It's a Flash editor for cleaning up your photo collection. They currently charge for their premium edition but will likely provide it Free in the future.
Uh, The idea of the web apps is if you are away from your home computer and using someone elses (hotels, friends, etc.) you can still access all your email, contacts, etc.
Sure, you can do that on your iPhone NOW, but not when MobileMe first launched (as dotMac) and many folks still prefer surfing and typing long emails at a desktop instead of their iPhone.
So... that is the "point of the web apps".
But, to be honest, is not even worth $10 a year. It's certainly not worth what Apple charge for MobileMe.
With GMail, Dropbox and Flickr - I am getting most of the MobileMe functionality for free.
On the internet. No one can hear you be sarcastic.
C.
If you disagree, list the free services that equate to MM. I'll ignore the inconvenience of having a different account for each service if you can show us that MM can be recreated with free options.
The next argument after I point out all the things MM does that no other service, free or paid, can match is how they don't need or want those service. Which is fine, but that doesn't make it a bad product simply because one won't utilize it's primary features.
It would be great if there was a true competitor to MM as Apple would be forced to push it along farther and faster, but there isn't so it will lag and that is unfortunate.
And if we are not sitting at a Mac - then we have our iPhones.
The web-apps are a me-too gesture. But I don't think many Mobile Me users actually find them of benefit.
Speak for yourself. The webmail interface is very clean and responsive. If I am near a computer I would much rather use it than my iPhone.
Quote:
At the same time every year, I question what the point of Mobile Me is.[LIST][*]The email service is a mirror of other free services.
I dunno, even with the foibles in the change from .Mac to mobile.me, it's been far more reliable than friends who use Gmail, Yahoo! or Hotmail. Integration with my iPhone and iMAP syncing among my Mac's is flawless and I have a huge volume of old mail at my fingertips and a search away. All without my email being profiled and data sold off to advertisers
Quote:
[*]iDisk just too weak to use. Dropbox beats it hands down.
For the little cloud sharing I do, it's more than adequate. I tried drop box, but for syncing my desktop and laptop, you can't beat Chronosync. And my really critical data stays on my machines.
Quote:
[*]The web-apps are of little actual value.
The free addition of the iPhone tools (remote wipe, tracking, etc.) have HUGE value. The gallery's that Aperture 3 produces are very nice and the integration is seamless.
Quote:
[*]And if I want to share photos, I will use Flickr.
Not me. While there is Flickr support for iPhoto and Aperture, Mobile.Me is built into the OS and just a click away. It just doesn't get any simpler...
But annoyingly, I am not allowed to send email *from* this address (from my iPhone) because it is not my primary mobile-me username.
Get a family account from Amazon - last time I looked you could get them for $67. You get five accounts and a bunch more storage for less than the single user retail. I split a family pack with my parents and that makes it VERY economical. Instead of just having an alias you can make that secondary address a separate account which does work with the iPhone just fine.
IMO their biggest flaw in general is how "cold" and unsocial the company is in general. They don't blog, or tweet, (or much of anything), and the management is totally old-school in that regard.
Call me an old fuddy-duddy, but I would rather choose a company for their great products then that they "tweet"
MobileMe is the best service of its kind. iDisk sync is great. That alone makes it all worth it.
Google may be free, when it comes to this kind of service, I'd trust a for-pay model over anything else.
MobileMe is doubly good with an iPhone.
This is like the I am a Mac and I am a PC ad. iDisk is the PC, DropBox is the Mac. You have no clue on what you are missing out on. Try it out, they have clients for the iPhone as well.
If you disagree, list the free services that equate to MM. I'll ignore the inconvenience of having a different account for each service if you can show us that MM can be recreated with free options.
Free internet IMAP email with web-client - GMail
Free auto-syncing calendaring. - Google Calendar
Contact syncing - not sure... investigating.
Free usable file-syncing - Dropbox
Free photo sharing - Flickr which has better community features
Personal Webspace - any number of services.
Does MobileMe do anything else?
I am not saying MobileMe isn't okay - But it isn't worth more than the sum of its parts.
And most of its parts have perfectly good free equivalents.
And when I say perfectly good, I mean "substantially better than Mobile Me".
