Apple has finally released the iPhone iDisk application for the iPhone! Bottom line is that you can browse your iDisk from your iPhone. You can view PDFs, Office and iWork docs.
Pros:
Cons:
All together, if you’ve got MobileMe and use the iDisk, this is a no-brainer to download.
Argh! Haven’t been this frustrated in a very long time…
The last 24 hours:
– I can’t sync my calendar items and address/phone numbers between my computers, MobileMe and iPod Touch.
– My main Windows machine won’t reboot, keeps resetting. Think the hard drive went.
– Accessing/syncing to my AppleTV is goofed up (that’s minor, unrelated and hacked so not an Apple issue)
– My cell phone keeps saying international roaming when I’m at home (it’s Sprint). I’m not that close to the border of Canada/Michigan.
I’ve spend more time with tech support the last 24 hours than the last 24 months. I’ve been escalated multiple times at Apple and not getting any closer. And after all the changes at my end I’m leaning towards it’s going to be a problem at their end so then I’ll have to get everything set back the way I want (a few hours ago, I’d have said 100% sure at their end, but not so sure now). They say this is a new problem and since we’re pushing 4 hours today I’m hoping it’s a unique problem (for their sake).
And I’ve wasted another sunny day :(
Posted in me + myself + i
Tagged Apple, AppleTV, frusration, iPod Touch, iTouch, Michigan, MobileMe, syncing, tech support, technology, windows
So I’ve never been happy with most digital calendars. I’ve used them for years, but never been completely satisfied with them, they’re just always missing a few things. Usually I use what’s on my Palm Pilot, a slightly modified version of their calendar with a week view. Sadly, this is virtually the same datebook they’ve had for years and never had a decent weekly view (handspring had a version for a while) so you have to add a program on to do this. FYI, if you don’t have a Mac or don’t use a calendar this post might get pretty boring (even if you do it’s probably not the most exciting) but if you are on a Mac and use Google Calendar and/or a Palm it might be useful.
I don’t like more of the desktop software that I’ve tried. If I find something I really like, generally the one thing that puts me off is the view of the days (either one day or a week) they generally show me a 8 or 12 hour block, this is useless to me when I have something outside that block of time, when I glance a the week view, I can’t see appointments that I have in the evening (and those are probably the fun things!). I have so few things on my calendar, I’m not booked for something different every 15 minutes, it’s easy enough to squish things together. It’s computer software, they should be able to do it.
What I’m currently doing is syncing iCal with Google Calendar. It’s pretty quick and has worked well with all the testing I’ve done today (I’ll tell you how at the end).
Google’s calendar shows me about 12 hours so I have to scroll to see if I have anything going on. iCal for the Macintosh gives me a nice 24 hour view, but they could easily compress the 1 am-6am section to something even smaller to give the rest more space (I’ve got nothing going on all week at those times) and even the on-line version does shows you all 24 hours. Another minus is that iCal doesn’t have a way to set a default calendar, I want it to chose the one I’m syncing with Google, I can sort of cheat for that but I see that not sticking all the time, but a option to set a default seems simple enough.
iCal and Google lets you subscribe to other calendars; kind of like a live feed that it’s updating to your calendar. When on-line it generally seems easier to add other items to my Google calendar (like when a site lists their upcoming events). While iCal doesn’t make it easy to copy from one category to another (it’s main category to my Google category specifically).
My end result is getting the Google Calendar synced with iCal and then syncing iCal with my Palm, thus having my appointments everywhere (preferably on the Palm and on the Laptop). And then I can use the desktop application for entering info.
