The Whole Widget

Goodbye .Mac

Sep 05

Ian FieldhouseApple, Web Apps 1 Comment

At the start of the week Google accepted my ‘Google Apps for Your Domain’ application and I've finally made the decision to not renew my .Mac account when it expires in a months time. My reasons for this are highlighted below:

Web Presence

Although .Mac allows you to host your site on their servers, they don't allow you to use your own domain name. As I have free server space at my place of work, and full access to the server to configure it how I want, it makes more sense to host my own domain and therefore have a fully featured blog rather than the rather anemic version .Mac offers.

Mail

As much as I love my .Mac mail account I just think the storage quota of 1GB is a bit measly when you consider that you need to share it with your iDisk quota. Added to this is the fact that the other members of my family have e-mail only .Mac accounts and so they only have 50MB of storage. With Gmail each member of my family can have their own user@mydomain.com e-mail address with 2GB of storage each. We can still use Mail.app to access our accounts since Gmail supports POP access and if we are ever on a machine that isn't our own we can use the Gmail web interface to access all of our mail.

Synchronisation

At first I thought that this might have been an area where .Mac would have won hands down, but over the last few months I've found .Mac synchronisation to be flaky at best. I find I can easily keep my computers at work and home synchronised with the information I desire by using Synchronize! Pro X and external firewire drives.Basically, everyday at work I back up files onto portable external firewire drives and take these home with me so that the backups are off site. All I needed to do was create a few new synchronise actions to back up my Address Book database, Calendar files and anything else that I wanted to be available on all of my Macs and then run the same actions periodically at home to update those machines. The only restriction I've found in this process is that it really pays to assign one machine as you master machine and only make changes on that machine.

Photo Hosting

I used to be a big fan of the integration between iPhoto and .Mac, but with the release of the FlickrExport plugin for iPhoto and the purchase of a Pro membership for Flickr I've not used .Mac for photo hosting for a long time. FlickrExport is currently at version 2 and costs £12, but I have been using it since version 1 which was open source and it still serves me well. The source code to version 1 is still available, so if you want to build it yourself and save yourself the cash, you can do so.

Calendars

I've never been a big user of the shared calendars feature of .Mac but by using Google Calendar I can still use this feature. The only restriction to this is that for any shared calendars that I host I must either enter all my data using Google Calendars web interface or periodically upload the iCal calendar file to Google Calendar.

Chat

None of my friends or acquaintances use instant messaging so this isn't a priority for me. All my family can be set up with Google Talk accounts and we can use iChat as our chat client as it supports Jabber. My existing .Mac username will still be valid for AIM chat through iChat once my .Mac account expires.

On-line Backup

One thing that .Mac offers that I can't replicate for free or cheaply is on-line backups of my most important files. However, gDisk does seem to have the potential to allow me to use some of my Gmail storage as a virtual drive and I will be keeping a close eye on this project over the coming months. If truth be told, I barely used iDisk at all because the length of time it took to upload anything to it was prohibitive.

Cost

Finally, this is what it all coms down to. To renew my .Mac membership is going to set me back about £70 for a years membership with all the inherent restrictions and problems that I have mentioned above. Whereas, for the price of a domain name and a Flickr Pro account — about £20 per year — I can have a better and more flexible collection of web applications at my disposal.

So after considering all of the points above it is heavy heart that I must say “Goodbye .Mac”. We had some good times and hopefully if Apple sees fit to give you a much needed upgrade we can be friends again.