Flickr is better than MobileMe by a long chalk.
Dropbox is better than iDisk by a long chalk.
We pay for Mobile me. But as a service, it offers poor value for money in comparison to free services. The user-experience is not exceptional and some services are just poor or outright broken. See iDisk.
There are some bizarre aspects to the way it works:
I heavily use my .Mac email address for all personal mail. But I am not permitted to send mail *from* that address on my iPhone because it is an Alias. Bizarre!
I used iTunes with another address before getting MobileMe. I am not permitted to change my iTunes account over to use my MobileMe identity! Bizarre!
So I am a little let down by this service.
I say this as a very loyal Apple customer, who would like to see a bit more magic, and bit less bureaucracy and billing.
Free photo sharing - Flickr which has better community features
Personal Webspace - any number of services.
Does MobileMe do anything else?
I am not saying MobileMe isn't okay - But it isn't worth more than the sum of its parts.
And most of its parts have perfectly good free equivalents.
And when I say perfectly good, I mean "substantially better than Mobile Me".
Flickr is better than MobileMe by a long chalk.
Dropbox is better than iDisk by a long chalk.
We pay for Mobile me. But as a service, it offers poor value for money in comparison to free services. The user-experience is not exceptional and some services are just poor or outright broken. See iDisk.
There are some bizarre aspects to the way it works:
I heavily use my .Mac email address for all personal mail. But I am not permitted to send mail *from* that address on my iPhone because it is an Alias. Bizarre!
I used iTunes with another address before getting MobileMe. I am not permitted to change my iTunes account over to use my MobileMe identity! Bizarre!
So I am a little let down by this service.
I say this as a very loyal Apple customer, who would like to see a bit more magic, and bit less bureaucracy and billing.
C.
• Back To My Mac
• Find My iPhone
• Dynamic syncing between all Macs, iPhones, Touch and even Windows for contacts, calendars and bookmarks, without using Exchange.
• Handsfree cloud backups of Bookmarks, Calendars, Contacts, Dashboard Widgets, Dock Items, Keychains, Mail Accounts, Mail Rules/Signatures/Smart Mailboxes, Notes, Preferences, and even 3rd-party apps like Yojimbo Items and Transmit Favorites.
Those first two are well worth the money and they can't be replicated with any free or paid service. I hope that Apple adds a GPS chip to the next Mac notebooks for a Find My Mac feature in MM. It's saved more than a few lost and stolen iPhones, it may work well for a few Mac notebooks.
That last one has been especially useful — albeit before Time Machine came out and backups were common — since I could pop in a single username and password and have my entire desktop setup exactly the way I had it before on a new Mac or one I was borrowing, sans the desktop background and any Dock Items that weren't yet installed on that machine. I'm not 15yo anymore, I don't want to spend hours or days tweaking the settings on a machine just to get to an ideal working state.
POP, IMAP, & (HTML/CSS/JS) are crap technologies? It sounds like someone has IE6 at work.
I'm sure IE6 can handle all the features you need to be able to run the functionality in MobileMe. So why restrict access to specific browsers? Universal access is one of the most important serious features of any online service. Consider that Apple have released an online service using a technology that their own mobile safari cannot access. That's just childish (of Apple, not you I mean).
I'm sure IE6 can handle all the features you need to be able to run the functionality in MobileMe. So why restrict access to specific browsers? Universal access is one of the most important serious features of any online service. Consider that Apple have released an online service using a technology that their own mobile safari cannot access. That's just childish (of Apple, not you I mean).
Those web apps use more modern code that IE6 can't understand. They allow IE7 and IE8 to work, though they do have a splash page suggest on Firefox or Safari. When me.com launched there were aspects of the site that wouldn't work with IE7 and IE8, but they have worked that out it seems. I don't know if it's as good as with Firefox or Safari, but they are supporting IE.
Even Google has stopped supporting IE6, though that seems mostly for security reasons, but there is a good deal of webcoding time saved, too.
? Dynamic syncing between all Macs, iPhones, Touch and even Windows for contacts, calendars and bookmarks, without using Exchange.
