I guess the idea is the Ubuntu install just works, and you can put the data back onto your Windows disk..?
Not if it's NTFS. Remember, Linux cannot reliably (that is, without f**king everything up) write to NTFS partitions. It can read them, and even resize them without much trouble, but writing data to files is pretty much a no-go, and the partitions will be mounted read-only for that very reason.
Linux falls flat on its face with backwards compatibility if you look at commercial, closed software. In an ideal world, everything would be open source enough that you could recompile it and have no problems. But in our non-ideal world, you've got stuff like Loki games and 3-5 year old commercial apps that simply will not run because of binary compatibility issues, unmaintained libraries, etc.
Perhaps someone should make an emulation layer a la Mac OS Classic? Or a la Wine? Then we could run our old Linux apps with LINE - Line Is Not an Emulator.:)
Where the hell do they get this figure? What "content" are they talking about? Certainly not web content in general. If anything is a contender for "roughly 90%" of the content on the web, it's porn. Even 90% of Slashdot's content isn't about patents, and it's a big deal on here... Sheesh.
the perceptible increase in launch time and page loading/rendering is a major improvement
If you like that "improvement," maybe you should upgrade your Linux system to Windows. You'll get even more increased launch times, especially since you will have to re-launch the computer multiple times a day.:)
For what it's worth, there's a great utility called SideTrack for OS X that adds a lot of great functionality to the trackpad. I use it on my G3 iBook (great for knocking around in my backpack when I go to campus). You can...
Use the edges of the trackpad as scroll wheels
Add "click corners" that can act as 2nd, 3rd, etc. mouse buttons
Set trackpad taps be the left or right mouse button, and set the actual trackpad button to the opposite
Have corner taps execute keystrokes (like key combos to change tabs in Firefox or Safari) globally or for specific apps, etc.
Sure, some laptops come with this built-in to the driver, but that's beside the point. SideTrack is very slick, and well worth the $15 registration... It certainly beats paying well over $15 for a separate mouse you'd have to lug around.
Keyboard shortcuts, look, general menu structure, colours, style, etc etc. And then we get into the even more important consistency, which is functional consistency. Just about every app that needs a text editor uses the same one, so they all behave the same. The same spell checking engine is used almost everywhere, and the password manager saves passwords for every application that has a need to store them. No other operating system is anywhere close to that consistent. Not OS X, not Windows, nothing.
I'd like to offer a rebuttal to that. Mac OS has always been about the general interface and styling being consistent across apps, and this is still true with OS X. Some rogue apps (looking at you, Microsoft) sometimes use retarded, non-standard shortcuts, but even in Microsoft's case this is not as bad as the majority of Windows or Linux apps I've encountered. Toolbars, buttons, dialogs, menus, and the majority of keyboard shortcuts work the same across all OS X apps. The only common exceptions are poorly-written little utilities, which I'm sure even KDE is susceptible to.
As for the spell check engine, password management, etc. your assertion that OS X does not do that is just downright false. The standard text widgets support the system-wide spell checker, and any app can easily take advantage of the system Address Book, Keychain database for passwords, Spotlight for searching, etc. Any app worth using will support all of these things if they are at all applicable to the program.
So, yes, I resent the "not anywhere close" remark. Windows is a lost cause, but I would say that OS X is at least on par, if not far beyond in some areas (e.g. the ability to AppleScript any virtually application, even if it was not coded with that in mind... or the combination of Expose with drag-and-drop wizardry to make it easy to move chunks of data around).
however you can get quite a deal on a Rolex and other brand name items...
It's +5 Funny, but true. I was just in Beijing in July, and it is crazy how much knockoff stuff you can buy. There's an indoor market called Ya Show (Ya Xiao), it is 6 stories I believe. One floor is dedicated to nothing but Nike, Gucci, etc. brands that may or may not be legit. Another floor is dedicated to electronics like iPod nano ripoffs (rather nice ones, actually) and GBA cartridges loaded with NES and SNES roms.
