Title: Why does Apple have this compulsion to abuse .Mac? Category: Apple
.mac could be such a great service. A shining beacon of Apple design.
Now don’t get me wrong, .Mac does some nice things. I use .Mac solely for syncing my address book and bookmarks, which is nice because they are backed up hourly.
However, the rest of the service is sorely lacking. Yesterday Apple offered some upgrades, namely the Web Gallery, which allows quick posting from iPhoto and even better, instant updating as you update your gallery in iPhoto.
This is great and all, but the service lacks the polish of an Apple system. For example, when you publish a Web Gallery, you are not given the chance to name the url. So you end up with a url that looks like:
http://gallery.mac.com/sriggins#100014
What? Yuck!
There are no options to customize the gallery. So for example, I like comments on top of the photos. In a Web Gallery, the comments only show on the info panel, which you must click the “i” icon to (in a cool widget-like flipping fashion) see. However this “i” icon is only available in one mode. The very neat carousel mode, which is akin to coverflow, does not offer any information about the photo you are viewing.
Next up, Apple added the ability to point your own domain name to your dot mac content. This is a great move! However, Apple managed to mess this up also. For example, my brother used this feature, which took only two hours to fully transition the DNS, for his site:
http://www.theriggins.com/
However, accessing the site redirects to:
http://www.theriggins.com/iWeb/Home/Welcome%21.html
Yuck!
The backup application is awful, offering no backup management other than using your iDisk to manually delete older backups and thus, well, destroying your backups. Let’s hope they replace backup with a cool Time Machine like system in Leopard.
The mail system is often slow and Apple offers no system to use their mail system with your own domain. Now that would be cool. However their mail is relegated to a backup email system because they offer no domain services.
We’ve come to expect first class from Apple. Dot Mac isn’t there yet. Maybe Apple is listening? I hope so – any amazing web presence from Apple or Apple software is an easy way to appeal to non-Mac users.
iWeb crashes, hosed all my photo pages on my site, and iMovie crashed upon trying to setup thumbnails for the movies in iPhoto.
Sigh.
I’m not recommending iLife 08 to any clients until they resolve the issues.
Agreed 100%.
I did re-open my .mac account a bit ago, but only a) because work paid for it and b) just to sync things between computers easily.
.mac could be so awesome… if it didn’t suck so bad…
And I couldn’t agree more about the awful horrible hideous foul URLs they create. They have the technology, thet have the designers, they have the back-end geeks. There’s no excuse for this microsoftian nonsense.
Maggie
PS – Hi!
yep. apple mail sucks. better adjectives out there? probably… but for now keep it simple. i am so frustrated waiting for my mail to load, waiting for the inbox etc. hate to say it, but entourage….works much faster. iweb is NOT user-friendly. period. iphoto is cool, haven’t had to many beefs with that. i recently purchased ilife 08′ and it has had a new update almost every day since purchasing it! i had to keep ilife 06′ to keep my old projects(which is LAME) but i do like the subtle new changes. just needed to get this off my chest. oh yeah, (off topic) also FURIOUS about buying full seasons of shows on itunes, then having to wait WEEKS sometimes before i can get a new episode, while everyone else can get each episode at any time. i will NEVER buy a full season again!