UPDATE: Apologies. I jumped the gun here. The article should have been headlined “MobileMe shows random signs of life”. It sputtered into life from time to time last night, but only long enough for me to grab some of the screenshots below.

MobileMe is live. Check it out for yourself at me.com

UPDATED UPDATE: Nope, gone again. This is too much for my nerves!

UPDATE: All good again! Go for it.

Well, it was live for a moment, long enough for me to grab the screenshot from my MobileMe Account page above. Now it’s gone, and the URL redirects to Apple’s MobileMe Promo page again.

In order to use it you will need to fire up Software Update first and download the MobileMe update that’s waiting there.

The update changes the icon in System Preferences to the new MobileMe one. And probably does more important things too. For example, it requires you to quit Mail.app before continuing, so it’s making some changes there as well.

More details if and when it revives itself again.

Hopefully, it was launched a little early, and is not quite ready. It didn’t look like the MobileMe Calendar knew about my CalDAV calendars.

UPDATE: Still doesn’t know about my CalDAV calendars.

And there’s bad news in the MobileMe Address Book Preferences for people who don’t live in the USA, France, Germany or Japan:

In answer to Harry’s question in the comments, it looks like the personal domain option in the Account Preferences only relates to web hosting, not to email:

But I can’t test that.mobileme, dotmac, .mac, mail.app, apple mail, apple, ical, address book, frustrating!

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

I love Apple as much as the next guy. Probably more than the next guy. But today has been another day on which — as the .Mac outage report clinically put it — “100% of members were unable to access mail using an IMAP client.”

You can read some less clincal reactions from .Mac users on Apple Discussions.

Apple are very good at sending nicely produced, well-polished emails about new Apple hardware and software products and new items in the iTunes Store. It obviously spends money and effort in producing them. It cares about these things.

How hard would it be to send an email to .Mac users warning that “scheduled maintenance” is about to take place over an eight or twelve (or whatever) hour window, and that connectivity to .Mac services may be affected?

Fastmail can do it. Joyent can do it. The IT Department at my work can do it.

Of course, it is possible that Apple didn’t know everything would go pear-shaped. Someone tripped over a power cord and all the lights went out.

So, I am stuck in the horns of a dilemma. Is it more troubling that Apple doesn’t care enough to warn users beforehand, or that its mail engineers don’t know what they are doing?apple, dotmac, mac, apple mail, outage, outage, outage, mail.app

Having trouble connecting to your .Mac account with Mail.app? You’re not alone.

According to a post at MacFixit:

Users are continuing to report (in droves) problems accessing .Mac services — particularly mail — over the past few days.

The post also suggest two solutions that have helped some of its readers.

First, cleaning out the Mac OS X’s caches seems to work for some. You can do this with Tiger Cache Cleaner (USD 8.99) or AppleJack (freeware).

Secondly, it suggests a restart.

There is an easier way. Under the “Other” pane of .Mac’s webmail preferences, you will find a option to forward your messages to an email service that actually works:

After .Mac sorts itself out, you can go back to accessing it directly (if you want to).mail.app, apple mail, .mac, dotmac, connection problems, cache, restart, solution, timeouts

Jaron Brass is dumping his .Mac account , having been a loyal user since the iTools days.

It’s just not worth it, he says:

With rival free services providing gigabytes of e-mail storage for free, and companies offering Mac OS X SyncServices-compatible solutions for a one-time fee, there’s no reason to continue paying for the service.

As part of his address switch plan, he tells readers of his blog:

If you currently use my .Mac e-mail address to communicate with me, please take a few moments to update your address books. Send me an e-mail here and I can provide you my new addresses and vCard.

For one reason or another, everyone has to change email addresses at some point.

Nikolena at The Crafted Webmaster provides a neat checklist of six steps to make sure that the process goes smoothly.

She covers things like starting early, making a conscious list of all the places the address needs to be changed, announcing the new address and continuing to monitor the old one.

It’s all common sense, of course, but common sense often fails at the critical point. As Nikolena says,

A few weeks ago I decided to switch my personal email account from .Mac to Gmail. This would be about the third or fourth time since 1997 I’ve switched my personal email address. The first time I switched my email address was a huge pain in the butt. I had subscribed to a lot of newsletters and when I changed my email address, I lost about half of my subscriptions and missed a number of emails from friends and family. With each switch, I’ve gotten a lot better about going about it in an organized manner. If you need to change emails sometime in the future, learn from my mistakes by following these tips.

not apple mail, not mail.app, email in general, changing email addresses, forward planning, moving, dotmac, .Mac

Mark/Space has released SyncTogether , the commercial version of the app formerly known as MySync, which syncs Address Book, iCal, Mail (and more) data between multiple Macs.

It’s quite clever as you can see from one, two, three previous Hawk Wings posts.

SyncTogether will interest two sorts of people; those with more than Mac and members of workgroups and families who need to keep data in sync across multiple Macs, whether they are on the local network or working remotely.

After establishing a main server and workgroup, registering other Macs to sync to and choosing what data to include, its interface allows for easy control of the sync process:

While it was in development MySync was freeware. SyncTogether is not; a licence for up to three Macs costs $49.95.

But make sure you read the list of known issues before parting with your money.

If you are very hardcore or frightened by the price tag, take a look at “Making your own .Mac“.

You can download a 14 day demo it from the Mark/Space web site .

UPDATE: Apologies. I could have sworn that I was rewarded with a screen mentioning a 14 day demo when I clicked “register later”, but I was hallucinating.mail.app, apple mail, ical, address book, syncing, dotMac, .Mac, apple

Webmailer is a System Preferences pane that offers a quick and easy way to set a variety of webmail clients as the default handler for composing new messages from mailto: links.

Gmail users already have options to achieve this, but this new utility makes the same feature available for users of a range of web-based services including .Mac, SquirrelMail, AOL, Hotmail, Horde, Roundcube and Yahoo!

After installing the preference pane, all you have to do is select webmailer as the default client and then select one of the preset webmail services:

The readme contains detailed instruction on how to create customised links for other webmail services.

The developer created Webmailer to ease a terrible affliction:

Ever click on a mailto: link, only to scream in frustration as Apple Mail opens yet again? The curse of the webmail user is that there is no way to get around this problem. That is, until now.

Webmailer comes in a Tiger and a Panther version due to the different ways in which default emailers are handed by the two systems.

Get the right one for you from the developer’s web site .

UPDATE: Works with Joyent too! See the comments.mail.app, apple mail, plugins, system preference, webmail, gmail, dotmac, .mac, yahoo, horde, squirrelmail, hotmail, email, mailto: