iLife and .mac...Is it needed?
I'm back on the mac platform semi-recently even though I've always preferred Apple. But with my new MacBook I decided to go for the entire Mac experience and give .mac and iLife a legitimate try.
I am finding the following. Please tell me what I am not utilizing, or why I am wrong. I may just not be getting what I can out of .mac and iLife.
.mac mail vs gmail - gmail works great with Mail. Gmail is free. AND I can use the 2 GB's of free space as an online hard drive for anything. If you keep your mail relatively clean the 2 GB of free online storage is double what I get from .mac. For FREE....p.s.. Not to mention you can use a secondary gmail account for dedicated storage. I cant believe Apple charges $100 for half of what Google give you. Am I missing something here?
iWeb...Wow. Pretty basic application. Flickr seems to be a much funner way to share pics. And the web pages you can make with iWeb seem about as customizable as anything on the free Google Page Creator. However, this is the point on which I may be most wrong. If anyone has some info here, I'd be grateful. And Yahoo has unlimited online photo stoarge....not that I want that many pics online.
Does BackUp 3 with the 1 GB constraint on iDisk do anything you cant do without it combined with Gmail's 2GB of free space?
I really like iCal. But I've just started playing with Google's Calendar and its pretty nice. Has anyone tried both and found iCal substantially better?
Now, photocasting is cool. I'm down with that. Send pics the easy way there.
Heck, I even use Firefox over Safari. Merely for the awesome extensions. There is nothing like Performancing for Safari. The Sidebar options. Delicious add ons.
Dont get me wrong. My MacBook is incredible. I love it. I'm not bashing Apple or my laptop. I will never go back. I'm just not sold on .mac. The more I explore what's available out there for free, the more I'm finding out that .mac is paying more and getting less.
What am I missing?
I am finding the following. Please tell me what I am not utilizing, or why I am wrong. I may just not be getting what I can out of .mac and iLife.
.mac mail vs gmail - gmail works great with Mail. Gmail is free. AND I can use the 2 GB's of free space as an online hard drive for anything. If you keep your mail relatively clean the 2 GB of free online storage is double what I get from .mac. For FREE....p.s.. Not to mention you can use a secondary gmail account for dedicated storage. I cant believe Apple charges $100 for half of what Google give you. Am I missing something here?
iWeb...Wow. Pretty basic application. Flickr seems to be a much funner way to share pics. And the web pages you can make with iWeb seem about as customizable as anything on the free Google Page Creator. However, this is the point on which I may be most wrong. If anyone has some info here, I'd be grateful. And Yahoo has unlimited online photo stoarge....not that I want that many pics online.
Does BackUp 3 with the 1 GB constraint on iDisk do anything you cant do without it combined with Gmail's 2GB of free space?
I really like iCal. But I've just started playing with Google's Calendar and its pretty nice. Has anyone tried both and found iCal substantially better?
Now, photocasting is cool. I'm down with that. Send pics the easy way there.
Heck, I even use Firefox over Safari. Merely for the awesome extensions. There is nothing like Performancing for Safari. The Sidebar options. Delicious add ons.
Dont get me wrong. My MacBook is incredible. I love it. I'm not bashing Apple or my laptop. I will never go back. I'm just not sold on .mac. The more I explore what's available out there for free, the more I'm finding out that .mac is paying more and getting less.
What am I missing?
Comments
For backups, wait for OS X Leopard (TimeMachine). Otherwise use Silverkeeper (an application by LaCie), or use Retrospect. Apple's Backup never worked for me, too few options to configure.
iCal also works when you're not connected to the internet and I wouldn't want to have all my personal information on the Web only. I want all that stuff in my computer, accessible at all times, wherever I am, but that's just my personal preference.
The best thing about iLife is that all the applications (iTunes, iPhoto, iCa, iMovie, iDVD, iWeb) are linked together. Use e-mail notifications via Apple Mail in iCal, use iTunes songs when creating a photo slideshow in iPhoto, use addresses from AddressBook in Apple Mail, create a DVD with music from iTunes and movies from iMovie, etc. It all just works together. Even if there are better applications out there for certain tasks, I still prefer Apple's simple to use applications that are linked together to single applications.
Plus: you don't have to buy a .Mac membership to use all the iLife applications. You can even publish websites made in iWeb to any regular web server. Or you could set up your own quasi-iCal server using WebDAV, you can use any POP3 or IMAP e-mail account in the world, etc., the list goes on. So there is no need to really buy a .Mac membership.
Can you use gmail as a web server where you can host a website or any kind of media the way I can on .mac? If so, how?
No. I dont believe you can. Its just an ftp-like deal. I use the Gmail Space extension for Firefox. But I believe Google's Page Creator works that same way Yahoo's 360 works where you have on-line website folder outside of the 2.5 GB's (newly upgraded from 2 I just found out when I logged in). I am not sure of the capacity for web page files yet for Google Page Creator, but iWeb has its own capacity. iWeb doesnt keep your internet files on your machine. Does it? It doesnt turn your hard drive into the server space? It cant. Right? It would have to be on all the time? Or am I a noob in need of pwnage?
I do agree that they all seem to work seemlessly with .mac. Which is why I boughti it. I mean, if you are going to buy a Mac....buy a Mac. See what it can do. And the above poster is right. I should not have lumped iLife together with .mac in the OP or the title. iLife is free with my MacBook and its great. I just think the bandwidth and the flexibility in the .mac package is actually less than what you get for free. There is something wrong with paying $100 for 1 GB when there is 2.5 GB's out there for free. Especially when Gmail works seemlessly with Mail and iCal already.
Maybe, just maybe, with Google's presence now intertwined with Apple, we can get a Apple stylized version of the Google packages with your .mac account. Sort of a Google package on MacRoids. Right now, I really think the limitations on .mac work as a bottleneck to what you can with these kick ass Mac computers.
I'm using .Mac only for synching Safari's bookmarks, calendar and address book entries between three Macs. Works fine for that, but yes, just for that it is expensive. But it saves me from manually keeping all the info current on all computers. The rest of .Mac I don't ever use.
Off-topic: I do pretty much the same as this, except I don't use .Mac. I'm using Firefox with Foxylicious to sync bookmarks with del.icio.us (and the classic del.icio.us plugin to tag new pages), and Chronosync to synchronize my address book and calendar. The only downside is that I can only update iCal and Address Book on one computer between syncs, as the info is stored in bulk in a couple of files so changes on both machines can't be merged.
The Google Calendar appears to be close to getting much better. There is a post on the Google Mac Group saying that they are now looking for beta testers for a tool that will allow iCal and Google Calendar to sync.
That will be a nice feature. Those guys at Google are really getting with the Mac program.