Apple officially killing MobileMe sync for keychains, widgets, accounts, preferences - Page 3

Good point.



Not a good point.



Excellent point.


Agile can use the plug-in SDK for 1Password but they have decided to move to an Extensions-based system. I'm not liking it as much as the plug-in but it has gotten substantially better so there is potential for it to be great.

Ha! I love these statements... iCloud is an utter disaster for people that Apple isn't targeting maybe. Then again if they aren't targeting you in the first place, is that really a disaster?

iCloud will be the driver of iOS expansion, and will foster a real shift for people who today feel that they can either buy a general purpose computer that is more complicated and expensive than what they want, or buy nothing at all. The iPad and other future iOS devices - combined with iCloud - are filling a HUGE gap in "appliance computing" or "computing for the rest of us" or whatever you want to call it.

iCloud is NOT targeted at the majority of us in forums like this - at least from the standpoint as trying to meet all our needs.

For years people loved to criticize iDisk - often rightly so - but now when Apple is pragmatically bowing out and letting third parties such as DropBox or SugarSync step in and fill the void it's the end of the world?

Please!

I guarantee you iDisk won't slow down Apple's plan ONE BIT. Indeed, it will be the catalyst that causes iOS adoption to skyrocket.


So you just admitted it's a non-issue. Whew! It's not the end of the world as we know it after all!


I think the key that is missing is, with your data in iCloud and readily available, getting "back to your Mac" is less important. And for those that have specific reasons where having ready access to your data isn't sufficient, working around back to my Mac missing is probably not as big a deal.

Round pegs, square holes and all that. Lion and iCloud are hardly the disaster many hyperventilating hand-waivers are making it out to be. The changes introduced affect a very small (if not vocal) minority - the vast majority of customers won't even notice and will probably welcome the reduction in stuff to be confused from.

It would be a nice differentiator for web hosts like SquarSpace to provide plug-ins for iPhoto and Aperture to ease in web uploading. Several gallery products for web sites have such plug-ins available. While not as convenient as activating Mobile.Me for $99 and having it built in, seamless management of galleries from within iPhoto and Aperture is still possible with a little digging.

On Mac OS X perhaps, but unless I really missed something there is nothing like that for iOS which is really annoying...

Along with their new contracts to allow resilient purchases of iTunes Store music, TV shows (US-only at this point), and most likely movies in the future just like you have with App Store apps and iBookstore books they have not only made the "cloud" better but now offer peace-of-mind at every level of the service. Of course, that won't stop people from complaining about it.

Yeah, iOS is a completely separate. I didn't think of that SDK because I don't see Apple making any fast moves to 3rd-party allow apps to integrate with the system and other 4rd-party apps. Opens too many holes they can't monitor for an always connected device.

Then again they do offer OTA delta updates of iOS which I had hoped for but didn't think were this close to be secure enough for Apple to implement. So maybe next year, but I'm more inclined to think Apple will release their own system-wide version of 1Password before they let 1Password et al. run free on iOS.

very good points.

But I take this to mean no server side Mail rules. That is we won't be able to sort mail before it gets to the device! If that is true it does suck. In fact it is a major failure on Apples part, especially if you have more than one device.

Hopefully a developer out there can tell us it isn't true.

in the near term it looks like we are loosing more than we are gaining.

There are some server-side Mail rules but I think it's the same paltry offering that's in MobileMe.

Although I find myself wishing they'd kept mail syncing - I haven't used that extensively (I have a few email accounts I sync between computers but mostly I've made slight differences in each device). That said, I wonder what Apple is planning with mail.

To approach this from a different angle entirely - lets assume Apple wants you to have identical mail experience on iPad, iPhone, Mac, and Web. To do that instead of my Apple Mail app connecting to my other mail sources, my Apple Webmail would need to connect to them all.

... so I'm wondering if that's the plan. Put one AppleID email address into your phone/iPad/Mac, and then configure your Apple Mail with your different email accounts if you have them. You then don't need to sync accounts because it's already in Apple Mail

Of course... suddenly 5GB of storage doesn't look like it's enough.

I dunno - just like they "thought different" on multi-tasking, I think they will eventually come up with a way to allow others to integrate without having to pass out the "keys to the kingdom".

It's just taking longer than I personally like


I hope not, because as I pointed out earlier, 1Password is a heck of a lot more than just password syncing - although if they let me do that it would be better than nothing Then I would just have to remember one really long and ugly password for my iPhone - but I could get the passwords for all my various web sites OTA from my computers automatically. Less than ideal, but far more feasible for the short term.