My last day, I decided to haggle with a street vendor and buy a "genuine Rolex." I ended up buying two for $4 USD, and they are actually fairly nice. Sure, the seconds hand "ticks" (which a real Rolex doesn't), but the watch looks pretty decent overall. If you don't look really close, it rivals my nice $180 watch that I bought in Denmark.
The result is that you get poor applications, that are slow, very insecure, do things without the user's control and it's a Mozilla/IE lockin.
Right, because it's so much slower for me to middle-click "Writely" in my favorites bar and have it pop up in a new tab, than to fire up the gargantuan Microsoft Word (or in my case at home, iWork Pages).
Oh and because there's absolutely NO value added by having my data accessible and editable from anywhere, using any modern browser. And there's clearly no worth in my information being easily exchanged between web services, reaching a level of integration that most desktop systems can't easily manage (except for limited things like KDE integration, Address Book/iPhoto/iTunes data in OS X, etc). And obviously the features for live collaboration on documents/spreadsheets, group managing of photos and other data, etc. are quite useless.
If that's "Web -1.0" then for me, as a highly mobile user with great respect for ease of access to my data, the step "backwards" is well worth it. You can keep your static web and continue toting.doc files around on USB drives.
I think that websites like IGN... actually have a pretty good way of displaying ads
I don't know if you've been to IGN lately, but the last time I was on there reading articles, they had placed "IntelliTXT" ads on all their pages. Basically, IntelliTXT seeds links over random words in the body. It tries to entice you to mouse over them. If your mouse comes anywhere near the links, BAM - a big yellow ad pops up in some position on the page. Sometimes it vanishes again when you move your mouse, only to appear again randomly. Extremely annoying, especially if you have your pointer sitting idle in the browser window, and you're scrolling with the keyboard... That alone can cause the cursor to trigger these stupid ads, right over the body text you're trying to read.
However, there is good news for my fellow Firefoxians. If you're using Adblock (and why wouldn't you be?), just add *.intellitxt.com/* to your block list. IntelliTXT loads through tags, which are easily filtered by Adblock.:)
account frozen and terminated with no explanation and no possibility for appeal
And that's worse than what PayPal does to many people... how? PayPal has done much worse, with actual money for sales and services. Real money that is in their account, not just the couple of bucks they supposedly "earned" through advertising.
They're still "integrating" into Google's systems, apparently. They bumped up the number of invites users can send to new people for collaborating, though, so I think things are ramping up to go public again somewhat soon.
As far as a similar service, I recommend Zoho Writer. It's very similar to Writely, and rather nice to use. Development on it seems rather slow, though, and there are still a few key features missing (for me, the deal breaker is the lack of double-spacing on documents - crucial for a college student). Still, Zoho does a lot of things right and it has good features for blogging and the like.
Accessibility from anywhere, and the possibilities of collaboration - those are the key draws to something like this. I'm a university student, and I organize pretty much all of my work online using Backpack, and write most of my short papers with Writely. There's computers all over campus, and at work, so no matter where I am, I have my projects with me. Plus both of those sites allow for collaboration with people when I need it.
Sure, I could carry stuff around on a USB drive (and for critical things where I can't rely on there being net access, I do so). Then you've got the issue of whether a given program is installed, or whether I'm allowed to use the drive (some public terminals on campus do not allow you to use USB drives, since they're strictly for checking e-mail and the like).
For 'mobile' people, having your data online and manageable on there is very attractive. With the exception of very elaborate work like research papers and such, pretty much everything I do for my classes is kept online somewhere.
Hate to break it to you, but it's pretty much impossible to sell back printed books already. Between the departments and the publishers, they do a good job of making the books very difficult to sell back (either by obsoleting them rapidly, or by making the books degrade rapidly through even casual use, destroying their value). Even selling my books online only gets rid of around 25% of the books I've bought, and always at a huge loss.