? Handsfree cloud backups of Bookmarks, Calendars, Contacts, Dashboard Widgets, Dock Items, Keychains, Mail Accounts, Mail Rules/Signatures/Smart Mailboxes, Notes, Preferences, and even 3rd-party apps like Yojimbo Items and Transmit Favorites.
Those first two are well worth the money and they can't be replicated with any free or paid service.
These are interesting points. But I guess I dispute the valuation.
When we strip away the features of MobileMe that are available for free - we are left with a handful of these neat little features.
I travel quite a bit, but have only made use of Back to My Mac on a couple of occasions.
Find my iPhone is great novelty, but if someone ever does steal my Phone, an insurance policy would be a safer investment than Find My iPhone.
I probably will renew Mobile Me - but I'd do so with much less reluctance if Apple were more aggressive in improving the service year on year.
These are interesting points. But I guess I dispute the valuation.
When we strip away the features of MobileMe that are available for free - we are left with a handful of these neat little features.
I travel quite a bit, but have only made use of Back to My Mac on a couple of occasions.
Find my iPhone is great novelty, but if someone ever does steal my Phone, an insurance policy would be a safer investment than Find My iPhone.
I probably will renew Mobile Me - but I'd do so with much less reluctance if Apple were more aggressive in improving the service year on year.
C.
Not finding a value in the services is not the same as a statement about everything MM can do is online for free. Everything you need or want it to do, maybe, but that isn't want the initial comment was about.
I've found those 4 specific services very useful, half of them I've used since the .Mac days going back to 2004. They are worth much more than $60/year to me.
Comments
...how much did Google pay for a blank webpage?
Google just purchased Picnik today.
http://www.picnik.com/
It's a Flash editor for cleaning up your photo collection. They currently charge for their premium edition but will likely provide it Free in the future.
Uh, The idea of the web apps is if you are away from your home computer and using someone elses (hotels, friends, etc.) you can still access all your email, contacts, etc.
Sure, you can do that on your iPhone NOW, but not when MobileMe first launched (as dotMac) and many folks still prefer surfing and typing long emails at a desktop instead of their iPhone.
So... that is the "point of the web apps".
But, to be honest, is not even worth $10 a year. It's certainly not worth what Apple charge for MobileMe.
With GMail, Dropbox and Flickr - I am getting most of the MobileMe functionality for free.
So someone remind me...Why are we paying again?
C.
But, to be honest, is not even worth $10 a year. It's certainly not worth what Apple charge for MobileMe.
With GMail, Dropbox and Flickr - I am getting most of the MobileMe functionality for free.
So someone remind me...Why are we paying again?
C.
Because nothing out there competes with MM at any price.
Because nothing out there competes with MM at any price.
On the internet. No one can hear you be sarcastic.
C.
On the internet. No one can hear you be sarcastic.
C.
If you disagree, list the free services that equate to MM. I'll ignore the inconvenience of having a different account for each service if you can show us that MM can be recreated with free options.
If you disagree, list the free services that equate to MM.
He can't. Because there aren't any.
You get what you pay for.
He can't. Because there aren't any.
You get what you pay for.
The next argument after I point out all the things MM does that no other service, free or paid, can match is how they don't need or want those service. Which is fine, but that doesn't make it a bad product simply because one won't utilize it's primary features.
It would be great if there was a true competitor to MM as Apple would be forced to push it along farther and faster, but there isn't so it will lag and that is unfortunate.
And if we are not sitting at a Mac - then we have our iPhones.
The web-apps are a me-too gesture. But I don't think many Mobile Me users actually find them of benefit.
Speak for yourself. The webmail interface is very clean and responsive. If I am near a computer I would much rather use it than my iPhone.
At the same time every year, I question what the point of Mobile Me is.[LIST][*]The email service is a mirror of other free services.
I dunno, even with the foibles in the change from .Mac to mobile.me, it's been far more reliable than friends who use Gmail, Yahoo! or Hotmail. Integration with my iPhone and iMAP syncing among my Mac's is flawless and I have a huge volume of old mail at my fingertips and a search away. All without my email being profiled and data sold off to advertisers
[*]iDisk just too weak to use. Dropbox beats it hands down.
