I hope the editors of VT consolidate the last 4 reviews by the same user into one review that combines all the user's comments into one review. The user/reviewer is certainly entitled to his opinion, but it seems to me it wouldn't be fair to Marketcircle or to other user/reviewers to let his 4 1-star reviews drag down the average rating of DayLite. That would be misleading to those evaluating DayLite.

I have no affiliation with either Marketcircle or Macmatrix.com, but I am a licensed user of DayLite so I can speak to the quality of DayLite from a small business perspective.

I have found DayLite to be an excellent app and it is constantly improving. It's the best CRM app for the Mac bar none; it's head and shoulders above other Mac CRM apps. DayLite is built on the best Cocoa database available, the SQL fault-tolerant OpenBase. In fact, DayLite is the only OS X Cocoa app that’s built on an industrial strength SQL database that also has project management functionality. This makes it an ideal hub for business management in my opinion as it integrates resource management across all business management functions.

Some of the limitations the previous user mentions are inherent in any database app. As anyone who's ever used a database knows, with the power of a relational database comes some limitations. The downside to using a database is that once you've set it up, the more structure you build into it, and hence the more useful it is, the less flexible it can be in changing that structure. That's why planning and foresight are required of any database user.

But the strengths of being able to relate almost any piece of data to any other far outweigh the limitations of being able to change that structure in the future, especially with large data sets. The larger your client or product or project base, the greater the advantage of using a database to manage it all. It just requires a bit of planning on the part of the user to make the most of it in terms of future growth. And there are always work-arounds for changing the structure in the future anyway.

Marketcircle also wisely designed DayLite in a modular fashion and is encouraging developers to write plug-ins for it which bodes well for the future of DayLite as a business management platform. There are already a handful of plug-ins available including one that integrates with Apple's Mail app for managing emails and another that integrates with a telephony app for managing phone calls. I haven't used either plug-in yet, but they've gotten great reviews by users on VT. Check them out.

I do wish DayLite had more project management features, and I'm told by the company they're beefing up the PM features in the forthcoming 2.0 version.

Jeff Nailen