I read a ton of Mac-related and geeky RSS feeds and listen to a handful of tech podcasts, so inevitably I’ve been thinking on the recent WWDC announcements. Google WWDC if you missed all of this, but in short (1) there’s going to be a 3G iPhone, which will be subsidized and have GPS but which will jack up the data plan prices, (2) there are a lot of cool applications being developed for the iPhone, and (3) dotmac is getting the axe, to be replaced by Mobile Me. I don’t have an iPhone, so the first two points shouldn’t really be on my radar at all, yet still I have some ideas that I’ll blog about later. Mobile Me is another matter.
After much head scratching and bitter complaining about the cost, I bought a year subscription to dotmac after I bought my MacBook. I wrote a post against dotmac at some point but am too lazy to link to it. I found my own arguments compelling but coughed up the dough anyway because of sheer laziness; the services can be found elsewhere for cheaper, but you have to tinker with way more stuff and babysit the processes. I want my tinkering time to be spent elsewhere. I really like the automatic sync, and I love the iDisk. I have a super simple Web page on there—very adequate for me. Even so, I was planning on ditching dotmac, but now I’m thinking I’ll continue my subscription (apparently you can buy these on Amazon at a discount! Who knew?), after considering arguments both pro and con.
The first compelling argument AGAINST doing so is the name. Mobile Me? WTF? Doesn’t Apple have enough money to pay a creative team to come up with something better than this? Like I really want a me.com e-mail address. I mean, dotmac e-mail sucks @ss anyway (I logged into it today and could not reach buttons on the page because it was not scaled to fit on my MacBook…argh), but I’m just talking hypothetically. The second argument is that many of the improvements are directed solely toward the iPhone, which, as has been established, I do not have.
However. They’re doubling the storage space to 20 GB with no price increase, and I can make use of some of the push syncing (notably iPhoto and Address Book). It’s nice to have a backup in “the cloud” (this is the new buzzword, in case you missed that), after all. Once I thought about it, if I get the $80 subscription from Amazon, that’s about $7 per month for effortless backup and synchronized data. That makes me feel better about not having to babysit another backup service or, worse yet, back up manually. Argh! Not that! The photo galleries and Web pages are just gravy. I use them since they’re there, but I probably wouldn’t pay extra to get them elsewhere.
There is little doubt that Mobile Me will really change the iPhone experience, and I wish it would work with the BlackBerry. On the other hand, my Gmail arrives instantly on my BB as it is, and I don’t keep photos on it. Calendar is the only thing I need a cable for. I guess it’s not that big of a deal. If only Gmail would enable two-way sync as Yahoo! has…but that’s a topic for another day.
Finally, I changed my Twitter username to not_ratched so as to be a bit more consistent, so if you are following me and experience sudden pangs of loss without tweets from wizardchimp, fear not! I seem to have been effortlessly ported over to the new username without any hassle, for which Twitter is to be highly commended.
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