I first wrote the title to this blog post using the word “hate” to describe how I feel about MobileMe (the web apps in particular) but I’m trying to stay away from this extreme since all of these issues came up on one day (today) and maybe MobileMe is just having a bad day. Or month. Whatever. I remember Phil Schiller talking about the web interface at the WWDC keynote, describing that they would be easy to use and a lot like their desktop counterparts. Well, they’re not.
Issue 1:
I ‘reply all’ to an email to plan an outing with some friends. When I hit send, I get an error that one of the email addresses is formatted incorrectly. I didn’t change the addresses at all, and double-check them – they are all correct. I hit send again. And again. That error message keeps popping up. I go back and delete and re-enter the email addresses by hand, which finally works.
Issue 2:
I add a contact, thinking it will be faster to do via MobileMe than on my iPhone since I can type faster on a computer keyboard. I create the new contact and try to drag and drop it into the primary group that I use on my iPhone. The icon that represents the drag and drop gets stuck in the middle of the interface and won’t budge, and any further attempts to do it again are unsuccessful.
Issue 3:
I want to send an email to a group of friends, and try to browse my full contacts list from which to select emails. I’m going through the list and realize that some of my friends are now shown. Oh no! Did they get deleted from my address book? I go to check and they are indeed there, but just aren’t showing up in the list in the new email window. Why this is happening is a mystery.
Whiskey tango foxtrot! I never used the web interface often with .mac before the MobileMe roll-out, so I don’t have much of a comparison basis, but this sucks and it doesn’t “just work.” I was lucky enough to not be one of those whose email accounts essentially stopped working during the MobileMe implementation, but if this sort of thing continues, I’ll re-consider renewing my subscription to MobileMe when it’s up later this year…
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