? Mobile.Me has them now and none of the reviews I read (the latest being on MacWorld) said anything about them dropping rules from iCloud mail. Revamping the skiing of it and speeding it up (yea!) - but nothing about major functionality like rules dropping.

Now they are pretty primitive in Mobile.Me - but they are there!

Of all of these, keychain is the one I wanted the most. If I'm really going to have a random login for different sites, I need to be able to share it easily and keep it in sync. Otherwise when a password expires (etc) there's no way for me to remember what the new random one is when I move to my other machines.

Suggestions?

Mean as in "small" not as in "cruel." True, I have never made a product to sell. But unless you (and Charlie below) sat at the table with Apple execs when this decision was made, you are speculating too. They may "have data showing it wasn't really that used." But they probably also have data showing that Automator isn't that used either. I don't use it, and no one I personally know does either. If we made a list of every feature in the MacOS and charted what percentage of users use it, we could remove lots of stuff. Each thing we removed only effects x people. The cumulative effect of such actions will be a lot of needless inconvenience to a lot of people in total.

I am not arguing for bloatware OSes here. Apple is right to move forward and not drag the past with them like Windows. But a simple web authoring tool for everyday people, like a simple word processor is fundamental. When AppleWorks went away they replaced it with Pages. They didn't say: "too bad about your hundreds of pages of text, try Word. Sorry about data loss." All I am asking for is an Apple-branded follow-on solution.

The problem here is that I tried RapidWeaver a couple of years ago and found it wanting vis-Ã*-vis iWeb. iWeb has direct integration into all things Apple. That's what makes most all Apple products superior to competitors. Even the hosting was integrated. That kind of ease and usability cannot be duplicated by third party products.



The fact that I don't know whether the code is clunky or not speaks to the fact that this product was evidently made for me more than you. I don't want to worry about code. I just want it to work, and it does. I have bumped up against its limits once and a while, but on balance it worked for me better than, say, Dreamweaver did. Because I used maybe 10% of what Dreamweaver was capable of because I just couldn't figure it out. I'm not a web development expert, just an average Mac user. It doesn't suck for me. What sucks is being left with a lot of orphaned sites. Yes, I can salvage them one way or another, but I don't know if it's worth the effort. I may end up just abandoning them. It would have been a "small" thing to sell us a little space on iCloud to host them. And it was mean spirited (small minded) of them not to. Is the web so last century that Apple doesn't have to support a basic tool to allow regular folks to use it within the Apple ecosystem?

Well to be fair it is a disaster to people who currently use MobileMe which apparently isn't who Apple is targeting. And this is exactly my point. Apple is moving farther and farther away from what I have depended on them for and what I originally admired about the company and OS X in general.

It is not like you when drop subtle hints that you liked it better when your wife wore her hair long straight and a natural color, yet she decides to cut it short, dye with fake highlights and style it in a fancy perm.

The same with computer operating systems, it is not like I would be happy married to Windows instead, but doesn't mean I wouldn't enjoy a little linux on the side. Apple and I had a good run but we have grown apart. I may learn to live with her but my heart is not in it anymore.

They are woefully inadequate on Mobile Me, they haven't changed since dotMac but it didn't really matter though because back in those days when it was just .Mac and we weren't using iOS devices, we could use Mail Rule syncing to keep things neat and tidy between multiple macs.

Now since we have iDevices (and Apple doesn't allow 3rd party email apps on iOS so there is no competition and they took 4 years to add email flagging!) things get messy.

I don't need some ultra complicated mail rules, we just need basic two part rules. For example, move all messages from Facebook to this folder then Mark as read.

If Apple seriously wants to "demote" the Mac, they need to add something more than the three ultra basic single part rules that already exist on Mobile Me.

It's not just about the usage rate. You also have to consider the cost for R&D and support. I don't see how iWeb for a modern HTML5, CSS3 and JS and bells and whistles for modern internet usage would be as inexpensive to implement than Automator being carried over Lion with a few tweaks.

I personally use Automator. I can make some complex actions in a short period of time than i can with raw scripting. I'm sure if I did more raw scripting I'd be faster and better the way Terminal can b much faster than using Finder, but I don't make enough scripts to make that worthwhile. For this reason Automator is pretty damn nice.

