Stephen Withers
Monday, 14 July 2008 06:43
Opinion and Analysis
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Apple's MobileMe (email, web publishing, data sharing and syncing, and remote-control) service came to life over the weekend following an uncomfortable transition from its predecessor, .Mac. In particular, going to the old www.mac.com home page now correctly redirects to www.me.com instead of yielding an 'under maintenance' message.
Apple's ability to deliver a smooth transition was probably not helped by an influx of new iPhone users signing up for MobileMe accounts to take advantage of the phone's push email capability.
MobileMe's support for a limited range of browsers is causing some fallout, despite being announced well in advance. The service works with Safari 3 or Firefox 2 or 3 on Mac OS X and Windows, but Internet Explorer 6 does not work and version 7 is only partially supported. This presents problems for MobileMe users trying to access the service from locked-down corporate PCs that aren't running modern browsers.
The situation regarding .Mac's Groups and HomePage features is still unclear. Groups, introduced in 2005, provides a mailing list, shared iDisk and shared calendar. HomePage is a template-based web page creation and editing tool.
Apple's transition FAQ says the .Mac features being discontinued are Web access to bookmarks, iCards, .Mac slides, and support for Mac OS X 10.3 Panther sync.
The MobileMe system status messages report that "MobileMe members may be unable to access groups.mac.com.
"MobileMe members cannot access the HomePage application. Service will be restored ASAP. We apologize for any inconvenience."
But there's bad news ahead if you've been taking advantage of Groups or HomePage - please
read on.
