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iChat for .Mac members currently down
If you go to .Mac right now and login to your account, you will discover this little notice in the sidebar about half way down: "iChat with .Mac accounts is currently unavailable. All other .Mac services are unaffected. Last Updated: 2/3/2006."Gee, thanks, Apple! How about an ETA on when this will be fixed or an explanation of why this is happening, or, Jobs forbid, a little warning that this was going to happen? I don't know about everybody else out there in Internet land, but chat is pretty mission critical to my day to day, and this is the second time in the past few months when this has happened.Time to migrate all my buddies over to the generic AIM account I registered a while back. Add "unreliable iChat performance" to the long list of cons that is going to have me seriously consider canceling my .Mac account next time it is up for renewal. Update: It's back up at 1:05pm EST with a note stating that it was down for 50 minutes (yet still with no info as to why).
Dialog box delays with iDisk
I'm sure we've all experienced that annoying delay that sometimes occurs when we've got a CD or DVD sitting in our Mac's media drive. Call up an Open or Save dialog box and you have to wait while the disc spins up. Keith at MacIT.org noticed a similar delay that seems to have been caused by the local copy of his iDisk that he kept mounted on his desktop. He writes:"I turned iDisk Syncing Off in the .Mac System Preferences, which turns the local copy of your iDisk into a disk image file and un-mounts the volume, and the Open - Save dialog delays have disappeared."I've tried turning off my local iDisk as well, to see if I get similar results over the next week or so (as Keith notes, Transmit is much quicker with iDisk file management anyway). Has anyone else experienced this?
Open source .Mac alternative?
This is pretty cool. Ubuntu, in case you haven't heard of it, is a flavor of Linux whose tagline is: "Linux for Human Beings." In other words, it is meant to be easy to use by everybody. Some Ubuntu members are planning on building a .Mac-Like service for Ubuntu that would offer Webmail, Calendar, Address Book, News Reader, Public Homepage, and Blogging services along with a slew of other features for free. This project has hardly started, but if it succeeds nicely in Linux land, it probably wouldn't be that difficult to adapt to OS X, thanks to the open source underpinnings of both platforms. A free version of .Mac that is scalable and usable by all? Sounds like heaven. [via Digg]
Finally - iDisk web access enabled, .Mac site redesign
Yet another significant update that should be added to the list of major updates and changes that were cut from yesterday's keynote: web access to the .Mac iDisk. Apple was obviously touting all the new features of iLife and iWeb in a .Mac email newsletter I received today, but they also mentioned that, along with a slight .Mac member site redesign and a new blog, web access has been enabled for the iDisk. The only way I know of getting into from a browser is by logging into mac.com, scrolling down and clicking on the iDisk icon in the left column. A new browser window will appear which should request your .Mac member name and password. Once logged in, you should then have Finder-like access to all your files and folders in your iDisk. This should make the iDisk a lot more handy, as it should be accessible from nearly any OS and browser.I'm really glad Apple enabled this access, but this particular upgrade took way too long. I know there's this whole element of "paced evolution" to products and software like this, but give me a break. This should have been there since day 1.
Check out the official .Mac blog
What's this? An honest-to-goodness blog from within Apple? Are you serious?Well, sort of. The .Mac blog is really just a promotion for iLife '06 and all of the swell things you can do with it as a .Mac subscriber. Still, it's the first iWeb-generated site I've laid my eyes on, and it's not bad. It would be nice to add a photo gallery, just so we could check it out. While it may not be especially informative, it is a decent demonstration of the product. I'll keep it in mind for when people ask, "So, what exactly does iWeb do again?"
.Mac services down during keynote
Finally, more interesting rumors related to Tuesday's keynote, and they actually have some incriminating evidence for proof. Sure, everyone's excited for Macintel machines, but we've known about (or have been suspecting) those for how many months now?This new rumor from hails from MacRumors, foretelling a big update to .Mac arriving on Tuesday. The evidence? It comes straight from the horse's mouth in the form of a service outage warning the morning of the keynote: ".Mac will be undergoing scheduled maintenance from 7:00 AM to 12:00 PM PST on 1/10/06. All .Mac services will be affected. We apologize for the inconvenience." Log in to view the actual warning.I hope all you .Mac'ers have at least a backup email address to use for five hours.
Chronos releases StickyBrain 4
Take note, information junkies. Chronos has released StickyBrain 4, which features a laundry list of new features, including 300-1000% speed improvements (really?), spotlight integration, a more useful dock icon, seven new file note and more. Of course, StickyBrain still features .Mac integration so you can easily manage your data between several computers.I briefly used StickyBrain when it was first released as a discounted .Mac benefit, but once I learned how to edit text files with Quicksilver, StickyBrain was shelved (yes, I realize it does more than edit text files, but this was really all I used it for). StickyBrain 4 requires Mac OS 10.4.3 or later and costs $39.99US.
