The Adventures of Jessica Sideways

I am a fairly faithful Apple fan and I think that for the most part, Apple’s products are far superior to that of any other companies’. The MacBooks and the MacBook Pros have been given a major overhaul and look and work better than they ever have (yeah, I love the aluminum/glass look that Apple gave to the iMac in it’s most recent update. The iPhone is getting better, albeit it still requires you to have AT&T service so I would have to wait Apple out or wait until I move to Canada. But there is still one service that Apple sells that is not worth the money and I would highly advise against. It is a service that was once called .mac, but now is called MobileMe. For the uninitiated, MobileMe is an online service from Apple that offers synchronization between Macs (very useful if you have multiple macs), PCs and your iPhone. However, it’s web offerings leave much to be desired and the synchronization benefits are hardly worth the price.

I initially bought the .mac service because I thought the synchronization benefits were worth it. Heh, well if you leave your computer without an internet connection for a month or so, it doesn’t sync well with the .mac servers. You can try to reconcile it but it wil all go back to the same thing - it will annoy you to make a decision on HOW to synchronize, not follow your decision and will ask you again in a few minutes. This is annoying and it is totally uncalled for. I finally had to say enough was enough and turned off the synchronization option on my MacBook Pro. The warnings stopped but any time I decided that I wanted the synchronization benefits and turned the MacBook Pro on, I started to get harassed again. It came up while I was in Photoshop, while I was trying to code, hell it even came up when I started my computer. This is one of the most annoying features with MobileMe and I assure you that when SpyMac was much better and had their Club programme, their sync options were MUCH better.

The Web Hosting is only good for one of two things. Hosting eBay images and other stuff that you don’t want to start your FTP programme for but you have an application that will store them on .mac space. That’s it. The Web space sucks, has no scripting language support and is only tightly integrated with two web editors: iWeb and RapidWeaver. I do not like iWeb because of the fact that the web pages it produces are horribly crappy and the programme itself is not extensible at all. While RapidWeaver has extensibility, it still produces horribly crappy pages. Bothy also have blog programmes that you cannot access through a web interface and you cannot control commenting if you have it enabled. Also, there is no master template option in iWeb, so you pretty much have to modify each page individually if you want to change something other than the menu. It’s tedious, it’s annoying and it just plain sucks.

Now that I have kvetched about the web space, let’s go on to e-mail. This complaint is probably the longest, so you might want to go get a drink - this might take a while. I am going to first address the issue of spam and mail filters. While the Mac OS Mail programme had excellent spam filters and controls that were very intuitive and helpful, .mac mail did not. I would see all the spam and all the e-mail that was supposed to be filtered into different boxes, right in my inbox. And until I would logon to my computer, pull up mail and have it download and sort all of my .mac messages, that is where they would sit - in the inbox. I cannot tell you how annoying it was to have to drag all the appropriate listserv messages to the appropriate box because the .mac mail client was not intuitive enough to do it by itself. I mean, it syncs mail filters - this should be an integrated feature!

I would also like to add that the .mac web client has always been horribly slow. The first .mac webmail client was AJAX powered and seriously half baked. It froze up your browser, it handled folders wrong, looked absolutely horrible when you had a window too small for it. Basically, it was a walking accessibility flaw. I can understand it not being slow if you have a T1 connection and the latest Mac Pro, but on any other computer - it crawled like an earthworm.

This is not to say that the MobileMe client was much better. It still had the same common outages as .mac and it still took a while to load your inbox. But now, you can’t even get into the mail client unless you have the latest version of Firefox or Safari. When I am stuck using other people’s computers and my only option is Internet Explorer, where does that leave me? Honestly, Apple could have rigged up a basic HTML webmail client, like it did when it had .mac. If you logged on to .mac and your browser wasn’t up to snuff, it would ask you if you wanted to use the HTML client. You do not have such an option with MobileMe.

I would also like to say that the features in MobileMe are not impressive enough to even start denying people access if they don’t use the right web browser. You cannot compose beautiful messages using Apple’s new stationery (or any stationery for that matter) nor with any sort of HTML formatting at all.

So, I would have to say that MobileMe leaves much to be desired. If you had to ask me whether or not it would be worth it for me to start using MobileMe once again, I would have to say “no, but the second that I own two or more macs, one of which being a desktop, I will change my decision.” Because I believe that the Back to my Mac feature is well worth the price of MobileMe, if you can make good use out of it.