For example, I bought an art history text book for $120(!). This was a brand new book, and its first semester in use at my school. Partway through that semester, the department decided they did not want to use the book anymore. Not only did we not use the book for anything in class or for homework, but nobody wanted to buy it - the university bookstore would of course not take it, and nobody else seemed to want it. I finally sold the book 3 years later, at like-new condition, on Half.com for a whopping $10!
It's only getting worse, as well. Publishers often make the textbooks incredibly flimsy, especially for classes with huge enrollment stats (read: 101 level electives in science and the like). My geology textbook, although uncharacteristically well-written and enjoyable to read, is very poorly constructed. The glossy pages get creased, folded, and torn with just the slightest page-flip, and the binding is already falling apart after light home use (I don't take it to campus). Very scary how much damage has been done to my book, considering how I go out of my way to treat all my books with care.
It's pretty obvious that many of these books are purposely designed to last barely the 16 weeks of one semester, to ensure that they are less appealing for second-hand sales.
All in all, a very disgusting racket. The university and the publishers work together to screw students at every turn. No surprises here, but things are definitely not getting any better...
Hey, maybe if we're lucky, Google will replace all of.Mac, for free!
Believe me, they already have...
Mail - Gmail is far, far superior to.Mac's meager webmail client..Mac doesn't support any kind of filtering, spam blocking, etc. It is very basic even by the webmail standards of 1998. Gmail wins with labels, filters, support for sending from non-gmail.com addresses, etc.
HomePage -.Mac's home page feature has always been very basic, very buggy, and not at all flexible. Google Pages has better templates, it allows you to use custom HTML, web pages don't have cryptic filenames, etc.
Calendar - Again,.Mac loses big time here. iCal publishing is very limited. It's read-only, publishing multiple calendars causes them to lose their color-coding, a lot of event data (e.g. the "location" field, notes, and so on) isn't visible via the web, yadda yadda. Also very buggy, with events "doubling up" with multiple synchronizations, sometimes. Google Calendar is far better in every way.
About the only thing Google doesn't do very elegantly is address book data. Yes, you can add it in Gmail, but it doesn't yet integrate with anything else. I'd like if I could have Google Calendar automatically propagate with birthday information from my Gmail contacts... And for that matter, if it allowed you to pick people from your contacts when you "Add Guest" for a calendar event. Right now, it's just an empty text book.
By comparison,.Mac's address book feature is weak. It only supports certain fields, and a lot of special data (birthdays, notes, additional phone numbers, e-mails, etc.) that are extremely useful on the go... Well, the info synchronizes, but you just can't view it on the web. It's damn useless for me if I can't look up a friend's birthday, or check in the notes to find out what kind of blueberry muffin basket my boss likes most when I want that promotion...
C'mon, Google. Get that contacts integration going and my 99% undying love will be 110%. Pleeeeeease?
For what it's worth, originally the scheme DID use authentication through your Google account. It was switched to the "temporary pass" system when people brought up the issue of "do you trust Zooomr with your e-mail login?" The switch is covered in Zooomr's Blog.
Yes, that would be a stupid move, but a lot of users have gotten used to "Yes, load the insecure website,"; "Yes, accept the third party content"; etc.
More justification for the approach that Apple uses - have verbs on the buttons, instead of generic crap like "ok" and "yes". If the button actually said "Save" or "Save Password" it might give the user some pause. It's also generally considered that these kinds of dialogs are easier to follow. As soon as they pop up, you have some idea of what will happen when you click on a button, even without reading the message.
They could either have password saving turned off by default, or have a sane dialog along these lines to make it clear that this is something different. They could have clearly marked verb push buttons, and maybe even go so far that there is no default for the enter key - you'd have to explicitly click the button to enable it, or explicitly use the shortcut for the button.
Yep, shoulda used that preview button. Cursed HTML formatting mode... Here we go:
I've been using.Mac for the last 6 months, and while it has a lot of great features, they badly need to be updated and refined. For example, your Address Book data is accessible through the.Mac web site, but it is very limited - you're restricted to certain data fields, and even though data such as birthdays, anniversaries, notes, etc. is synchronized to the server, it is not viewable or editable via the web. This seriously limits the usefulness of this feature for me - my need to look up someone's birthday or other info tends to come up more often than the need to say, find their phone number (which is usually in my cell phone).