If I just sync in iCal I guess they’d be on the web (in MobileMe), but I’d rather have them in Google Calendar. I can do more with Google while I’m on-line and easily add others events to it and subscribe to other calendars but with iCal I can’t see my subscribed calendars in the MobileMe web interface. I could just always use Google Calendar all the time, but not if I’m off-line, I guess that’s why I need iCal. If I got an iPhone this would be less of an issue, I’d just sync iCal with an iPhone and be done with it. Hmm…
FYI to get Google Calendars to talk to iCal I used Calabortion (from Google). I don’t know if you actually need it (I think you can type everything in by hand) but it’s a tiny application that makes configuring a breeze (just need your Google address and password). It’ll even add your subscriptions (go to preferences) but since it’s read-only it’ll yell at you when you sync.
So in addition to the 30 Day MobileMe credit from a month ago, they are giving another 60 days of free MobileMe credit.
My problems have not been too bad during this transition (I don’t use their mail) so I’m getting 90 days total!! Plus they’ve doubled my space (back during the transition) which makes it 20 times the storage what it was a year ago.
While a lot of people seem to complain about the .Mac / MobileMe service I’ve always had pretty good success. The biggest thing I use it for is iDisk so that all my laptop files get automagically backed up to the server, I can then access those same files from the web and have the get mirrored to one of my other Macs. It does the same for the my bookmarks and mail settings (and it’ll do the same for contacts and calendar, but I haven’t been using my mac for that). They are removing the web access to the bookmarks, I only occasionally used this, but I don’t understand why they took this away (it was an already written feature so why remove it); I’m especially annoyed since I renewed for a year and then they took the feature away.
For the same cost they just increased storage from 10 GB to 20GB so that’s a bonus. They’re still more expensive than most storage on-line but the connivence is what makes it worth it. It’s also slow if you just decide to sync up gigs and gigs of data, but it’ll get there eventually and it resumes seamlessly (usually) the next time I connect.
I did have some MobileMe problems during the transition and the iPhone 2.0 launch (I don’t have an iPhone) but they all resolved themselves. As a result for those problems and the ones others had they are offering a free MobileMe MobileMe30-day credit extension to your account (you were a .Mac member whose account was active as of July 9, 2008 or you are a new MobileMe member who created your account on or before July 15, 2008 at 7:00 PM PDT).
I’ve mentioned Apple’s .Mac service before and I really like it. Apple has expanded their .Mac on-line backup/syncing to 10GB (from 1 GB). Apple has always been behind the curve in how much storage space for the cost ($99 a year) but they’ve made up for it. With the increased storage it really makes the family plan more practical and affordable too.
If you have a Macintosh, you’ll love this (especially if you have a laptop or more than one Mac). It’s a remote backup / synchronization / file sharing / training / web publishing software service rolled all-in-one! The biggest feature to me is that if you use your iDisk for all your documents, the next time you connect to the internet it seamlessly synchronizes this document to the server & all your other Macs and you can access the files from any web browser on any platform (it also keeps a copy of all your documents on your hard drive so you can see them if you aren’t on-line). It also synchronizes your bookmarks, e-mail, calendar, contacts data/settings across all your Macs. So if I drop my laptop (or have it stolen), I don’t lose any of my data (as long I’ve been on the internet recently).
With the extra storage I can save all my purchased iTunes to to my .Mac Music folder and it’ll be on all my computers and I don’t need to make a copy until I have a DVD’s worth of music. The same goes for my photos, I’m always worried about losing my irreplaceable photos.
For regular documents, you’ll never notice that it’s biggest downside, it’s slow. But if you drag a bunch of huge files in there it’ll take a while, but since it’s seamless you’ll probably never notice, if it doesn’t have enough time, it’ll just continue the next time you’re on the ‘net! Continue reading
I just noticed that .Mac expanded their storage from 250MB to 1GB (as of August 2007 it’s now 10GB!) which makes it even better! If you have a Macintosh, you’ll love this (especially if you have a laptop or more than one Mac). It’s a remote backup / synchronization / virus checking / file sharing / training / web publishing software service rolled all-in-one! I was going to post an update and I realized I’ve never posted about it before (I’d swear I had, I can’t believe I hadn’t). Here’s a few details:
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