For the little cloud sharing I do, it's more than adequate. I tried drop box, but for syncing my desktop and laptop, you can't beat Chronosync. And my really critical data stays on my machines.
[*]The web-apps are of little actual value.
The free addition of the iPhone tools (remote wipe, tracking, etc.) have HUGE value. The gallery's that Aperture 3 produces are very nice and the integration is seamless.
[*]And if I want to share photos, I will use Flickr.
Not me. While there is Flickr support for iPhoto and Aperture, Mobile.Me is built into the OS and just a click away. It just doesn't get any simpler...
I pay my fee mainly because I like the [email protected] address.
But annoyingly, I am not allowed to send email *from* this address (from my iPhone) because it is not my primary mobile-me username.
Get a family account from Amazon - last time I looked you could get them for $67. You get five accounts and a bunch more storage for less than the single user retail. I split a family pack with my parents and that makes it VERY economical. Instead of just having an alias you can make that secondary address a separate account which does work with the iPhone just fine.
IMO their biggest flaw in general is how "cold" and unsocial the company is in general. They don't blog, or tweet, (or much of anything), and the management is totally old-school in that regard.
Call me an old fuddy-duddy, but I would rather choose a company for their great products then that they "tweet"
MobileMe is the best service of its kind. iDisk sync is great. That alone makes it all worth it.
Google may be free, when it comes to this kind of service, I'd trust a for-pay model over anything else.
MobileMe is doubly good with an iPhone.
This is like the I am a Mac and I am a PC ad. iDisk is the PC, DropBox is the Mac. You have no clue on what you are missing out on. Try it out, they have clients for the iPhone as well.
If you disagree, list the free services that equate to MM. I'll ignore the inconvenience of having a different account for each service if you can show us that MM can be recreated with free options.
Free internet IMAP email with web-client - GMail
Free auto-syncing calendaring. - Google Calendar
Contact syncing - not sure... investigating.
Free usable file-syncing - Dropbox
Free photo sharing - Flickr which has better community features
Personal Webspace - any number of services.
Does MobileMe do anything else?
I am not saying MobileMe isn't okay - But it isn't worth more than the sum of its parts.
And most of its parts have perfectly good free equivalents.
And when I say perfectly good, I mean "substantially better than Mobile Me".
Flickr is better than MobileMe by a long chalk.
Dropbox is better than iDisk by a long chalk.
We pay for Mobile me. But as a service, it offers poor value for money in comparison to free services. The user-experience is not exceptional and some services are just poor or outright broken. See iDisk.
There are some bizarre aspects to the way it works:
I heavily use my .Mac email address for all personal mail. But I am not permitted to send mail *from* that address on my iPhone because it is an Alias. Bizarre!
I used iTunes with another address before getting MobileMe. I am not permitted to change my iTunes account over to use my MobileMe identity! Bizarre!
So I am a little let down by this service.
I say this as a very loyal Apple customer, who would like to see a bit more magic, and bit less bureaucracy and billing.
C.
Free internet IMAP email with web-client - GMail
Free auto-syncing calendaring. - Google Calendar
Contact syncing - not sure... investigating.
Free usable file-syncing - Dropbox
Free photo sharing - Flickr which has better community features
Personal Webspace - any number of services.
Does MobileMe do anything else?
I am not saying MobileMe isn't okay - But it isn't worth more than the sum of its parts.
And most of its parts have perfectly good free equivalents.
And when I say perfectly good, I mean "substantially better than Mobile Me".
Flickr is better than MobileMe by a long chalk.
Dropbox is better than iDisk by a long chalk.
We pay for Mobile me. But as a service, it offers poor value for money in comparison to free services. The user-experience is not exceptional and some services are just poor or outright broken. See iDisk.
There are some bizarre aspects to the way it works:
I heavily use my .Mac email address for all personal mail. But I am not permitted to send mail *from* that address on my iPhone because it is an Alias. Bizarre!
I used iTunes with another address before getting MobileMe. I am not permitted to change my iTunes account over to use my MobileMe identity! Bizarre!
So I am a little let down by this service.
I say this as a very loyal Apple customer, who would like to see a bit more magic, and bit less bureaucracy and billing.
C.