Similarly, the Calendar publishing is very basic. It's read-only, the "location" and "notes" data is not accessible, and if you publish multiple calendars as one, they lose their color coding (e.g. work calendar vs. birthday calendar).
I like.Mac, and they've made some nice additions and refinements in the last year or so... But the ability to access my address book and calendar, all nicely sync'd with my Mac, was a key part of my decision to subscribe. The fact that these features are basically untouched from whatever implementation Apple had 3 or 4 years ago is disappointing and very limiting.
I've been seriously debating whether to continue my subscription when it comes time. In fact, if it wasn't for the new iLife suite, I would definitely have let the subscription lapse. iWeb looks promising though, and I may yet find other excuses to keep my.Mac subscription...
I've been using.Mac for the last 6 months, and while it has a lot of great features, they badly need to be updated and refined. For example, your Address Book data is accessible through the.Mac web site, but it is very limited - you're restricted to certain data fields, and even though data such as birthdays, anniversaries, notes, etc. is synchronized to the server, it is not viewable or editable via the web. This seriously limits the usefulness of this feature for me - my need to look up someone's birthday or other info tends to come up more often than the need to say, find their phone number (which is usually in my cell phone).
Similarly, the Calendar publishing is very basic. It's read-only, the "location" and "notes" data is not accessible, and if you publish multiple calendars as one, they lose their color coding (e.g. work calendar vs. birthday calendar).
I like.Mac, and they've made some nice additions and refinements in the last year or so... But the ability to access my address book and calendar, all nicely sync'd with my Mac, was a key part of my decision to subscribe. The fact that these features are basically untouched from whatever implementation Apple had 3 or 4 years ago is disappointing and very limiting.
I've been seriously debating whether to continue my subscription when it comes time. In fact, if it wasn't for the new iLife suite, I would definitely have let the subscription lapse. iWeb looks promising though, and I may yet find other excuses to keep my.Mac subscription...
Re:PLEASE, enough with the words!
on
The Podjacker Threat
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I think it's rather amusing to observe these people thinking that they've invented a new medium when it's really just a minor variation on plain old web browsing.
Yeah, just like the web was just a minor variation on plain old FTP. Gee, yeah, all they've done is make an existing form of information phenomenally accessible.
Slashdot Mirror
Bah, you forgot to put something in about iPods having less disk space than a Nomad. Lame.
I guess the idea is the Ubuntu install just works, and you can put the data back onto your Windows disk..?
Not if it's NTFS. Remember, Linux cannot reliably (that is, without f**king everything up) write to NTFS partitions. It can read them, and even resize them without much trouble, but writing data to files is pretty much a no-go, and the partitions will be mounted read-only for that very reason.
Linux falls flat on its face with backwards compatibility if you look at commercial, closed software. In an ideal world, everything would be open source enough that you could recompile it and have no problems. But in our non-ideal world, you've got stuff like Loki games and 3-5 year old commercial apps that simply will not run because of binary compatibility issues, unmaintained libraries, etc.
:)
Perhaps someone should make an emulation layer a la Mac OS Classic? Or a la Wine? Then we could run our old Linux apps with LINE - Line Is Not an Emulator.
Where the hell do they get this figure? What "content" are they talking about? Certainly not web content in general. If anything is a contender for "roughly 90%" of the content on the web, it's porn. Even 90% of Slashdot's content isn't about patents, and it's a big deal on here... Sheesh.
the perceptible increase in launch time and page loading/rendering is a major improvement
If you like that "improvement," maybe you should upgrade your Linux system to Windows. You'll get even more increased launch times, especially since you will have to re-launch the computer multiple times a day. :)
- Use the edges of the trackpad as scroll wheels
- Add "click corners" that can act as 2nd, 3rd, etc. mouse buttons
- Set trackpad taps be the left or right mouse button, and set the actual trackpad button to the opposite
- Have corner taps execute keystrokes (like key combos to change tabs in Firefox or Safari) globally or for specific apps, etc.
