Well they have been talking about "the cloud" ever since I can remember, even back during my IBM days when they were all excited about IBM/370 applications being in the cloud, and everyone was using monochrome terminals with green blinking cursers to find it. Only back then, the cloud was more like an isolated thunderstorm confined to single set of mainframes the size of a small house. Things have not really progressed much, as proven by my recent sign up to Apple’s MobileMe Cloud program.
You probably have noticed, I am frugal with my software budget so I don’t go out and frivolously buy anything, but I do experiment with everything if there is a free trial. MobileMe is no exception, and from the get go I was irritated that I could not just try it out for a few days without putting in my credit card number. That tactic always reminds me of trials of “free” dating services or porn sites, not that I have experiences with any of those:-)
But after my initial irritation was overcome – and sticker shock wore off – 99$ a year! - it just turned into downright anger at Apple’s lame attempt to make everything look like my Mac, but actually work like a PC gone wild. The interface is great looking, with the System preference pane giving one the illusion they were about to experience another fine Apple app, even though it was up in the sky somewhere.
The first problem that I can see for newbies not familiar with the concept of cloud (or even oldbies like myself who knew the concept but as something else) is the lack of any meaningful documentation or online help clicks. There are no real help balloons for the choices for isync or idisk, which is the bulk of the product, but there are some lame video tutorials and lots of marketing hype on the apple website about the two.
So for users needing to understand what’s going on, off you go to log into the Apple support forums (discussions they call them) to sift through that nightmare of complaints and problems. And for idisk, you will not be disappointed in that regard (over 100,000 posts). The forums there are broken down into the major areas of MobileMe, and subdivided by how you are using the product, with your iPhone/ipod touch, with your mac, ur PC (?), or when you are in the cloud (www.me.com). The major components of MobileMe are, in a nutshell:
• Sync (** stars)
• Mail (**** stars)
• Gallery (** starts)
• iDisk (-10 stars)
• Back to My Mac (unknown stars)
• Find My iPhone (***** stars)
• iWeb (**** stars)
I won’t go into all of these in any detail, other then to give them a rating, as this blog post is already at 500 words and I haven’t said anything all that useful yet, but suffice to say that
Mail is better then Google Gmail, as it’s interface is uncluttered like any other apple interface. Perhaps for some mobile travellers, that may be worth the 99$ alone - to avoid the gmail/hotmail/yayhoomail hell!
iDisk is total write off, or rip off, depending on how you want to look at it, but perhaps that’s because Apple is still working on getting the kinks out of the abominably slow performance when using it. Apple posters in the forums describe the performance as “less then glacial.” Personally, I would not trust this app from the number of cryptic error messages received while it’s sending files to and from the cloud, and for the mere fact it took 3 days to transfer 300 megs of my 10 gig trial allotment. At this rate I won’t be able to fill it up before my 60-day trial runs out.
Gallery worked fairly well, but lacks many of the cool features that say Flickr or Picasso does, and in this case the bland uncluttered consistency of the Apple GUI works against Gallery. We wanna have some fun with photos! There is no fun to be found in Gallery, as well as no clear way to share (embed) an individual file in a forum board or a blog post (unless you are using iPhoto and iWeb). Here is a sample, so go see for your self:
http://gallery.me.com/studiosphoenix
Sync is a mixed bag, as it does work, but took over 3 days to get all my stuff synced (bookmarks, calendars, contacts, dashboard widgets, dock items, keychains, mail accounts, mail rules, notes, preferences, etc.). I was testing between an iMac and a MacbookPro that I have configured to be near identical, and I could not test on my iPhone as that’s “in the mail.” But assuming everything works the same with the iPhone, this is the real meat of the MobileMe product. The only problems I noticed so far, besides it’s slow time syncing, is that for things like dashboard widgets and preferences - it flat out does not work - or makes such a mess of it that it’s not worth the long wait.
Back to My Mac I just don’t understand this app as an ARD (apple remote desktop) user. I suppose if you don’t have ARD, then this would make sense, but I dunno. You tell me. If it allowed you to control / screenshare / fileshare between your mac and your iphone, now that would be cool, but I don’t think it does.
Find My iPhone would be even better if would let you know why DHL is taking so long in getting one back from AppleCare. But for any owner of iPhone who plans on leaving it in a coffee café or airport terminal, this is a must have.
iWeb 09 and MobileMe was one of the things that actually interested me the most. Heck, you get web hosting and integration with all your mac-based tools, so the marketing blurbs said. And for the most part that’s true. I created a blog in minutes using one of the nicely designed themes that come with iWeb, and the publish to MobileMe is a no brainer. The tight integration to iPhoto, iWeb, iTunes, and the iTunes Store is pretty amazing, and I am planning on getting my podcasts there soon using this interface. Here is a sample of a site that just took minutes to whap together:
http://web.me.com/studiosphoenix/Blog/index.html
My only criticism here is, again, the poor performance. For web serving, the web.me.com servers are painfully slow when displaying the pages.
So then to end this, I give MobileMe an
overall rating as follows:
*** Stars for features and functionality
* Star for performance and reliability
**** Stars for looking good, except for the reverse case of Gallery, and
** Stars for overall value for the money, although a user may find just one feature worth the entire price, but I did not.
Final Comment: MobileMe actually works well syncing simple things like Contacts, Email, and Calender. The Calender is actually quite elegant online, much nicer to look at then iCal. But considering I used to be able to do this a decade ago with a palm pilot, one would expect these tasks to work flawlessly by now. However, if you throw in Microsoft's Entourage into the mix, you get nothing but trouble. Some things never change.
UPDATE: Four days later and it seems that iDisk is now working, albeit errors on files that seem to be there. Are they there all there and ok? How would one know without checking all the time? But I have to give iDisk another star for at least outwardly completing the task. The concept is very cool, and has potential for road warriors who want to travel light, with just an iPhone let's say. But only when Apple provides an iPhone app! Here is a quote from Geek.com from early July: "... the company remains mum on iDisk app for the iPhone, simply repeating that it’s “coming soon.”
UPDATE ON THE UPDATE: The iPhone iDisk app is out, and on the store for free. I have not tried yet, as my 3Gs is on the slow yak train to Nepal as I write this. But as soon as I get my hands on it, I will try it, but hold out little hope for iDisk, as even on Leopard 10.5.8, it's even slower then the yak train.
