Love it or hate it, it’s clear that the unveiling of MobileMe in yesterday’s keynote signals big changes ahead for .Mac.

It needs some kind of change. Regular Hawk Wings readers will have seen .Mac come in for a lot of stick (and the occasional bouquet).

I spent this morning (while supervising a Greek exam) reading coverage of the announcement from the big-hitting Apple news sites. Most of them just rehashed the press release from Apple. Fair enough, and a sign perhaps of how little there is to know. It’s hard to have an informed opinion in the absence of any real evidence beyond the hyper-polished demonstration in the keynote, the very attractive screenshots on Apple’s MobileMe teaster page and the Apple MobileMe Screen cast .

Still, a lack of real experience with the yet-to-be-launched service didn’t stop some people speculating.

The tin-foil hat brigade were out in force. I read somewhere that MobileMe is a branding rip-off of the ill-fated and much-despised Windows ME. You be the judge:

Further, it was suggested elsewhere that the move from mac.com to me.com is an part of an intentional “de-mac-ifying” of Apple, an attempt to pitch the service to Windows users. Some fear a loss of tribal identity will follow.

Myself, I am inclined to be cautious. I am going to wait until users get a chance to experience the service for themselves before venturing a view on whether (or not) this will be .Mac’s much-needed shot in the arm.

Amidst the frenzied speculation, two articles stand out from the rest of the pack. First, Dan Moren’s article on MacWorld is a very fine piece.

He provides a history of Apple’s online services, including its early life as iTools. I was still hacking away on a PC in those days, so I read it with interest and profit. You might find it interesting too.

We won’t know the future until July, but we can at least bone up on the past, and so get a better sense of where we are going. Nice one, Dan.

Productivity Bodhisattva (wikipedia ) Merlin Mann also does a fine job of carefully balancing up the pros and cons of the move in his post today. There are things he likes, but he is also willing to put (IMHO) the key question: Great that it looks nice (it does), but “Will stability and reliability of MobileMe greatly improve over .Mac?” dotmac, mobileme, apple, keynote, me.com, .mac

Tags: Apple, dotmac, keynote, mac, me.com, mobileme

Of course, there was only one real question of any importance during the Keynote yesterday: What email client is iPhone using?

Apple doesn’t call it Apple Mail in the same way as it calls the phone’s browser Safari. It describes the email app as,

…a rich HTML email client that fetches your email in the background from most POP3 or IMAP mail services and displays photos and graphics right along with the text.

Is it a stripped-down version of Apple Mail all done over with eye-candy or something else? What is “rich HTML”?

After watching the Keynote a few times and viewing the videos in the new iPhone section of the Apple web site, I think that that “rich HTML” is a term designed to appeal to Windows users. Mail.app users are used to the distinction between “Rich Text” and HTML email, and Mail’s ability to compose only in the former whilst happily displaying the latter.

There is nothing in the Keynote or videos to suggest anything more advanced (or depraved, depending on your point of view about HTML email) than Mail.app’s existing capabilities.

There is no composing in HTML and nothing on display that suggests more advanced HTML rendering. The only list I can see is marked with hyphens, not bullets, although presumably it wasn’t composed on an iPhone:

So I am guessing that is not a new custom-made client but a cut-down version of Mail.app, “Mail Mobile” as it were. What do you think?

Australians won’t get their hands on one until sometime in 2008, so someone else will know the answer before I do. mail.app, apple mail, iphone, mwsf, keynote, html, rich text, email client

Tags: Apple Mail, Email Client, HTML, iphone, keynote, mail.app, mwsf, rich text

After a week in which the blogosphere dissected the keynote from every angle, frantically hunted for new hidden features in Leopard and evaluated how much of it is really new and/or useful, it’s time for a round up of the “general view” on Leopard Mail.

HTML Templates suck

The new HTML templates were never going to be a big hit in the blogosphere. MacSlash writer acaben speaks for many :

…they’ve now made it EASIER to send out craptastic HTML email. Apparently, mail.app didn’t suck hard enough as it was, so they had to spend all of their engineering dollars making it as annoying as possible, instead of, you know, making it work well. WTF.

Pierre Igot at Betalogue has a similar view :

Real Mail users in the real world are just hoping to get decent performance and a proper interface for managing tens of thousands of archived emails. Instead, we get “30 professionally designed stationery templates.” Yet more crappy HTML email! Grrrrreat.

I share the same dislike of HTML in email, but I think it is time for bloggers to pause and take a collective deep breath. We are not like other people. Other people like HTML email a lot. Jim Puls attempts a defence of the new templates and HTML in email:

HTML e-mail exists so that you might be able to communicate with people better by more richly expressing yourself.

Productivity enhancements

Notes, to-dos and the inclusion of RSS feeds for extra information-processing focus were greeted more positively. Although these features are not new and are (partially) available to Mail users now through the work of third-party developers, Apple will present them in a more polished form. When Apple eats its children, it always makes a good job of the meal (remember Konfabulator? RIP).

Overall, restrained praise is the general tone. These things are welcome but not overwhelming.

Chris Clark at decaffeinated represents the tone of many blog posts I’ve read in the last week:

The system-wide ToDo server is a very cool idea, but everything else about the Mail preview perturbs me. Stationery? Great, more (no doubt standards-ignorant) HTML email. Thank god for hidden preferences that force plain text display by default. A notes mailbox is pretty cool, so long as it plays nice with IMAP servers (I worry that it won’t), and RSS is a gimme. Next.

Paul Thurrott seems conflicted . On the one hand he says the new features are welcome; on the other:

Apple’s Mail application (often called Mail.app in reference to its beginnings on the NeXT platform) is being updated with some truly lame features: Stationary, notes, to-do notes, and RSS. Ugh. These aren’t major features, and they’re certainly not worthy of the time Jobs gave them during the keynote.

Macworld presents an extended evaluation of Leopard Mail. It likes the new features but remains unimpressed in general:

New bells and whistles, such as Notes, To Dos, RSS support, and stationery templates, expand the program’s reach and make it more of a multitasking tool. However, if you’re using a third-party e-mail application because you need powerful management features not offered by Mail, these additions alone aren’t likely to change your mind.

mail.app, apple mail, leopard, views, HTML, to-dos, notes, preview, keynote, apple

Tags: Apple, Apple Mail, HTML, keynote, Leopard, mail.app, Notes, preview, to dos, views