As soon as Apple announced the launch of the new iPhone 3G and along with it MobileMe their own online version of Microsoft Exchange, I was adimant that I was going to sign up and be organised once and for all.
So yesterday, when I found that I had a spare five minutes in my schedule, I signed up to MobileMe. The free trial of 60 days is fantastic, its like having 60 days free from a years subscription, as at sign up you are prompted to enter your payment details and at the end of 60 days you are automatically billed. Dont worry though if you find that you do not like it, there is a cancel button in the account options, although Mobile Me is well worth the £59.
Registration is easy, and I was logging in within minutes, the first thing I noticed was the clean interface, with good use of some relatively unpopular Javascript libraries, Prototype and the add on Scriptaculous, often pushed aside by jQuery. Nevertheless the technology is fast and impressively accurate to Apple’s desktop software iLife.
One of the major gripes to come from MobileMe is the fact that Apple would really rather you use their own email @me.com which is rather frustrating, while you can import your external POP account, I have found an error which got me very frustrated, I keep my mail on my server for a week or so before deleting it, that way if I delete something I have a backup. Unfortunately every time I check for new mail on my external account Mobile Me imports everything again, so I end up having duplicate emails in my mail box.
So for a work around I have forwarded my email to another mail addess [email protected] and asked MobileMe to remove the messages from my servers. granted I may look at the same email in two places, but until I get used to how Apple has set up its online applications, this is going to work for me.
Syncing was easy, Preferences on my iBook G4, .mac enter my username and password, and there you go, contacts, calendar and some mail preferences on its way. One nice touch I noticed, I can even sync my Panic Software, Transmit favourites with Mobile Me.
Onto iPhoto. What a great partner to have, I do not think there is anything better to share your iPhoto images with others. As soon as you open iPhoto after signing into MobileME you will see the icon in the bottom toolbar. Simply select your album, click the icon, and woosh, off your images go, 84 images took just under 5 minutes to upload, in full quality, full size, to be stored, and backed up on Apples servers. The best thing is though, that I can share the albums I send to Mobile Me. After getting married to Rachael in March, we decided to host all out images, (all 5685 images) in one place, available from my mac. This is fine until my wife wants to view past memories, and just cannot work her way around my mac. But Mobile Me ends this dilema, I simply share the album with her, allow her to download photos so that she can get her favourites printed, and what is even better, she can even add to the album via online upload, or a special email link, and any new photos are synced down to my iPhoto library! Marvelous.
So go ahead, what are you waiting for, sign up today.
Posted On: Thursday, July 24th, 2008 @ 5:56 pm by Ian Tearle
If you would like to discuss anything about this post, please be polite and add your comments below.
No HTML is allowed. All links, and new lines will be automagically converted to HTML for you.
Notice to spammers, all links will be sanitized with rel="nofollow".
If you would like to discuss anything about your next project please drop me a line.
Projects start at £99.00 per month
We normally book 2–3 months in advance.
No matter how small your project is, or if the prices above scare you, please do get in touch, I shall always listen and will advise freely alternative ideas or solutions. If you are a charity, let's talk!