Even if I'm unique and Apple first created it for their employees and then decided to button it up for their customer and make it a part of Mac OS it's clear their employees aren't using iWeb so their need to button it up for Mac OS is unlikely.

I do wonder if they have some other internal tools for this that could make their way to Mac App Store in the future as oft is the cycle with Apple apps, but I don't think it's "small" of Apple not put a heavy weight behind iWeb.


PS: I'm hearing the transfer from MobileMe to iCloud states it will take up to 5 minutes. This sounds like a hefty server-side conversion.

If you are using iCloud it's not an issue. The only thing you can't do is have the system mark it as read. This is server side and a much better way than the client-side rules you seem to want.

What we need are more server-side rules integrated with the service. As iCloud grows and becomes a major player for email since it'll be tied to your Mac and iDevice syncing and backups I think it's likely Apple will add more features to iCloud due to the number of users that will be requesting features. I'd expect robust Rules to be in high demand.

Weak.

It was really nice being able to buy a new computer or replace a failed HD and have all of these setting automatically appear.

edit: GregAlexander said it better.

I liked being able to setup a new machine, enter my mobileMe details and get some things synced across. But it was only a partial thing and was never an answer for restoring a system.

I was really hoping we'd now be able to put an AppleID into a new system and have it automatically setup everything. Email, contacts, calendar, desktop setup, my most recent documents, my basic photo setup (with recent & published photos), music setup (with just the purchased music/tv and podcast setup), my app-store apps, iPhone sync information. Then when I plug in my iOS device it can sync back whatever music/photos/movies etc are there. And of course if it can connect to an old backup - get more photos/documents (and 'upgrade' the resolution of photos restored via the low-res iPhone versions).

That would be a great setup. Of course something like that could also act as a full syncing system between 2 macs in different locations.

But the old system was never that either. So it's not a loss... just an unfulfilled wish.

The settings it backed up are pretty simple and self contained. It's pretty much grabbing files and folders from a couple /Library folders. There is no reason why a Mac App Store app can't do this. They can even use the iCloud APIs (and/or Dropox and/or SugarSync) to store the data as it changes or for a periodic backup. It can even be much more versatile than what .Mac or MobileMe ever offered. One thing that always got me about the settings was that my desktop background always had to be done manually whenever I used those sync services.

At this stage nothing else, literally, beats an external Time Machine hard disk for restores.

Greg, you have a good idea and that's certainly where iCloud is heading.

Apple has to get the first round of implementation right though, and banish the demons of MobileMe.

Dropbox is still one of the best options for document sharing across multiple computers. I can't live without it now. Scary, but that's the Cloud for ya.

But yeah your point about "zero config" for multiple computers is well taken. That will be missed... Though it may be put back in iCloud, we've still got a year to go.

I'd say let's give Apple the chance to get iCloud right this year, then hopefully next year they'll start to add more features to it.

Is that really the "only thing" you can't do in iCloud? Thanks for posting that screenshot, you just did more journalism than every other blog on the internet. Can you please post a screen shot of what other options are in the "Move to folder" sub menu?


We are agreeing on this same point, it needs to be on the server side if iCloud is going to hold up it's motto that "the truth is in the cloud". However, you shouldn't have to log into iCloud.com to set up the server side rules. If Apple is going to stick by it's guns that Native apps are a lot better than web apps, you need to be able to set up these server side mail rules from your Mac mail client at least.

I'll be satisfied if server side mail rules are only accessible from iCloud, but if Apple really wants to keep iCloud as invisible to the user as possible, they should really be adjustable on the client side.

"Only" in terms of your aforementioned example.


The others are just Move to Trash and Forward to <email_address>


I'd love for that kind of integration.

What rule options does IMAP have built-in? I know that if Mail on Mac OS flags an item it will show up in Mail on my iDevices as flagged. However, if Mac OS Mail doesn't grab it the flagging doesn't happen.

I read a few comments from around the web that seem to imply the new MobileMe->iCloud transfer service (me.com/move) copies MobileMe data to an existing iCloud account, rather than creating a new one. Is this true?

The point is that Apple lacks courage to only support Windows 7 (being consistent with the one OS for Mac - Lion). Apple is supporting Vista for iCloud, which was released in January 2007. Apple is not supporting Leopard, released in October 2007 or Snow Leopard, released in August 2009.

