The .Mac report

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

Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3 | All 3 Pages

As we all know well, the Mac is the ultimate digital lifestyle device. Nothing in the PC world (or even PC World) seems quite as stylish or as cool as a Mac. But ever since the Internet came along, no computer has been an island, and the Mac needed something to bring the Internet within its fashionable grasp.

Enter iTools (Bet you thought we were going to say .Mac, huh?). Launched in the year 2000, the free iTools service included four tools: a mac.com email address for every Mac owner; 20MB of online storage via ‘iDisk’; the web site vetting service KidSafe; and web page-publishing system HomePage.

Since then iTools has disappeared, replaced by .Mac, which itself has gone through two big changes since its launch. KidSafe is long-gone, but free software such as Virex, massively increased storage and data syncing have all been added to the mix, as has a £68.99 yearly membership fee. The latest update coincided with the launch of Tiger, which is why we’ve decided to turn our attention to .Mac and ask the question other Mac mags daren’t: is .Mac really worth the money or is it just another opportunity for Apple to extract money from us in exchange for an extra chunk of coolness?

1 Mail
What’s the main reason anyone signs up for .Mac? The mac.com email address of course! Only an apple.com address trumps mac.com in the scheme of things, and anyone signing up for the .Mac service gets a mac.com address straight away. If one’s not enough, you can purchase up to 10 others for up to £7.50 each – they get cheaper, the more you buy – and you can also set up up to five email aliases for your mail account. These deliver email to your main account’s email box, so you don’t get any extra storage, but you do get more mac.com addresses. You can also delete them at any point, and set up a new alias if you’re bored of the old one or it’s getting too much spam.

But how do you use it? Unlike AOL, Hotmail and Netscape Mail, .Mac email uses the POP and IMAP email standards, so you can use just about any email client under the sun to access it. Mail and Entourage make it even easier to read your .Mac email since they already know the settings you’ll need, saving you the hassle of finding them out and typing them in. If you’re away from your Mac, you can also use the .Mac webmail system (webmail.mac.com) to access your email from any web browser.

On the whole, .Mac doesn’t compare too badly with other email services (see our first table for more details). The integration with OS X is good. Impressively, for instance, Mail in Tiger automatically grabs a list of all your email aliases from .Mac and gives you the option to send emails using those aliases. The IMAP support is very handy, since it lets you keep your mail online and store it in folders, which is quite rare: many services offer POP at best or at worst, webmail only. But the security conscious will get annoyed that their .Mac password is sent unencrypted to Apple whenever they use .Mac mail; anyone who hoards email will be singularly unimpressed by the relatively paltry storage that .Mac mail has (it shares 250MB with the other .Mac services); and with many design professionals likely to be sending around large files, the 10MB limit on email attachments is a hindrance, albeit one shared by all the other free services.

2 iDisk
iDisk, the second of the survivors of iTools, is a nice idea that’s badly implemented, unfortunately. Essentially, it’s a disk you can put things into over the Internet and which you can access from anywhere in the world. Its initial 25MB limit has now expanded to 250MB, with the option to buy more, although this has to be shared with your .Mac email: you use an online control panel to decide how much should be dedicated to each service. If you want to share files with others, there’s a public folder that can be password-protected and made read-only, making it a snip to trade files when email just won’t do.

OS X also has some good tools for dealing with iDisks. The Go menu in the Finder has a menu for accessing iDisks, both your own and other people’s. There’s also the option in the .Mac System Preferences pane to set up iDisk syncing. This gives you a local copy of your iDisk; whenever you change or add something on the local copy, your Mac will wait until there’s an Internet connection and then copy the changes to the actual iDisk; it will also scan the iDisk to see if you’d made changes to it elsewhere and then will download anything new or different.

iDisk is a nice idea but it runs into a few problems in practice. Firstly, although it’s supposedly accessible anywhere, it relies on the “WebDAV” protocol. Unfortunately, OS X 10.0.x and earlier don’t know anything about WebDAV and neither does anything on the Windows side before Windows 2000. While there is an iDisk Utility for Windows XP to make it relatively easy to get to your iDisk from Windows XP, it’s a tortuous route through Network Places on Windows 2000 to get to your iDisk. So that means it’s a lot harder to trade files with Windows users than if you were using something a bit more standard such as FTP.

