Apple to disable .Mac website creation in July
MobileMe subscribers using legacy .Mac website tools have been warned by Apple that the .Mac Groups and HomePage features will be discontinued in July, leaving existing pages live but taking away the ability to edit or update them.
The email message, which is partly mirrored on a notification page on Apple's site, tells those customers who transitioned over from .Mac that the HomePage web app will shut down on July 7th and will prevent sites created using the online web editing tool from receiving further updates.
"Any pages you've already published will remain live at their current web address for as long as you like," Apple reassures customers. "[But] if you need to make changes to your existing pages, please do so before July 7."
In its place, customers are asked to instead use MobileMe's photo and video hosting services for simple galleries, and iWeb for creating and posting MobileMe sites. The company in an online FAQ notes that users can migrate content on their iDisks as long as they're active MobileMe users, and sites can still be manually deleted even after the July 7th cutoff.
The .Mac Groups application, intended to allow subscribers to create a shared portal for posting contacts and news for a team or organization, will also be going offline. Both Groups and HomePage were applications built using WebObjects. Their suggested replacements are either the new MobileMe apps built using SproutCore, or the desktop iWeb application.
While making the move in advance, Apple's switchover has already triggered concern by long-time users, many of whom have used HomePage since it was first available through the free iTools service in 2000 or when it was transitioned to .Mac in 2002. The discontinuation won't break links to static content but will force those regularly dependent on Apple's hosting service to migrate if they hope to remain current.
There is no group sharing features in MobileMe equivalent to the former .Mac Groups, but that web-based application did not appear to find much interest. Most of the features in HomePage are eclipsed in iWeb or by the new Gallery app in MobileMe. However, readers have reported some missing features, such as the ability to create multiple websites each with its own password.
The email message, which is partly mirrored on a notification page on Apple's site, tells those customers who transitioned over from .Mac that the HomePage web app will shut down on July 7th and will prevent sites created using the online web editing tool from receiving further updates.
"Any pages you've already published will remain live at their current web address for as long as you like," Apple reassures customers. "[But] if you need to make changes to your existing pages, please do so before July 7."
In its place, customers are asked to instead use MobileMe's photo and video hosting services for simple galleries, and iWeb for creating and posting MobileMe sites. The company in an online FAQ notes that users can migrate content on their iDisks as long as they're active MobileMe users, and sites can still be manually deleted even after the July 7th cutoff.
The .Mac Groups application, intended to allow subscribers to create a shared portal for posting contacts and news for a team or organization, will also be going offline. Both Groups and HomePage were applications built using WebObjects. Their suggested replacements are either the new MobileMe apps built using SproutCore, or the desktop iWeb application.
While making the move in advance, Apple's switchover has already triggered concern by long-time users, many of whom have used HomePage since it was first available through the free iTools service in 2000 or when it was transitioned to .Mac in 2002. The discontinuation won't break links to static content but will force those regularly dependent on Apple's hosting service to migrate if they hope to remain current.
There is no group sharing features in MobileMe equivalent to the former .Mac Groups, but that web-based application did not appear to find much interest. Most of the features in HomePage are eclipsed in iWeb or by the new Gallery app in MobileMe. However, readers have reported some missing features, such as the ability to create multiple websites each with its own password.
Comments
Back in 2004 when I got .Mac I only used the web created pages as a template and from that point on would edit the HTML by hand.
Now if you're not able to do that even, that would kind of suck.
i guess it's just a matter of time until they wrench the .mac email addresses from those of us that have supported them the longest. not cool.
I don't think this gives us any info on that matter. This is shutting down an actual service that has systems and back-end software dedicated to. But maintaining a domain name (especially mac.com which Apple is likely to hang onto anyway) is another matter--and very easy to keep on doing. (And in addition, a lot more people use email than host Web pages.)
I don't think this gives us any info on that matter. This is shutting down an actual service that has systems and back-end software dedicated to. But maintaining a domain name (especially mac.com which Apple is likely to hang onto anyway) is another matter--and very easy to keep on doing. (And in addition, a lot more people use email than host Web pages.)
It would be easier for Apple to maintain just one. It's only a matter of time.
i guess it's just a matter of time until they wrench the .mac email addresses from those of us that have supported them the longest. not cool.
Apple has already stated (some time ago) that they would not disable the .mac email addresses. You can use the .mac or the .me, your choice.
Whereas "MobileMe" doesn't make you think of Macs at all.
How does this boneheaded decision make sense? They should have just kept it called .Mac.
It only say's they're shutting down the "homepage" web-app...
As I read it, the .mac domain will still be functional ... even the "homepage.mac.com" should still work, you'll just have to create your own pages and upload them rather than having the web-app doing all the work.
As long as you're still able to access your .Mac web-created pages through iDisk or FTP there should be no reason you can't edit them manually or with an editor like Dreamweaver..
Care to walk me through that? I use iWeb and can't find a way to get the site into a format that any other web page editor can handle.
readers have reported some missing features, such as the ability to create multiple websites each with its own password.
Huh. Must be those readers who don't know what the hell they're doing. My iWeb file has TWENTY-THREE unique websites in it, thirteen of which are password protected.
I don't think this gives us any info on that matter. This is shutting down an actual service that has systems and back-end software dedicated to. But maintaining a domain name (especially mac.com which Apple is likely to hang onto anyway) is another matter--and very easy to keep on doing. (And in addition, a lot more people use email than host Web pages.)
I hope you're right.
Apple has already stated (some time ago) that they would not disable the .mac email addresses. You can use the .mac or the .me, your choice.
yeah, true. but the fact that they stopped giving out mac.com addresses a while ago, when afaik keeping both domains running in parallel would have been trivial, doesn't make me terribly confident that it's going to be like that forever. i've been using the service since it was called itools, and some of the features we had are now gone.
Care to walk me through that? I use iWeb and can't find a way to get the site into a format that any other web page editor can handle.
It's probably best to just edit the HTML by hand. If you open it up in Dreamweaver you'll have the template and the text, but no images -- not a real big deal though.
If you really want to make it portable to any site then copy all the images locally from your browser and start modifying the image links accordingly.
As for iWeb . . . I know I've made manual changes without iWeb. Whenever I need to make a minute change I usually open the HTML up from iDIsk in TextWrangler or something similar. iWeb (and Homepage before it) don't like when you muck with their templates anyway and will end up rewriting over your work so as a general rule I don't even open them once I've made manual changes to any site.
There's some programs that will let you export an iWeb page to a standard format you can upload to any site. Can't remember the name though. Check MacUpdate.
Both Groups and HomePage were applications built using WebObjects. Their suggested replacements are either the new MobileMe apps built using SproutCore, or the desktop iWeb application.
SproutCore is a client-side only framework, WebObjects is Apple's server-side application server. A cursory examination of the MobileMe javascript files shows that WebObjects still powers the site.
It would be easier for Apple to maintain just one. It's only a matter of time.
There is nothing to be done, Apple will just keep the .mac domain pointing to the same address as the .me domain.