Sure, we here at the AtAT compound may be bleary-eyed and sorely out of touch these days ("Is it Tuesday or March?"), but heck, even we know about iSync, that spifftabulous iApp demonstrated last July by a zenlike Steve Jobs as he effortlessly synchronized contact and calendar data between multiple Macs and a bevy of shiny Digital Lifestyle™ products with nary a care in the world. At least, that's how we remember it, though we won't deny the powerful effects of Wishful Thinking, e.g. wouldn't it be nice if our Handspring Visor and our iPod and our Power Mac all listed the correct date and time for our therapy session, instead of two of them still showing the old date prior to last week's rescheduling? Likewise, it'd be great if they also all had the same freakin' phone number for our shrink, instead of one of them listing the number from his old office back in Newton which is now evidently the number of a rug-shampooing service that was singularly unhelpful when we were sobbing into a pay phone about how our Inner Child desperately needed a hug and a home-baked muffin. You know, that sort of thing.

So, uh, yeah... we're looking forward to iSync.

So anyway, question: will Apple ship this sucker in "September, 2002," as originally promised? Answer: Nnnnyaybe. Basically, it all comes down to a simple question: does a beta count? If not, then we put Apple's odds at shipping iSync 1.0 before midnight tonight at roughly about the same as the odds of your winning the state lottery by purchasing a municipal bus transfer. If, on the other hand, you're the type who says "beta, shmeta" and blithely clicks through warnings about potential irreversible data loss the same way you tear those "DO NOT REMOVE UNDER PENALTY OF LAW" tags off your mattresses, then hey, good news-- Apple already met its deadline with a couple of days to spare.

Yes, as faithful viewer kungfumaniac kindly pointed out to us over the weekend, Apple has indeed posted a public beta version of iSync and it's ready for download. And while we personally aren't the sort of folks who typically leap headlong into the murky waters of beta software, we had our Wheaties this morning and we were feeling reckless, so we figured what the heck-- we'd go for the gusto. (We hear some of you asking, "So what do you want, a medal?" Yes. Yes, we want a medal.)

As it turns out, installing iSync itself is a pretty straightforward process, and we were able to synchronize data to .Mac and an iPod with no trouble at all. Unfortunately, things get a little sketchier when you throw a Palm OS device into the mix; we'd been hoping we could use iSync instead of the official Palm Desktop software, but no dice-- iSync requires Palm Desktop 4.0 (or at least its HotSync Manager) to do its thing. Moreover, we had to turn off the Palm Address Book, Calendar, and To-Do List conduits before the iSync conduit worked at all, and even once it was all set up properly our visions of a single magical brushed-aluminum Happy Sync button promptly crumbled to dust when we discovered that clicking iSync's funky activation button simply popped up a dialog box telling us to press the HotSync button on our handheld's cradle. Granted, triggering a standard Visor HotSync then prompts iSync to do its thing, but it's still not exactly the simple and seamless process we'd hoped it would be. Ideally we'd be able to initiate a sync by thought waves alone.

Of course, it is just a beta, and there's a decent chance it'll get fundamentally better before 1.0 ships-- especially if enough people leave feedback. And even in its current state, while the Palm sync aspect of the process is a smidge unwieldy, we can't argue with the results: iCal, our Mac OS X Address Book, our iPod, and our Visor now all share the same data. It's a little spooky, actually. We have a sneaking suspicion that this is sort of what it probably feels like to be organized...