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.Mac Alternatives?
peel asks: "In the endless effort to get organized I'm looking for an alternative to signing up for a .Mac account that allows me to sync iCal and the Address Book between multiple computers (mainly work and home). I found iSyncCal to let me sync calendars, I can also publish them using my personal server setup with WebDav. I haven't found any such utilities for addresses. What I really want is something that works more like .Mac but that I can run at home on my server without paying the monthly .Mac fees. What are some solutions people are using for syncing contact info for people stored in multiple places (Palm, cell, work computer, home computer, laptop)?" There was a similar discussion over on MacInTouch, although the alternatives offered cover more basic needs, the information may still prove useful for those looking for "a cheaper .Mac".
I would sync to a third portable device like a palm or a cell phone and use that to transfer the data.
"Six Great Tips for Homemade Dot Mac Servers"
I don't want to trust all my personal data to a unknown third party. .Mac is not a known party... a service that Apple pays someone to do for them.
I agree with the translation above...there's no reason to go and gerryrig a pseudo-.Mac when this one works and is integrated already. You will end up spending more than $99/year between labor, etc.
How do you "sync iCal and the Address Book between multiple computers" by installing Linux?
Probably by means of typing some cryptic commands. This seems to be an universal answer for all questions beginning with "how to" and ending with "Linux".
You really need to look at what this is worth, if you have to maintain a server and spend time setting it up, and if it doesn't work 100% is that worth it?
.Mac offers. Its not that much to pay to get rid of headaches. I only use mine for addresses, iSync, and iPhoto uploads. But for me, its worth it. But what do i know, i paid the $50 deal when it came out, heheh.
How much money do you make per hour at your current job, i always put it that way to see if something is worth the time. Of course if its a fun hack to do, then its priceless right?
In the end you may see that $99 (sometimes cheaper) is worth what
It seems there is an opportunity for a third party to establish a competitor to .Mac
Maybe 80% of the features at 70% of the price? $69 a year, or $5.99 a month, for an email, synching, calendaring, etc?
GPL Deconstructed
I get what I consider to be an incredible amount of value from .mac subscription. I get antivirus, some free games, a great webmail and email service, and things keep getting added.
What exactly do you expect for USD$100 per year, and what makes alternative more efficient for you?
Ross Winn "not just another ugly face..."
Most of the fancy devices use syncML which is the XML schema for transfering all your contacts and addressbook information. on sourceforge there is a program called Sync4J which is a java program you can connect to from your devices over the web and transfer/sync all your data http://sourceforge.net/projects/sync4j/
Setup & maintain IMAP mail
Setup & maintain sync to iCal
Setup & maintain sync to address book
Setup & maintain 100mb DAV
Setup & maintain CD/DVD/on-line integrated backup
Setup & maintain template driven web hosting
Setup & maintain iPhoto image publishing
Setup & maintain iCards
Substitute anti-virus software
Substitute access to "members only" support
.Mac account is $99.year, if you spend ONE HOUR doing each of the above each year, and your time were worth $10/hr you would LOOSE $1 a year!!! (Presuming no hardware or software costs, just time.)
Since a
I COULD change my own oil, but to me, it isn't worth $20 every 3,000 miles to do it.
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
How much time per month are you going to spend maintaining your own server? What's it going to cost in terms of bandwidth? What will the electricity cost you? If you value your time at all, get .mac, because it works out to only $8.33 per month, and you're quite likely to spend more than an hour per month working on your sever, and quite likely won't have the reliability of the real .mac, which also backs up your data to backup servers nightly.
.mac server, you don't pay a dime, and at most, you lose one day's data, and experience no or very little downtime.
For example, look at the scenario of what if a hard drive dies. If it dies in your server, you go out and spend $100 on a new hard drive, and possibly lose months of information, and may have days of downtime while you reconfigure everything. If it dies in a
Karma: Ran over your dogma.
As a non-mac owner, I'd love to have access to a .MAC-like service which works for non-Mac users.
.MAC services will work with any computer, as long as you have an iCal, LDAP & IMAP client. But that is probalby only 50% of the services.
Seems that many of the
On a local box at my house, I've considered setting up Apache+WebDAV, IMAP, LDAP & iCal servers; all available via a password-protected/SSL website, or via their normal protocol (with encryption, if possible).
