Managed to play with the app a bit more today and jotted some notes.

Device Import

The OS X Training Center software reads from the Edge 305 and ForeRunner 305 fine, though the PC version has a nice progress indicator that the OS X version lacks. There were some issues with Parallels (need to do more investigation), but doing some USB settings reconfiguration on the Parallels side cleared things up.

Activities

The PC version will also auto-categorize your activities (running, cycling, etc) upon import. The OS X version does not even have pre-made categories (you can make "folders") and you cannot shift- or command-click to do multiple activity selections in order to perform a bulk move. This is frustrating, but workable after the initial device import is complete since you are just moving individual activities at that point (or very few, at least).

The PC version also allows you to move your cursor along the graphs and see the associated data (speed, pace, heart rate, etc). There is no provision in the OS X version for this functionality yet.

You can also get a more detailed breakdown of each activity and compare activities with the PC version. Again, this functionality is lacking in the OS X version.

"Macness"

Any app developed for OS X gets held to a higher standard than those for the PC since folks expect Apple developers to do the right thing whenever possible. This means conforming to standards and having the app behave like other Mac apps.

Many things, such as user profile information (even multiple profiles) and unit display preferences definitely belong in a "Preferences..." menu. Garmin needs to do this at a minimum. Garmin's application help is not integrated with the Help Viewer (how difficult can it be?!), and has interesting viewing requirements:

NOTE: The graphics in this Help system are optimized for monitor displays set at 1680 x 1050 screen resolution. Viewing this Help system at resolution settings other than 1680 x 1050 can result in reduced image quality.

1680x1050!!! So, we need to own a big, honkin' wide screen monitor, eh? (BTW: the help looks fine in any Safari view, so I think the Q/A team missed this error)

It has no AppleScript elements, leaving you no choice but to resort to UI scripting - which is a pain. Many Mac folks are going to want to do "stuff" with the data in this app and having a simple, programmatic way to export/convert from the main database format to something usable should have been an out-of-the-box feature (I'm thinkin' Dashboard Widget displaying last activity with basic stats).

What is interesting is that there is a "Copyright 2000-2005 Omni Development, Inc. All rights reserved." in the "About..." dialog. If anyone knows how to build Mac apps, is the Omni folks, and if they are the primary developers for Garmin's Training Center, I hope they are given more latitude on future versions/updates.

The "Training Center.gtc" file in ~Library/Application Support/Garmin/Training Center/ seems to be a tad different than the name.gdb files the PC version stores the data in. Either way, they are both proprietary, but I plan on seeing what I can get out of the gtc file with gpsbabel+

Conclusion

The OS X version of Training Center does the basics and gives you access to your workout data without the need for BootCamp or Parallels. It's very rough around the edges but is a welcome addition to my Applications folder.

I hope Garmin takes some pointers from the Omni Group folks for their next revision.