As far as I can tell .Mac (Apple’s Website describing the complete service) has been overhauled in a very big way and for the better. For a while now I’ve been aware of the .Mac service which was basically a somewhat expensive way to keep all of your macs up to date with each other. It offered a simple way to sync bookmarks, address books ect as well as offering 1GB of online storage to use between your iDisk and the IMAP email they offered.
The iDisk itself was and is a very cool system. Basically it’s a place that you can keep your files so that they are available to all of your macs. Each mac gets an iDisk icon on the desktop and you can use it like you would any other drive, drag and drop folders and files, save to it ect and anything you put into the iDisk would automatically be synced between all of the macs you have. The only problem was you had basically no space. 1GB. It was like some sort of sick joke. For $99/year (or $70/year if you signed up for the service when buying a mac) you had 1GB of space to share between your email and your iDisk. For me at least, it was not worth the money.
At a recent press event apple held (Watch the Video herethe announced a new feature called web gallery. This is basically an image hosting service that integrates right into iPhoto 08.
Basically when you’re in iPhoto working on an event, the lower part of your iPhoto screen shows a button called ‘Web Gallery’. When you click on that button it will take either a single image or the whole gallery depending on what you have selectd and upload it right onto your .Mac gallery. It asks a few simple questions like if you want people to be able to download full size images or upload some images of their own and then it just handles the rest. It uploads the photos automatically to the site and creates a new gallery. Once the process is complete you can view the gallery online immediately.
There is a drawback though; Performance on the site is a bit slow. To me it seems understandable but I’d still like it to load faster. I understand it has a lot of thumbnails to load but when you first get to the page it takes about 10-15 seconds before the spinning icon goes away and you can see something. Once you choose a web gallery it switches quickly enough but then you have to wait for a page of thumbnails to load. Granted my own web server was slower but in this world of instant everything…
One of the other pluses of the .Mac service is something they are calling ‘Back to My Mac’. This feature integrates into Leopard which won’t be released until October. While details are pretty limited at this point what we do know sounds great. For instance when you are on the road and away from your fleet of macs at home it will connect to them for you and display them in the finder. From there it is my understanding that you will be able to access your files and remotely control them. Very powerful on paper and I’m curious to see how it all works. For instance, if it were able to connect to sleeping macs and on your request wake them up…I would be in heaven! That would be amazing.
Something that .Mac has been doing for a while that is also excellent though not very glamorous is the syncing features. Once you sign up you go through ‘System Preferences’ and add your account information to your macs. From there it will keep your email accounts, iDisk, address book, bookmarks ect synced across all of your macs automatically.
This for me was a bit of a pain at first because I don’t have a lot of that kind of data stored on my macs and every-time it runs the sync it would bug me telling me it was changing more then %5 of my data. This is in the end a great feature but when you start out it’s a pain. Basically Apple decided that if more then 5% of the data is different from your last sync there is a good chance that something has gone wrong. Maybe one of your macs has a corrupt address book and it erased the address book data on the server. When another mac goes to check the data it sees that it has 1000 addresses locally and, based on server data, should delete them all. .Mac says ‘Wait a minute is this correct?’ You would tell it no and then fix the problem without any data loss. It’s a good design.
What is happening to me though is I have, lets say, 5 addresses right now and I add another one. That is, technically, a 6% change in the data and .Mac says ‘Is this correct?’ I tell it that it is and it moves along. Over time as my data has grown it has stopped bothering me but for a week or so it was a pain!
Over all the service has gone from a weird thing that cost a lot to a service that I like and feel like I’m getting my money’s worth out of. I would recommend it to people who want a simple to use and elegant web gallery or anyone that has a couple of macs. Once Leopard comes out, assuming ‘Back to My Mac’ works well it will be indispensable to me as well as anyone who has a desktop Mac as well as a Portable Mac.
At the end of the day it’s pretty fast and dead simple to use plus it comes with a laundry list of features I’ve not written about. Backup software (That I like and use), Web Hosting (with full iWeb 08 integration like iPhoto), IMAP email and something they call Groups that I’m going to look at using. If you can find 2 or 3 items on the list that look interesting it’s worth taking a look at and with a free 60 day trial (thought with limited storage space) it’s hard to pass up. I signed up for the trial and after a couple of weeks became totally dependent on it…
Topslakr