Marketcircle is comprised of displaced NeXT developers, and like all NeXT developers, they stopped learning somewhere around 1988 and lash out violently at anyone who dares to suggest that maybe the way they’re used to doing things isn’t best.

I came to know Daylite by hearing other consultants talk about it incessantly. I tried it out, fell in love with it for about two days, and then fell out of love with it once I started attempting to exercise some of its more “advanced” features and found them to be so horribly implemented as to render the application completely unusable for me.

I submitted detailed bug reports; no response. I submitted support requests; no response. I took their “Certified Partner” exam; no response. Finally, after four months of constant email hounding and phone calls, someone at Marketcircle actually looked at my test and told me I’d passed.

Being a “Certified” Marketcircle “Partner” entitles one to join a private mailing list where one can actually communicate with Marketcircle employees directly, though in reality, Alykhan Jetha, the company’s founder, is the only active internal participant. Finally, I had a chance to get answers to some of my nagging questions, like “why can’t I print appointments, events AND notes on the same report?” The response I received was a little disheartening; although Daylite developers know a lot of programming buzzwords like “polymorphism,” they do not know how to put them to practical use in a real-world application. Even though all of your calendar, appointment, to-do, and note objects implement a subset of identical messaging protocols which would allow any sane developer to allow users to easily print object of heterogeneous types out on a single report, this is heresy for Mr. Jetha. His actual response was something along the lines of “if you make everything polymorphic, why even have an app?”

Why have an app? Well, because most people can’t type syntactically correct SQL queries as quickly as they can click on items in a list. The real question here is “Why buy this app?” and that’s the one I couldn’t answer, for myself or for my clients. Granted, one can achieve my lofty goal by writing some really ugly F-Script (the implementation of which is little more than a cop-out for developers who are too lazy to build an actual AppleScript dictionary in this case) or by (surprise, surprise) giving Marketcircle even more money to build a custom report for me. Call me kooky, but I’m of the opinion that applications which cost hundreds of dollars per seat should live up to their price tags in terms of quality, and Daylite’s convoluted DIY UI simply does not.

And what about those “Certified Partners” you might be tempted to hire to evangelize you back into the Marketcircle way of thought? I was only on the list for about a month, and I most certainly did not have an opportunity to converse with every member, but most of the messages posted to it indicated a profound lack of even the most rudimentary Mac troubleshooting knowledge, and frankly, I was a little ashamed to be a member of this secret society of sad little salesmen.

Then 3.5 rolled out and the list was awash in reports of people’s iCal calendars and Address Book contact lists being obliterated thanks to Daylite crashing non-stop and all Mr. Jetha had to say was “Hurrrrr you runned out of memories hurrrrr...” He and his engineers are, in my opinion, idiots, and one should not expect Daylite to improve anytime soon. Unless you’re already completely entrenched in the product, don’t give them money and don’t hire their partners to come over and convince you to give them money even though their software sucks. Oh yeah, and don’t bother reporting bugs.