All Articles Tagged sync

During the 2008 WWDC Keynote today, Apple VP of Marketing, Phil Schiller, confirmed the rumors of a .Mac maga-revamp in the form of MobileMe.

Apple’s answer both to previous critiques of the admittedly out-dated .Mac service, and the expected cloud computing boom (see Android, Google), MobileMe features ActiveSync-like “push” email, calendar, and contacts syncing between your iPhone (or iPod Touch) and your Mac or PC, or via any web browser with some pretty spectacular looking Web 2.0/AJAX style online apps. It also adds photo syncing, clearly targeting consumers.

iDisk (the online storage service) gets a bump to 20GB, and goes fully online as well. Mac user? Still enjoy the Mac sync, iWeb, and Back-to-my-Mac that you know (and I) love.

Launching in July in time for the new iPhone 3G, and priced at the same $99 as .Mac, it still smacks the expensive, but if your don’t have Exchange, and value highly polished syncing and web-based solutions, this might just be the service for you.

Existing .Mac customers will be rolled into MobileMe — see Apple’s migration page for details — with a choice of maintaining their old @mac.com address, or the new @.me equivalent.

For more, go to me.com (which will redirect you to Apple.com/MobileMe), where a handy-dandy MobileMe guided tour awaits!

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?

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Updating yesterday’s story about .Mac getting the push-email treatment in iPhone 2.0, TUAW’s tipsters are back with this little gem:

According to our anonymous tipster, .Mac will undergo a complete revamp that will coincide with the iPhone 2.0 launch (which everyone expects to occur at WWDC 08).

Again with the asking and receiving, eh?

Rumored highlights for the updated .Mac include full wireless (cell + wifi?) calendar, contacts, and email (an Apple Exchange anyone?) and .Mac support for — you guessed it! — Windows.

First El Jobso gives PC users a cool glass of iTunes and iPhone, and now a possible consumer-centric push service.

Did I mention how June can’t come fast enough yet?

No sooner did our own Chad Garette lay out the case for .Mac syncing via the iPhone, then iPhone Alley, (via TUAW), brings word that El Jobso might be doing just that:

In the just released SDK beta 2, iPhone Alley found a string within a preference bundle that reads: “Syncing with this Dot Mac account will turn off syncing for other Dot Mac accounts and delete any existing synced data.” This suggests the possibility of wireless syncing for non-Exchange users.

This would be awesome additional functionality for both the iPhone and for .Mac. 2.0 really can’t come fast enough.

And note to Chad: How about an article on why the iPhone really needs immediate release in Canada? Please?

I spent a bunch of time getting Leopard installed and set up on my mac to find out what goodies it would bring to the iPhone. It looks like syncing notes from the iPhone to Mail might have been pulled just before it was ready, or that it’s going to come in a future iPhone update. When I tried to change the default font in an edited note from Marker Felt to anything else, I’m given this warning message:

“Convert this note to rich text format?
Changing the style or formatting requires that this note be converted to rich text format. Rich text notes may not be editable on iPhone and other devices.”

The language is there, as you can see above. Based on the language that I see above, I think it’s safe to assume that it should be available soon.

And in other news, it looks like Apple hasn’t made up their mind whether or not we’ll be able to edit rich-text notes in the future. The fact that there’s a warning at all indicates that we should be able to edit notes on the computer and have them sync to the iPhone.