Secondly, Apple’s implementation of WebDAV sucks very, very badly. Sorry, Apple, it’s just no good. As a quick comparison, we copied 500 files, all of which were 60K or less to our local iDisk and waited to see how long it would take to synchronise the files. Even over a 1Mbps broadband connection, it took over three hours to copy just 11MB of files. We then tried uploading the files again, but this time using Panic Software’s Transmit. It took 18 minutes. If you rely on your iDisk to publish a web site, take advantage of a third-party WebDAV tool to reduce your stress levels.

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.

Again, if you use iDisk you’ll be sharing that space with every other .Mac enabled app you have, so it might get to be a tight squeeze if you insist on saving anything other than your most critical data.

Backup’s other drawback is that it is occasionally unreliable, at which point it complains it can’t reach the iDisk server or it has to recover the catalogue and you might have to start again. This is not helpful in a critical piece of software like a back-up utility. Fortunately, it appears to be getting less irritating over time. The most glaring failing of Backup? You can only use it to back-up one of your Macs. Since .Mac’s biggest draw is its ability to bring several different Macs together over the Internet, why should only a single Mac be able to back itself up using a .Mac account? Ask Apple.

Apple, incidentally, from time to time provides other bits of free software. Jam Pack loops for GarageBand are popular faves; Apple also keeps promising some Dashboard Widgets exclusively for .Mac members but has yet to provide any, a full month after Tiger hit the market (at the time of writing). We wait with baited breath, so we can comment on whether they’re worth the delay. There are also occasional special offers, such as free shareware, and discounts off more expensive software such as Contribute, Spiderman 2 and StickyBrain, which can save you the cost of a .Mac subscription if they’re off bits of software you want. Typically, most of Apple’s other special offers are for US .Mac customers, such as a month’s free trial of T-mobile’s US WiFi service. Since UK customers are actually paying more for .Mac at current exchange rates, this only serves to annoy and make you less willing to renew your membership next year.

6 Learning Centre
If you’re new to the Mac or use some of Apple’s Pro apps, then the learning centre is a welcome source of tutorials and training videos. Look through the menu of programs, click on the area you need training in and then click on the icons to get the material, be it a PDF, a web page or a QuickTime movie. You’ll really need a broadband connection to get the most out of it, but all the training centre material is worth looking at for some basic hints. Don’t expect to be walked through every aspect of iLife, OS X or your iPod, even though there are resources for all of these, but do expect to get some insights into the software that you may not previously have had.

7. The Verdict
Overall, there are few parts of .Mac that excel, with HomePage being the obvious standout and syncing ready to leap forward to join it once the third-party developers really join in. It’s a pity really, since most parts of .Mac could have been brilliant if Apple hadn’t hobbled them: if you’re prepared to fork out for a full 1GB of storage, .Mac is certainly a worthwhile service, albeit an expensive one; Backup could have been a far superior utility if it had supported more than one Mac, and had a bit of reengineering in the background to make it more reliable; and iDisk could have really blown everyone away if hadn’t been built around a moped engine instead of a superbike.

If Apple hadn’t provided the Backup app, it could have been forgiven its stingy storage quota; but to expect everyone to store everything including their backup files in 250MB unless they stump up even more money for the 1GB option is like Bill Gates claiming he needs a few extra dollars to make ends meet: Apple makes the cheapest enterprise-grade storage system on the market – the Xserve RAID – so it should be able to afford a few extra systems for its regular fee-paying customers, particularly when so many services give away 1GB or more for free.

Nevertheless, despite our reservations, .Mac is worth the money if you can afford it. The integration of .Mac into OS X, iLife and other programs alone justifies the outlay, even if you grit your teeth while handing over the money. Even while competitors such as Spymac Wheel offer similar services, none of them ever does it as seamlessly or with as many features. You could, quite probably, cobble together your own version of .Mac from numerous different providers, but the effort wouldn’t really get you anywhere farther, with as many features and any more easily, and the time it would take you to manage it all would circumvent any savings you made. You certainly wouldn’t get the badge of Apple coolness: a mac.com email address.

Just as most people can get by on dial-up instead of broadband, so most people can get by without .Mac. But the Internet really doesn’t come alive until you get that fat pipe of broadband data gushing into your house. Similarly, to make your Mac really sing, grab hold of a .Mac trial account to see what you’ve been missing out on.

Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3 | All 3 Pages