Enough of the MobileMe moaning Minnies

Stephen Withers
Friday, 08 August 2008 07:30

Opinion and Analysis

Installers have been known to incorrectly set permissions on folders that they had no real business changing.

As for preference files, I've long suspected that part of the problem is that programs may assume that because they had written the preference file there's no reason to validate the data when it is read. That's fine until something damages the file, in which case the effects can be highly problematic. I further suspect that such bad data can lead to buffer overflows, which could potentially lead to further damage.

But neither of these is capable of explaining all the problems that arise.

My experience with calendar syncing was that it just worked - apart from the fact that as I'm not on US Pacific Time I needed to enable time zone support in iCal and in MobileMe's calendar. It meant events entered in iCal were visible on the MobileMe web calendar and on the iPhone that I had the use of for a few days. The same applied to syncing my address book and bookmarks, and publishing albums from iPhoto worked properly too.

The email transition was less impressive, but then I wasn't one of the "one percent" of users that were worst hit.

This suggests to me that whatever problems really do exist in MobileMe, the service isn't fundamentally flawed as some people would have you think.

Anyway, my message is this: publicly writing off a new product or service might make you feel better, and you may find some fellow users that have similar experiences so you can bitch about it together. But it does little, if anything, to pin down the exact cause of the problem, and may unjustifiably deter other users from trying something that might work perfectly for them.

I'm definitely not saying we should accept whatever Apple or other vendors dole out to us and express undying gratitude. But a sense of proportion is definitely called for. Just because it's called MobileMe, that doesn't make you the centre of the universe.