Sure, some laptops come with this built-in to the driver, but that's beside the point. SideTrack is very slick, and well worth the $15 registration... It certainly beats paying well over $15 for a separate mouse you'd have to lug around.Keyboard shortcuts, look, general menu structure, colours, style, etc etc. And then we get into the even more important consistency, which is functional consistency. Just about every app that needs a text editor uses the same one, so they all behave the same. The same spell checking engine is used almost everywhere, and the password manager saves passwords for every application that has a need to store them. No other operating system is anywhere close to that consistent. Not OS X, not Windows, nothing.
I'd like to offer a rebuttal to that. Mac OS has always been about the general interface and styling being consistent across apps, and this is still true with OS X. Some rogue apps (looking at you, Microsoft) sometimes use retarded, non-standard shortcuts, but even in Microsoft's case this is not as bad as the majority of Windows or Linux apps I've encountered. Toolbars, buttons, dialogs, menus, and the majority of keyboard shortcuts work the same across all OS X apps. The only common exceptions are poorly-written little utilities, which I'm sure even KDE is susceptible to.
As for the spell check engine, password management, etc. your assertion that OS X does not do that is just downright false. The standard text widgets support the system-wide spell checker, and any app can easily take advantage of the system Address Book, Keychain database for passwords, Spotlight for searching, etc. Any app worth using will support all of these things if they are at all applicable to the program.
So, yes, I resent the "not anywhere close" remark. Windows is a lost cause, but I would say that OS X is at least on par, if not far beyond in some areas (e.g. the ability to AppleScript any virtually application, even if it was not coded with that in mind... or the combination of Expose with drag-and-drop wizardry to make it easy to move chunks of data around).
however you can get quite a deal on a Rolex and other brand name items...
It's +5 Funny, but true. I was just in Beijing in July, and it is crazy how much knockoff stuff you can buy. There's an indoor market called Ya Show (Ya Xiao), it is 6 stories I believe. One floor is dedicated to nothing but Nike, Gucci, etc. brands that may or may not be legit. Another floor is dedicated to electronics like iPod nano ripoffs (rather nice ones, actually) and GBA cartridges loaded with NES and SNES roms.
My last day, I decided to haggle with a street vendor and buy a "genuine Rolex." I ended up buying two for $4 USD, and they are actually fairly nice. Sure, the seconds hand "ticks" (which a real Rolex doesn't), but the watch looks pretty decent overall. If you don't look really close, it rivals my nice $180 watch that I bought in Denmark.
The result is that you get poor applications, that are slow, very insecure, do things without the user's control and it's a Mozilla/IE lockin.
Right, because it's so much slower for me to middle-click "Writely" in my favorites bar and have it pop up in a new tab, than to fire up the gargantuan Microsoft Word (or in my case at home, iWork Pages).
Oh and because there's absolutely NO value added by having my data accessible and editable from anywhere, using any modern browser. And there's clearly no worth in my information being easily exchanged between web services, reaching a level of integration that most desktop systems can't easily manage (except for limited things like KDE integration, Address Book/iPhoto/iTunes data in OS X, etc). And obviously the features for live collaboration on documents/spreadsheets, group managing of photos and other data, etc. are quite useless.
If that's "Web -1.0" then for me, as a highly mobile user with great respect for ease of access to my data, the step "backwards" is well worth it. You can keep your static web and continue toting .doc files around on USB drives.
I now have in my bookmarks roughly 140 news, information, commentary and blog sites, all of which I review at least once a day
Congratulations! You officially have no life! :)
Clarification: IntelliTXT loads through SCRIPT tags, which are easily filtered. (Curse that preview button...)
