still need to be ported to Mac OS X before this is going to do us a whole lot of good. Still, while syncing via Classic has actually been working halfway decently, it's nice to see some concrete evidence of solid Mac OS X support coming from Palm's direction.

Then again, maybe "concrete evidence" isn't quite the right term-- it won't be particularly concrete until we manage to download and run this alleged new software, probably sometime in the year 2525. Say, have we ever told you about our brilliant plan one day to announce some fantastic piece of utter vaporware, hype it to the stars until demand is through the roof, and then finally announce its availability by sticking some large and appropriately-named file of garbage on a slow server on a 14.4 kbps dialup connection, thus proving that it "shipped"? Everyone figures the server is just on a hideously overloaded T3, nobody's able to download a copy, and the few that do and find they can't run the software just assume that the download got corrupted. Pay off a few reviewers to claim they've used the product and love it, and voilà: actual shipping vaporware. It can't fail!

Not that this applies in any way to Palm Desktop for Mac OS X, of course-- probably. We'll know for sure any eon, now. 2% of 13312K and counting.

Whoops, connection lost! Guess we're starting again. Wheeeeee!! (Thank heaven for almost-certainly-unauthorized mirrors...)