So one of the companies I work with is evaluating Blackberry devices. I got one to use for a bit, and found it, frankly, utterly wanting. It receives mail pretty well, but managing and sending from the device is a very frustrating experience, beginning with the fact that folder management thereon is unusable; all messages are comingled in a single queue; all messages that come from it must come from the same email address; and the online “managment” site is so fucked it only works in IE. RIM may own this space for people saddled with Exchange back-ends, but their tool is a sick joke when hooked up to standards-based mailers — there’s not even any real IMAP support, for crying out loud.

Add to this the fact that the PDA functions are utter crap compared to, say, an 8 year old Palm, and you see why I pawned the thing off on a sales guy and got a Treo 650. Anyway, As part of the testing, I downloaded PocketMac for Blackberry, which allowed the Blackberry to sync with my desktop tools (well, mostly of them; it syncs only with iCal, Address Book, and Stickies — the Palm tools sync with StickyBrain). Since I’m done with the damn thing, I went to uninstall PocketMac.

It took a trip to the knowledge base before I found out that the install program (which I deleted) is how you uninstall PM. I re-downloaded it (jumping through some auth hoops in the meantime; thank goodness I kept the email with the URL) and stepped through to the “type of install” phase before I found the “uninstall” option; this alone is incredibly unintuitive, but what came next was even worse.

I’m accostomed to installers requiring my authentication before they do anything. This is normal on a Mac, and a good thing. What I was NOT prepared for was the fact that once I gave the PM uninstaller my password, IT SYSTEMATICALLY QUIT EVERY APPLICATION I HAD RUNNING. All of ’em. I had browser windows pointing to things I was planning to read; I had active terminal sessions on remote machine. A modern Mac is NOT a Windows machine; we don’t have to quit everything to uninstall a program, and we damn sure don’t appreciate having it done FOR us with no warning. It’s stupid, arrogant, and just plain fucked up.

PocketMac may be the only game in town for syncing Blackberries and Wince devices with Macs, and bully for them. But right now they’re on my shit list, and I’m damned glad I have no need of their software anymore.