Do it yourself .Mac
Like some other people, Matt Simerson decided 
that the cost of renewing his .Mac subscription wasn’t worth it.
He wanted to retain the good things about the service though, “iDisk, iSync (between computers), iCal sharing, and Backup” and if possible make them even better:
Simply retaining the useful features would be an utter failure. The most value can be found in addressing the shortcomings of each feature. For iDisk, speed and disk space are the impediments to its usefulness. iSync already works quite well. iCal sharing works well but publish and subscribe updates are terribly slow. Backup is hamstrung by the iDisk space issue.
In the rest of a long and detailed post he outlines how he achieved this using WebDAV.
He even goes as far as fooling his Macs into believing that his local WebDav server is Apple’s iDisk server.
It’s a technical post demanding a fair bit of coding skill. I don’t think that I would attempt this myself, but people with the background will find it a useful guide.
I’m not sure how I missed this back in February. Perhaps I was at the beach.
Tags: Apple Mail Tips, dotmac, hacks, iCal, iDisk, isync, mac, WebDavRelated posts
June 28th, 2006 at 1:41 am
Its pretty cool to be able to do this, but until someone posts a step by step guide for the rest of the us, it’s pretty useless. We tried emailing Matt a while back but not surprisingly got no response. Either he did this for fun, or simply couldn’t be bothered to help out any further.
June 28th, 2006 at 5:03 am
That web page actually is a step-by-step guide. It’s just a lot of highly Unix-geeky steps. It’s actually not as hard as it looks but if it doesn’t ‘just work’ the first time, the ‘rest of us’ will have no idea how to debug it.
Notable, though, is that iSync still doesnt work with his solution, though, without a .mac subscription. Which is rather unfortunate. Many alpha power users who would greatly benefit from iSync won’t pay $99 a year for the privilege. Apple is only screwing themselves.
June 28th, 2006 at 5:57 am
I agree with Chris. Chances are the step by step won’t work from the first shot because if you’re not a programmer or someone ‘pretty darn’ technical, there is no chance in hell you’ll understand it enough to troubleshoot it. But the idea is really great; I would even encourage to pay someone to provide a Mac OS X step by step guide on doing this.
June 28th, 2006 at 6:48 am
The issues with the WebDAV publishing of calendars is that it’s fine for one or two people but really loses it’s appeal when you have six or seven and more than one person needs read/write rather than just read.
That’s why we started working on SyncBridge. There had to be a way to get calendar synchronisation like .Mac. We’ve also added calendar sharing as well :) We’re about a week from release so….
June 28th, 2006 at 7:18 am
… Let me know when it appears. Sounds interesting.