Now I could go on about Apple still supporting Windows XP users (released October 2001) for iTunes, Safari, iPhone 4, & iPad 2, while Mac users would need the Leopard OS (again, released October 2007), but this is a different topic (albeit a bit related).

The main point is that Apple seems to punish it's loyal customer's before Windows users. (knowing that because they love Apple products, they will cough up the money to upgrade their computer and/or OS). Also keeping in mind the spec requirements for Lion (as we all know the cheap cost of purchasing the Lion OS).

Second point: This is hardly a new thing with Apple, but it still annoys me greatly. Apple should be consistent or at lease give the impression that it is trying to be fair (supporting Snow Leopard for iCould would do this).

??? Mobile.Me was routinely criticized as being overpriced, poorly implemented and trounced by competitors.

So Apple says the equivalent of "Fine - were going to focus on our core competencies - feel free to move elsewhere" and now everyone is freaking out?

There's over a year to transition to something else. Is it annoying? Sure - I used the gallery feature and enjoyed the integration with first iPhoto and then Aperture. At least with Mobile.Me we have a year to figure out where to go. Better than those with Final Cut Pro! (killing Final Cut Pro so soon was Apple's only real blunder with the Final Cut Pro X launch).


Oh please - your entire Apple experience was dependent on mediocre web and picture hosting?

Really? if that's true then I have good news for you - there are plenty of alternatives!


Meh - a few cosmetic changes in the GUI and and the cancelation of some mediocre web offerings is hardly enough to get worked up over. I'm not thrilled with everything in Lion, but overall the positives far outweigh the few negatives. And it's still leaps and bounds above everyone else.

Let's hope to hamburgers that they upgrade the Keychain system to support syncing via key-value pairs. Keychain syncing has been one of my most favorite and useful features of Mac OS X for the past 10 years. But I will admit it hasn't been perfect, it's saved my behind more times than I can count.

That's been subjective, though. I've been a very happy subscriber for 10 years.


To be clear, Sync Services were not mediocre web services. They were very valuable feature built into the OS that's now going away. It's a shame.

I'll be trying one of the available plugins for Aperture. If that doesn't cut it I'll buy a Mini, create a website, open a port on my router and have the speed gain from simply copying photo's over the LAN instead of the Internet.

Check here for all the plugins:
http://www.apple.com/aperture/resources/plugins.html


Cheers,
Phil

If you would've read all the posts you would've read this one from sol and not asked for suggestions.

iCloud is starting to look less and less interesting with every new anouncement.

I paid for .mac, mobileme was using the galleries, idisk and the synch features.

Especially teh synch was quite usefull, set it up once and never worry again, all your passwords bookmarks and so on are on all your machines.

Loosing the idisk is annoying, but loosing the galleries will really hurt me.
Loved the easy way you could set them up and they looked really nice without any clutter there.

The stream to teh cloud is not nearly so interesting, I sync my aperture libraries manually anyway, and I dont need 500 unfiltered photos from a shooting on my iphone.

making a little gallery with the best ones and publishing that was much more convenient.

Will miss the way to show pictures to other people.

And the interesting question here for me also remains, my mobile me account is different from my itunes account, how will that be handled?

I think the question should be rather how do we decide which part of the data we have in iCloud should appear on any particular device? Like we do it in iTunes now, ie, via a device-specific panel?


Jobs explicitly mentioned albums, ie, 'if you move images into an album the will stay forever in iCloud (but count against your data allowance)'. That pretty much confirms that albums will be synced (what would be the point of having data in iCloud that are not synced?).
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Well, you still have it until June 30, 2012. A lot will happen with iCloud until then.

Yeah, you have to spend those $25 on iTunes Match to replace the existing iTunes Match service in the MobileMe package. And those $40 on 1Password is also a yearly price to pay over and over again. And the $99 Dropbox account and the 1Password application do not provide a lot more than iDisk and Keychain synching.

Somebody ate his lunch.

So, iCloud has not even be released but it already is a disaster? I'll sure know whom to turn to if I am in need of an unsubstantiated opinion.

The installed base for OS X is more than 50 million, the installed base for iOS is over 200 million, the installed base for MobileMe is estimated to be only 3 million. So, Apple targeting 99% of the market instead of 1% is really a bone-headed move by Apple.

Well put. Simply, MobileMe did not offer value that most customers were willing to pay for.

As a result, Apple customers were losing out on a lot of functionality that would save them in an emergency. Things like Find my iPhone, backups, etc. It is in Apple's best interest to offer that for free.