• Back To My Mac
• Find My iPhone
• Dynamic syncing between all Macs, iPhones, Touch and even Windows for contacts, calendars and bookmarks, without using Exchange.
• Handsfree cloud backups of Bookmarks, Calendars, Contacts, Dashboard Widgets, Dock Items, Keychains, Mail Accounts, Mail Rules/Signatures/Smart Mailboxes, Notes, Preferences, and even 3rd-party apps like Yojimbo Items and Transmit Favorites.
Those first two are well worth the money and they can't be replicated with any free or paid service. I hope that Apple adds a GPS chip to the next Mac notebooks for a Find My Mac feature in MM. It's saved more than a few lost and stolen iPhones, it may work well for a few Mac notebooks.
That last one has been especially useful — albeit before Time Machine came out and backups were common — since I could pop in a single username and password and have my entire desktop setup exactly the way I had it before on a new Mac or one I was borrowing, sans the desktop background and any Dock Items that weren't yet installed on that machine. I'm not 15yo anymore, I don't want to spend hours or days tweaking the settings on a machine just to get to an ideal working state.
Oh good, so can Apple now get rid of all that cr@p technology that means I can't access my MobileMe account from the office.
POP, IMAP, & (HTML/CSS/JS) are crap technologies? It sounds like someone has IE6 at work.
POP, IMAP, & (HTML/CSS/JS) are crap technologies? It sounds like someone has IE6 at work.
I'm sure IE6 can handle all the features you need to be able to run the functionality in MobileMe. So why restrict access to specific browsers? Universal access is one of the most important serious features of any online service. Consider that Apple have released an online service using a technology that their own mobile safari cannot access. That's just childish (of Apple, not you I mean).
I'm sure IE6 can handle all the features you need to be able to run the functionality in MobileMe. So why restrict access to specific browsers? Universal access is one of the most important serious features of any online service. Consider that Apple have released an online service using a technology that their own mobile safari cannot access. That's just childish (of Apple, not you I mean).
Those web apps use more modern code that IE6 can't understand. They allow IE7 and IE8 to work, though they do have a splash page suggest on Firefox or Safari. When me.com launched there were aspects of the site that wouldn't work with IE7 and IE8, but they have worked that out it seems. I don't know if it's as good as with Firefox or Safari, but they are supporting IE.
Even Google has stopped supporting IE6, though that seems mostly for security reasons, but there is a good deal of webcoding time saved, too.
? Back To My Mac
? Find My iPhone
? Dynamic syncing between all Macs, iPhones, Touch and even Windows for contacts, calendars and bookmarks, without using Exchange.
? Handsfree cloud backups of Bookmarks, Calendars, Contacts, Dashboard Widgets, Dock Items, Keychains, Mail Accounts, Mail Rules/Signatures/Smart Mailboxes, Notes, Preferences, and even 3rd-party apps like Yojimbo Items and Transmit Favorites.
Those first two are well worth the money and they can't be replicated with any free or paid service.
These are interesting points. But I guess I dispute the valuation.
When we strip away the features of MobileMe that are available for free - we are left with a handful of these neat little features.
I travel quite a bit, but have only made use of Back to My Mac on a couple of occasions.
Find my iPhone is great novelty, but if someone ever does steal my Phone, an insurance policy would be a safer investment than Find My iPhone.
I probably will renew Mobile Me - but I'd do so with much less reluctance if Apple were more aggressive in improving the service year on year.
C.
These are interesting points. But I guess I dispute the valuation.
When we strip away the features of MobileMe that are available for free - we are left with a handful of these neat little features.
I travel quite a bit, but have only made use of Back to My Mac on a couple of occasions.
Find my iPhone is great novelty, but if someone ever does steal my Phone, an insurance policy would be a safer investment than Find My iPhone.
I probably will renew Mobile Me - but I'd do so with much less reluctance if Apple were more aggressive in improving the service year on year.
C.
Not finding a value in the services is not the same as a statement about everything MM can do is online for free. Everything you need or want it to do, maybe, but that isn't want the initial comment was about.
I've found those 4 specific services very useful, half of them I've used since the .Mac days going back to 2004. They are worth much more than $60/year to me.