The .Mac report

• Article 35 of 53
• iCreate, July 2005
• View a PDF of the original article ~ 3.4MB

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3 Sync
.Mac syncing is a really good thing. Anyone who has more than one Mac will know just how irritating it is trying to keep files in sync, whether they’re contacts, calendars, web browser bookmarks or just preferences. With .Mac, you can keep everything up to date without having to lift a finger. After you’ve installed Tiger or iSync installed on your Mac, a built-in synchronisation engine keeps a watchful eye for changes on both .Mac and your Mac. If anything happens, the engine compares the two different versions and adjusts the one that hasn’t been updated. Simple and easy, it’s all automatic. Best of all, you can register several Macs to the same .Mac account and the process will repeat itself across all the Macs, ensuring that any changes get propagated through the lot of them. Since all this takes place through .Mac, the online services, including the Address Book and bookmarks services, all have access to your Macs’ data. If you use iCal for your calendars, then you can use .Mac to publish as well as sync your calendars so others know your schedules.

What gets synced using .Mac is an ever-expanding list. Panther will sync your Address Book, calendars and Safari bookmarks; Tiger will also synchronise your keychain items, and Mail rules, accounts, signatures and smart mailboxes. More importantly, Tiger provides a way for third-party developers to use .Mac to sync their programs’ settings between computers, although few developers have done so, so far.

As with all syncing software, Apple’s syncing engine is a little temperamental. We’d advise keeping regular back-ups in case some of your data goes astray. The online Address Book also provides fewer fields and labels than Address Book, so you may find that some information gets misclassified sometimes. But it’s usually pretty good, particularly under Tiger.

4 HomePage
HomePage is probably the best way available right now for home users to create web pages. Filled with dozens of templates, it provides a simple way to share files, show off movies, create photo galleries or just tell the world about whatever’s on your mind, all without your having to know any HTML at all. It integrates delightfully with iPhoto and other iLife programs, which can upload files and complete pages to HomePage, saving you the hassle of creating the pages manually. It’s vastly easier and better-looking than the tools offered by web site providers such as Tripod and Fortune City, and since it shares your iDisk space, potentially has more storage than any of the free services and even many of the paid-for services. The last blessed relief: absolutely no ads forcibly inserted like glowing neon enemas into any of your web pages.

For the slightly more advanced user who wants to go beyond the templates, there are more benefits still. Since there’s always the option of editing and uploading files using iDisk, all third-party web editing tools work with HomePage; some, such as Contribute, explicitly have .Mac support built in and will upload directly to HomePage or even manage the whole site for you.

There are, as ever, drawbacks, although none are very severe. The lesser issue is the templates: all embody a US design philosophy, which is fine if that’s your target audience; some might, however, make a non-US audience gag on their cheesiness. With some judicious choices, you can usually find ones that look all right though.

There are bigger problems for anyone who wants to get a bit sophisticated. Provided you stick to standard things like JavaScript, you’ll be all right; but if you’re looking for dynamic pages that use PHP, ASP or JSP scripting, you’re going to be out of luck: it’s plain HTML or nothing with HomePage. Equally difficult is using a domain name other than the one provided by Apple: homepage.mac.com. While you can use ‘cloaking’ systems from third-party domain name providers to camouflage the true source of your HomePage files, neither sophisticated web users nor search engines will be so easily fooled.

So if you want a professional web site with all the bells and whistles, you’ll need to go somewhere other than HomePage. But if you’re a regular home user, HomePage is far and away the best choice of web site hosts there is.

5. Free stuff
Every .Mac member instantly gains access to a load of a free software that’s downloadable either from the .Mac web site or from the Software folder in your iDisk (don’t worry, none of it counts towards your quota). The Virex anti-virus software is one of those benefits, and as long as you continue your .Mac membership, you’ll be able to subscribe to the latest anti-virus definitions. It’s not the best anti-virus tool on the market but it will stop you from sending out viruses to your PC-using pals. Another subscription you get for free with .Mac is VersionTracker Plus, the software update service: compile a list of software to monitor, and VersionTracker Plus will email you when the developers update the software. Not as useful as VersionTracker Pro, it will still your Mac up to date.

Backup is Apple’s own piece of software for backing up and restoring data to a variety of sources. As well as iPods and other external hard drives, you can save data to CDs and DVDs and, of course, your iDisk. The program’s easy to use, with simple selection methods for the data you want to back up: “All Word documents in your home folder”, “Keychains”, “iTunes Music Library” are all supported options, and you can drag and drop anything not explicitly mentioned to the backup window. Scheduling is a nice option, so if you leave your Mac on at night, you can at least have it backing up files while you’re not using it.

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