.Mac: By Any Other Name Would Sync More Sweetly?
Ah, .Mac, the poor abandoned stepchild in Apple’s 360 degrees of spherical integration. It’s the online service Google, Yahoo, and even Microsoft Live kick sand at on the playground.
Sure, Back-to-my-Mac can rock, and syncing can be oh-so-sweet, but c’mon, what have you done for us lately?
Could be a lot, if rumors pan out. We’ve already brought you word on possible iPhone 2.0 .Mac “push” mail, and even reports of a total revamp. Now it seems the revamp may be more of a full on renovation, including a brand spanking new name!
[Dmitry Chestnykh, the CEO at Coding Robots] went through the iCal Localizable.strings file in the recently released 10.5.3 update and found a number of changes. In particular, he found a lot of evidence that the .Mac brand name is going to be replaced. Apple is apparently using a placeholder %@ which will be dynamically replaced by the new name, whatever that is, when it’s released.If Apple wants to keep charging $100 a year, then changes, and big ones, are a very necessary way to justify it. Here’s for something game-changing in the online “cloud” services realm. What do you think?
May 30th, 2008 at 10:34 pm
Dot Mac / Schmot Mac. For those of use who are Windows users, I really do not think this is any big deal. The far more better option to me seems to be a free ISP which is Exchange outlook-based such as Mail2Web.Com. At no cost, you get e-mail, contacts, and calendar all directly pushed to your device. It is awesome (and no, I am not saying this on behalf of Mail2Web, I just think it is awesome…..
May 30th, 2008 at 10:58 pm
I use Exchange for work email, contacts, and calendar sync (currently only email via IMAP on the iPhone), and .Mac to keep my laptop and desktop in sync, and for Back-to-my-Mac functionality.
I help admin the Exchange server on occasion, and while it sometimes seems nifty from the outside, the thing is a kludgy nightmare, and I’m hoping IMAP IDLE and CALDav do some damage to it eventually.
Nothing beats working on my laptop, browsing, saving files to iDisk, updating contacts, etc. and getting home and having everything, including my web history “just there” on my desktop. What .Mac does is amazing, and if Apple can deliver something just as user friendly for consumers as .Mac with the power of ActiveSync, it will both welcome and game changing.