.Mac Revamp Planned

Posted:
in Mac Software edited January 2014
This message in the system status section of .Mac:





January 13, 2005

The .Mac suite of services will be undergoing scheduled maintenance from 10:00 am to 6:00 pm PT on January 15, 2005. All web based services, iChat and iDisk access will be unavailable. Email access (POP and IMAP) from a client application will be unaffected.



Suspect the long awaited increase of storage to 1GB and enhanced benefits is taking place tomorrow.
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Comments

  • Reply 1 of 23
    buonrottobuonrotto Posts: 6,368member
    I wonder if, and hope that Apple updates the .Mac web page features to go with the new iLife and iWork suites.
  • Reply 2 of 23
    Quote:

    Originally posted by TRowell



    Suspect the long awaited increase of storage to 1GB and enhanced benefits is taking place tomorrow.




    That would be extremely cool, but I think unlikely given that they only just increased the standard to 250MB at the tail end of last year. Fingers crossed though .
  • Reply 3 of 23
    bwhalerbwhaler Posts: 260member
    While I would love new features, I'll take more speed and reliability. iDisk is almost unusable it is so slow, as is most of the web posting functionality in iLife.



    I hope Apple is doing a major upgrade to the infrastructure to get it ready for Tiger. Speed and quality is what I want next.



    (But of course, new feature would be nice too. ;-)
  • Reply 4 of 23
    rokrok Posts: 3,519member
    this MUST be something big if they're taking down the whole system for an entire day. most places, when doing upgrades, only do them at stupid early times in north america, to minimize customer outages (and outrage).



    i'm just betting on speed increases myself, but i'll take extra space, especially if apple starts wanting every new mac mini owner to start sharing their home movies online.
  • Reply 5 of 23
    ybotybot Posts: 329member
    *fingers crossed* We can certainly hope, can't we!?



    I hate how Gmail, which is free, has us beat in terms of storage. I guess since it's not an online hard drive Google is less worried about people using 100% of that 1gb offered.



    Whereas with .Mac having a 1gb hard drive, everyone would pile files on it using up terrabytes worth of bandwidth every day and it would end up costing Apple quite a bit more than .Mac costs to run currently.



    Just my $0.02 (but it seems logical, doesn't it?)
  • Reply 6 of 23
    ybotybot Posts: 329member
    One more thought. I know that currently we can choose how much of our collective 250mb goes to email and goes to iDisk.



    But what if they DID up it to 1gb and allowed us to use the iDisk up to a maximum of 250mb forcing us to have a minimum of 750mb for email? I'd be happy with that. .Mac would beat Gmail then (well, close) AND still have all the benefits of .Mac.



    I'd be VERY happy with that!
  • Reply 7 of 23
    cakecake Posts: 1,010member
    Back in late August, I bought 300MB of extra space for my iDisk and Apple bumped it up to 1GB for free.



    I forgot the wording in the email, but it was something to the effect of "As a longtime .Mac member we're giving you additional space at no extra charge".



    Maybe everyone will get upgraded now.
  • Reply 8 of 23
    For what it's worth, the .Mac status page now says Jan. 22:



    "The .Mac suite of services will be undergoing scheduled maintenance from 10:00 am to 6:00 pm PT on January 22, 2005. All web based services, iChat and iDisk access will be unavailable. Email access (POP and IMAP) from a client application will be unaffected."
  • Reply 9 of 23
    idunnoidunno Posts: 645member
    I wonder why Jan 22 and what significance this date holds.



    .mail updated/graded/whatever.

    Macminis are supposedly released that day

    And there are rubblings down here that iTMA Australia will go live that day due to Apple changing some sort of privacy policy that day.
  • Reply 10 of 23
    buonrottobuonrotto Posts: 6,368member
    January 22 is not only the date for the Mac mini release, it's also the release date for iWork and iLife '05. Food for speculation, no doubt.



    I don't suppose anyone noticed any hooks or special aspects to any of these apps with regard to iLife on the expo floor?