I think that websites like IGN... actually have a pretty good way of displaying ads
I don't know if you've been to IGN lately, but the last time I was on there reading articles, they had placed "IntelliTXT" ads on all their pages. Basically, IntelliTXT seeds links over random words in the body. It tries to entice you to mouse over them. If your mouse comes anywhere near the links, BAM - a big yellow ad pops up in some position on the page. Sometimes it vanishes again when you move your mouse, only to appear again randomly. Extremely annoying, especially if you have your pointer sitting idle in the browser window, and you're scrolling with the keyboard... That alone can cause the cursor to trigger these stupid ads, right over the body text you're trying to read.
However, there is good news for my fellow Firefoxians. If you're using Adblock (and why wouldn't you be?), just add *.intellitxt.com/* to your block list. IntelliTXT loads through tags, which are easily filtered by Adblock. :)
account frozen and terminated with no explanation and no possibility for appeal
And that's worse than what PayPal does to many people... how? PayPal has done much worse, with actual money for sales and services. Real money that is in their account, not just the couple of bucks they supposedly "earned" through advertising.
Since it has "Apple" in the subject somewhere.
As far as a similar service, I recommend Zoho Writer. It's very similar to Writely, and rather nice to use. Development on it seems rather slow, though, and there are still a few key features missing (for me, the deal breaker is the lack of double-spacing on documents - crucial for a college student). Still, Zoho does a lot of things right and it has good features for blogging and the like.
Sure, I could carry stuff around on a USB drive (and for critical things where I can't rely on there being net access, I do so). Then you've got the issue of whether a given program is installed, or whether I'm allowed to use the drive (some public terminals on campus do not allow you to use USB drives, since they're strictly for checking e-mail and the like).
For 'mobile' people, having your data online and manageable on there is very attractive. With the exception of very elaborate work like research papers and such, pretty much everything I do for my classes is kept online somewhere.
Hate to break it to you, but it's pretty much impossible to sell back printed books already. Between the departments and the publishers, they do a good job of making the books very difficult to sell back (either by obsoleting them rapidly, or by making the books degrade rapidly through even casual use, destroying their value). Even selling my books online only gets rid of around 25% of the books I've bought, and always at a huge loss.
For example, I bought an art history text book for $120(!). This was a brand new book, and its first semester in use at my school. Partway through that semester, the department decided they did not want to use the book anymore. Not only did we not use the book for anything in class or for homework, but nobody wanted to buy it - the university bookstore would of course not take it, and nobody else seemed to want it. I finally sold the book 3 years later, at like-new condition, on Half.com for a whopping $10!
It's only getting worse, as well. Publishers often make the textbooks incredibly flimsy, especially for classes with huge enrollment stats (read: 101 level electives in science and the like). My geology textbook, although uncharacteristically well-written and enjoyable to read, is very poorly constructed. The glossy pages get creased, folded, and torn with just the slightest page-flip, and the binding is already falling apart after light home use (I don't take it to campus). Very scary how much damage has been done to my book, considering how I go out of my way to treat all my books with care.
It's pretty obvious that many of these books are purposely designed to last barely the 16 weeks of one semester, to ensure that they are less appealing for second-hand sales.
All in all, a very disgusting racket. The university and the publishers work together to screw students at every turn. No surprises here, but things are definitely not getting any better...
Ugh... Right now, it's just an empty text book.
This is what 7 years of college and studying will do to you. I meant text box . Sigh.
Hey, maybe if we're lucky, Google will replace all of .Mac, for free!
Believe me, they already have...
About the only thing Google doesn't do very elegantly is address book data. Yes, you can add it in Gmail, but it doesn't yet integrate with anything else. I'd like if I could have Google Calendar automatically propagate with birthday information from my Gmail contacts... And for that matter, if it allowed you to pick people from your contacts when you "Add Guest" for a calendar event. Right now, it's just an empty text book.
By comparison, .Mac's address book feature is weak. It only supports certain fields, and a lot of special data (birthdays, notes, additional phone numbers, e-mails, etc.) that are extremely useful on the go... Well, the info synchronizes, but you just can't view it on the web. It's damn useless for me if I can't look up a friend's birthday, or check in the notes to find out what kind of blueberry muffin basket my boss likes most when I want that promotion...
