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Date: Mon, 30 Jun 2008 17:47:03 +0100
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Mine works. 🙂 So long suckers! Note that the servers are still called mac.com servers in the email headers…
Apple’s me.com service does make a lot of sense considering that it’s aimed at iPhone users. Think about that – they just took Mac.com (previously iTools) which was a completely Mac centric subscription service providing email, web galleries and online storage…
Previously everything like Web galleries were only accessible via iPhoto and iWeb and that left a lot of people out in the cold (you know, everyone still on Windows). By doing this they’ve vastly increased the potential for customers for their subscription services perhaps even by an order of magnitude.
It looks kick-ass in the browser (except in Internet Explorer, but then pretty much everything looks awful in IE6) and should provide all sorts of neat improvements. My interest in it really is in how the iDisk part of it ties into the iPhone – it seems like the only parts which really apply to the iPhone are photo galleries and the groupware (email/address book/calendar) integration.
And isn’t that an interesting question. Is there groupware built into this? The only person who can update my mac.com calendar is me. Therefore over the air updates are pretty much worthless to me. This feature only makes sense if you can delegate someone else control over your calendar or address book. That necessary step doesn’t seem to be part of the MobileMe suite however. I’d like to have read and write access to other calendars on a permission basis but there’s no UI visible in Apple’s MobileMe pages.
Now…you could get everyone in an organisation to use the same MobileMe account but this has two issues.
- They can’t use their own MobileMe account. Pretty much a non-starter for Mac diehards.
- There’s no granular permissions. Anyone can see and change everything.
Those of you with good memories will remember this is why Infurious started working on SyncBridge. It wasn’t to make it so that Google Calendar would work with the Mac properly, it was designed to help you share calendars and also allow or deny permissions to those calendars to other people. Apple subsequently changed how they did everything with calendaring which pretty much killed SyncBridge. There was no way SyncBridge could compete directly with Apple. The best solution for workgroups will still be Leopard Server with the tight integration with authentication and use of the CalDAV standard.
It may return, but there’s a few wounds to lick first.