Marianne Schultz

the musings of a geeky girl

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Dear Apple: How to make my MobileMe iDisk more useful

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My dearest Apple,

While I’m quite sure I singlehandedly boost your in-store and iTunes sales in the Northeast by at least a couple of percentage points every year, you probably don’t notice little old me at all. Though you may not know it, I am one of your biggest fangirls. Not big as in circus freak exhibit, but big as in “Oh, I must buy every new Apple product that comes out within a maximum of 24 hours of its release!” Just to be clear. However, fangirl status aside, there are times when I literally want to throttle your stubborn virtual neck. When I ponder my iDisk and its relative uselessness in relation to my iPhone, that is one of those times.
Let me explain. I have been a .Mac/MobileMe subscriber for about 6 years now. And I must confess that I have rarely paid the full $99 for my subscription each year, thanks to Amazon and eBay. However, you may be happy to know that I have become iPhone crazy and have more than made up for my cheapness in scouring for MobileMe deals with the number of iPhones and iPhone apps I have purchased. Anyway, my point is that I am a long-time MobileMe subscriber and an iPhone user. I love the ability to sync my contacts and calendar over-the-air between my Mac and my iPhone via MobileMe, and I’ve found my MobileMe email to be more or less reliable over the years, even through the MobileMe transition that was disastrous for some.
You recently put out the iDisk app, allowing iPhone and iPod touch users to access the contents of their iDisks while on the go. While this is nice, it is incredibly insufficient. While I can view files on my iDisk, move files to the Public folder to be shared, and email them to others, I can’t edit them or create new files on my iPhone and save them to my iDisk. Why does this frustrate me? Because I have the ability to create new documents on my iPhone (through Dataviz’s Documents to Go, or even Notes, if you want to count that) and to get them on my Mac, I have to use a special application to transfer them via Wi-Fi (or sync via iTunes for Notes, and then copy and paste the contents somewhere else if I want them to be truly useable). I have this lovely 20GB bit of storage in the cloud and I can’t even use it directly from my iPhone to save a document. Does this not sound ridiculous? Does this not boggle the mind with its insanity?
Steve – dude – I really can’t believe that you would let something like this continue. The iPhone is all about having easy, intuitive access to so much in the palm of your hand. This level of connectivity is only reinforced by the mandatory data plan required on AT&T’s network with an iPhone and its Wi-Fi connectivity. You guys make MobileMe and the iPhone. Make them work together better, please.
Forever yours,
a geeky girl

A small confession: I have hoarded silly @me email addresses

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If you were a .Mac subscriber before Apple re-branded it to MobileMe, you are probably aware of the fact that Apple committed that existing users could maintain their existing email addresses ending in @mac.com and that new addresses under the @me.com scheme would be handed out on a first-come, first-served basis. Well, I definitely kept my @mac.com address and I decided to have a wee bit o’ (very geeky) fun and kidnap a few cute @me.com address aliases as well (spaces added to try to evade spam bots):

whyarentulooking @ me. com
throwthecat @ me. com
throwthedog @ me. com
Yeah, I know. I need to get out more. And I’m not quite sure why I felt that throwing animals was amusing to begin with, but there you go. I said I was geeky, which does not necessarily imply sane at the same time.

I really don’t like MobileMe

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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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