C'mon, Google. Get that contacts integration going and my 99% undying love will be 110%. Pleeeeeease?
For what it's worth, originally the scheme DID use authentication through your Google account. It was switched to the "temporary pass" system when people brought up the issue of "do you trust Zooomr with your e-mail login?" The switch is covered in Zooomr's Blog.
- Iron Successfully Irons
- Light Successfully Emits Light
- Runner Successfully Runs
Sheesh.Yes, that would be a stupid move, but a lot of users have gotten used to "Yes, load the insecure website,"; "Yes, accept the third party content"; etc.
More justification for the approach that Apple uses - have verbs on the buttons, instead of generic crap like "ok" and "yes". If the button actually said "Save" or "Save Password" it might give the user some pause. It's also generally considered that these kinds of dialogs are easier to follow. As soon as they pop up, you have some idea of what will happen when you click on a button, even without reading the message.
They could either have password saving turned off by default, or have a sane dialog along these lines to make it clear that this is something different. They could have clearly marked verb push buttons, and maybe even go so far that there is no default for the enter key - you'd have to explicitly click the button to enable it, or explicitly use the shortcut for the button.
Yep, shoulda used that preview button. Cursed HTML formatting mode... Here we go:
.Mac for the last 6 months, and while it has a lot of great features, they badly need to be updated and refined. For example, your Address Book data is accessible through the .Mac web site, but it is very limited - you're restricted to certain data fields, and even though data such as birthdays, anniversaries, notes, etc. is synchronized to the server, it is not viewable or editable via the web. This seriously limits the usefulness of this feature for me - my need to look up someone's birthday or other info tends to come up more often than the need to say, find their phone number (which is usually in my cell phone).
.Mac, and they've made some nice additions and refinements in the last year or so... But the ability to access my address book and calendar, all nicely sync'd with my Mac, was a key part of my decision to subscribe. The fact that these features are basically untouched from whatever implementation Apple had 3 or 4 years ago is disappointing and very limiting.
.Mac subscription...
I've been using
Similarly, the Calendar publishing is very basic. It's read-only, the "location" and "notes" data is not accessible, and if you publish multiple calendars as one, they lose their color coding (e.g. work calendar vs. birthday calendar).
I like
I've been seriously debating whether to continue my subscription when it comes time. In fact, if it wasn't for the new iLife suite, I would definitely have let the subscription lapse. iWeb looks promising though, and I may yet find other excuses to keep my
I've been using .Mac for the last 6 months, and while it has a lot of great features, they badly need to be updated and refined. For example, your Address Book data is accessible through the .Mac web site, but it is very limited - you're restricted to certain data fields, and even though data such as birthdays, anniversaries, notes, etc. is synchronized to the server, it is not viewable or editable via the web. This seriously limits the usefulness of this feature for me - my need to look up someone's birthday or other info tends to come up more often than the need to say, find their phone number (which is usually in my cell phone).
Similarly, the Calendar publishing is very basic. It's read-only, the "location" and "notes" data is not accessible, and if you publish multiple calendars as one, they lose their color coding (e.g. work calendar vs. birthday calendar).
I like .Mac, and they've made some nice additions and refinements in the last year or so... But the ability to access my address book and calendar, all nicely sync'd with my Mac, was a key part of my decision to subscribe. The fact that these features are basically untouched from whatever implementation Apple had 3 or 4 years ago is disappointing and very limiting.
I've been seriously debating whether to continue my subscription when it comes time. In fact, if it wasn't for the new iLife suite, I would definitely have let the subscription lapse. iWeb looks promising though, and I may yet find other excuses to keep my .Mac subscription...
I think it's rather amusing to observe these people thinking that they've invented a new medium when it's really just a minor variation on plain old web browsing.
Yeah, just like the web was just a minor variation on plain old FTP. Gee, yeah, all they've done is make an existing form of information phenomenally accessible.