But the devil is the integration of these services. I'm not sure where to start.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
The proprietary part of .Mac really is just a virtual device that iSync connects to over WebDAV (I think it is the encryption/authentication that closes the interface, not really a new protocol). The problem is, as I said, that it is proprietary and thus there is no open way to simply create a service on your own computer that iSync can connect to and stores the same information as .Mac.
.Mac and created a dummy server. The problem was that it was far to complicated and generally not a feasible solition.
I do remember seeing one person that had sniffed the communications to
The solution would be to create a plug-in to iSync that allowed the use of a different server. Imagine a virtual bluetooth device that was really a connection to remote server. It might also be possible to plug more directly into iSynch. I am aware that it is based on SynchML, it strikes me that this standards based approach makes virtual device solution possible.
The suggestion to use a PDA or phone is good, but some of us don't have these toys. I really just want to synch multiple computers.
I think it's kinda funny how all these comments center around the fact that .mac 'is only 8 dollars a month'.
I'm not interested in saving money (I'd just get an el cheapo x86 machine instead of a Mac to really save money... :p as if), I'm interested in really sharing my information between my different machines.
Just look at my setup: at home I've got a G3 powerMac and an Ibook, at work it's a powermac G4 and the aforementioned iBook. I'm just looking at an easy (or maybe better 'straightforward') way to share Jaguar's address book and calendar between the three.
I could do this via .Mac, but only if I have an internet connection. Now, having an internet connection isn't a problem in itself (i've got cable at home and dsl at work), the stupid thing about this imho is that, since the machines are networked anyway (through ethernet, in a powermac to ibook type of deal both at work and at home), why do I even need to go via .Mac? I just want to be able to sync locally.
The current workaround I've got is using my T68i bluetooth phone. It works pretty well, but I think it's a shame I have to use this workaround...
IMHO, apple should support local sync without .Mac.
So for some, it might not be about money.
Cheers.
If I recall correctly, the first time I performed a sync between my computer and my T68i, I got a dialog box asking me what to do:
1. merge the data on both computer and phone (with an option not to copy addressess without a telephone number to my phone)
2. Overwrite the phone with the computer data
3. overwrite the computer with the phone's data
On subsequent synchs, I get asked for each item whether or not to add it to either the computer or the phone, modify the data or, if applicable, delete the data. It works pretty well.
However, I think your problem stems from the fact that you're using a Palm device with iSync. I don't own a Palm myself (thus I lack any hands-on experience), but I thought using isync with your Palm involved using a Palm desktop conduit to get the thing to work (correct me if I'm wrong)? Maybe the whole Palm desktop to isync routine is still incomplete?
Either way, to try and solve your problem: in isync: can you click on the Palm icon, and do you get a dialog box/window with options? I get that with my T68i, and there i get the option to choose whether the computer or the phone takes precedence when synching (thus effectively telling the phone data to overwrite the computer's data, if i choose so). Maybe that functionality just isn't there yet for Palm devices (which would be a shame)?
I'm not sure either, but it'll most likely be in your user folder somewhere (duh ;) ). Either way, you can manually save and or export both your calendars and your contacts (as separate vcards) to use for backup, and even to use bluetooth file exchange to get them on the Palm. Maybe worth a try?
The abovementioned method (exporting to vcards) works on a P800. To be fair, on ease of use wrt to this whole isync stuff, my T68i blows the P800 out of the water... for now. Support for it indeed can't come soon enough.
Cheers
I've got .mac. It works fine for lots of stuff, but trying to do a backup over DSL is effectively impossible. And for a lot of corporate stuff, it makes more sense to do things inside the subnet rather than have them on a server out in the world.
.mac services into Mac OS X Server. It'd be a nice value add for workgroups, while still giving stand-alone consumers a reason to pay the big bugs.
Personlly, I think they should add local
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Think of it as a read-only PDA, with massive storage, that happens to play excellent sound quality music. It's also easy to sync across multiple machines.
We all live in a state of ambitious poverty. -- Decimus Junius Juvenalis
CVS is a system specifically designed to (among many other things) keep text files in sync across multiple machines. It can handle binary files also, but not particularly well. If you have a system in which you can set up a CVS server (all the tools are built into Mac OS X + Development Tools) I recommend experimenting with that.
The iCal calendar files are text files that could be synchronized. Note that I have *not* tested how well this would actually work with iCal.
The Apple Address Book application does not seem to store its address books as text files, so CVS is less likely to work well with it. But Eudora seems to store its address books as text files.
cvshome.org
I have considered doing this myself, as my first annual .Mac membership nears renewal time.