    I was looking at the Quicktime 7 preview that's in the new Tiger preview area at Apple.com, and one of the features of QT 7 Pro (they kind of sneak that in) is that you can use the "Send..." command to email someone a movie or upload it to Homepage. They only show the email choice in the movie, but you can see an icon called "Homepage" in the sheet that drops down. That doesn't say much about what would be new, but I wonder if they will, if they're smart, offer a QT 7 Pro discount to .Mac members to take better advantage of this. Probably not though. \



    Overall, I think the whole .Mac homepage thing, aside from new themes for pages, could use a good revamp. It would be nice to pick a theme for your web site overall, a la Keynote and Pages, then simply lay out stuff on your choice of pages. I dunno, I'm just thinking out loud that the .Mac team could learn something from those apps. I also wonder if there would be some sort of more elegant interactive connection between .Mac and iWork and iCal.
  • Reply 11 of 23
    paulpaul Posts: 5,278member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by BuonRotto

    Overall, I think the whole .Mac homepage thing, aside from new themes for pages, could use a good revamp. It would be nice to pick a theme for your web site overall, a la Keynote and Pages, then simply lay out stuff on your choice of pages. I dunno, I'm just thinking out loud that the .Mac team could learn something from those apps. I also wonder if there would be some sort of more elegant interactive connection between .Mac and iWork and iCal.



    I was thinking exactly that when Pages was introduced... .Mac support would be KILLER... not exactly as good as an apple blog app, but might get me back into writing again... the 22nd does seem to be some kind of deadline tho... what will show up in the next 7 days?
  • Reply 12 of 23
    idunnoidunno Posts: 645member
    only 3.5 hours until .Mac goes down for it's upgrade. Any ideas on whether or not we will see improvements, or will it simply be some back end fine tuning that we won't even notice?
  • Reply 13 of 23
    jbljbl Posts: 555member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by iDunno

    only 3.5 hours until .Mac goes down for it's upgrade. Any ideas on whether or not we will see improvements, or will it simply be some back end fine tuning that we won't even notice?



    I bet it is just some tuning. They just upgraded the disk space. It doesn't make a lot of sense to keep it secret if they have other upgrades planned. It isn't like the PowerBooks where if they announced that they were going to be upgrading them no one would buy the current models. On the contrary, if they promised that it was going to be better in a week or two, more people would buy it.
  • Reply 14 of 23
    ybotybot Posts: 329member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by JBL

    I bet it is just some tuning. They just upgraded the disk space. It doesn't make a lot of sense to keep it secret if they have other upgrades planned. It isn't like the PowerBooks where if they announced that they were going to be upgrading them no one would buy the current models. On the contrary, if they promised that it was going to be better in a week or two, more people would buy it.



    Well it's the day after the update and nothing seems to be different. \
  • Reply 15 of 23
    kcmackcmac Posts: 1,051member
    Doesn't seem to be any new features.



    I did reset my bookmarks and addressbook and the performance seems faster to me. No lost info. Everything seems great.
  • Reply 16 of 23
    as far as i can recall, Apple usually has taken .Mac offline a couple days to a week before they announce new features. i'm not saying they're actually going to announce anything, but it's possible they got their servers upgraded in preperation for new features to be announced sometime in the near future.
  • Reply 17 of 23
    buonrottobuonrotto Posts: 6,368member
    Tuesdays are usually the days for any sort of announcement, but I'm not holding my breathe. Performance (or the placebo effect) seems better at least.
  • Reply 18 of 23
    ybotybot Posts: 329member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by confirmed

    as far as i can recall, Apple usually has taken .Mac offline a couple days to a week before they announce new features. i'm not saying they're actually going to announce anything, but it's possible they got their servers upgraded in preperation for new features to be announced sometime in the near future.



    It just seems silly to add feature(s) to .Mac so soon after Macworld but to not have announced those features AT Macworld. Apple loves to announce things (Tiger) SO long before they become available. Why slip this in so soon after MW with no announcement? Unless it's so mundane (new servers) that it's not worth mentioning.



    -Y
  • Reply 19 of 23
    dfilerdfiler Posts: 3,420member
    For such lengthy downtime, the only scenario I could imagine is extensive infrastructure changes. Like perhaps upgrades to the server farm's power grid or network topology. Maybe the servers moved to another physical location...



    But of course I wouldn't mind more features.
  • Reply 20 of 23
    see next
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