The Apple MobileMe service
Comment added in 2011: MobileMe is about to be replaced with iCloud, a far weaker service that only connects a few selected Apple applications over the net. iDisk and the picture gallery will die in June 2012. I won't use iCloud because it's Apple-only, too app-centric, and I am not happy about my confidential files passing through Apple's servers.
MobileMe, formerly known as .Mac or Dot Mac, is a web service provided by Apple. The annual subscription fee is fairly high, 79 euro or $99. Each of its services can be had cheaper elsewhere, but what you get - as always with Apple - is a seamless integration into the Mac interface with almost no integration hassles. I have been using it for several years now, and I like it, although some features work better than others. The main services are:
- iSync syncs your calendar, addresses, bookmarks, and
(theoretically) notes with every computer logged into the
service under your account, including your iPhone and iPod.
Everything is also accessible from a very nice web interface.
- iDisk is a network disk that stores up to 20 GB of data
(shared with the other services). Maximum transfer volume per
month is 200 GB. You can buy more if you need it.
- Photo gallery is a very fancy web album that is linked to iPhoto. You don't get much control over the looks, and you can't add text, but it's still very nicely done and very easy to use. I have written about it on my iPhoto page, go there to find out more. I have several thousand photos in my MobileMe gallery, but Apple will shut down that site in June 2012. I have moved all the photos to Flickr, whose organization features are far better than Apple's anyway.
- Back to My Mac lets you access the disk of another of
your Macs. It also contains a VNC screen-sharing service that puts
another Mac's screen on your display so you can remote-control it.
- Email is a web mailer that can also be accessed from
Apple Mail (or other local mail programs) using IMAP. It's quite
polished and easy to use, although if I were looking for a mail
service, I would prefer Google Mail; it's not as pretty but
quicker to use. Apple Mail can do something that the alternatives
cannot: push mails to your iPhone, without polling. I won't go
into details here.
- Miscellaneous stuff, like locating and remote-wiping stolen iPhones, web space, and encrypted chat. I tried the iPhone locator once - its accuracy is scary, just a few meters off - but otherwise I don't use these features.
Let's consider each service in turn to see whether they are worth the MobileMe subscription fee. Keep in mind that this is not a manual, but a simple writeup of my experiences with those parts of the service that I use (or tried to use). For example, Apple's web interface is very nicely done but I don't use it so you won't find much information on it here.
Syncing
For me, it's the reason why I have been a subscriber for many years now. It's incredibly easy and very reliable. Turn it on, select what you want synced in the System Preferences on every host you want synced, and you are set.
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| System Preferences → MobileMe → Sync |
Whenever you add, modify, or delete a synced item, such as a calendar appointment or an address book entry, all connected computers will have the updated information a few minutes later. This works with iPhones too, even over the cell network. Apple loves to restrict iPhone features to Wifi-only or even USB-only, especially iTunes syncing, but this is the rare exception where it works as it should. You don't need to think or worry about it, it just does the right thing. Well done.
The exception is Notes. MacOS X doesn't actually do proper notes, and despite the checkbox they aren't synced. The Dashboard notes widget in MacOS X and the iPhone notes app ignore syncing completely. There is a strange feature in Apple Mail that involves notes, which are apparently considered a kind of email with a yellow background, but it works poorly and I have not found out what it might be good for. When I tried using this I always ended up either losing my notes or have lots of clones. This complaint has been made for years by many people so there is little hope that Apple gets their act together here. They aren't interested. Forget note syncing.
From a privacy standpoint, allowing Apple access to your calendar and to your address book is a problem. Your company might not allow you to do this with company data. I do care about privacy but I have decided that I am ok with this here. As much as I like Google for other things, I don't trust them with personal data because they are in the business of sharing data and turning it into money. My - possibly mistaken - belief is that Apple isn't doing that. If you run a mafia cell or a hedge fund your tradeoff might be different.
iDisk
iDisk gives you 20 GB of space - more if you pay for it - on Apple's server. The disk shows up in your Finder like any other disk or USB stick that you plug in. You can buffer it on your local disk so file operations are just as fast as any local disk; MacOS X will sync the data to Apple's server in the background. Remote disk space is not a novel idea but as always, Apple has thought hard about making the process easy and smooth. After entering your login and password in the system preferences, this is the configuration page:
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| System Preferences → MobileMe → iDisk |
For me it has always been a mystery why the notion of "cloud computing" doesn't automatically imply "hard encryption". If you use iDisk storage, it's like putting your stuff in front of your door, in plain sight of anyone who cares to look. Remember that the servers are in the US, where privacy laws are so weak that you would be safe to say that you enjoy no privacy at all. If you are European, forget the "safe harbor" legislation that is supposed to extend European privacy standards to US companies that do business with Europeans - it's a placebo, a law without teeth and without meaningful verification.
But that doesn't mean that you shouldn't use iDisk. See it as a free bonus feature. I use it to make files available to myself that I might need anywhere, anytime, such as bus schedules that are tedious to find on the web (French transportation web sites are like that). I also use it for backups, in the form of PGP encrypted packages. If I happen to need my .cshrc or latest writings in source form when I am not home, they are always waiting for me. And they have a very nifty web interface that looks almost like a Finder, except more elegant. If I didn't have a MobileMe subscription I'd probably find some other service that supports WebDAV and use FUSE to integrated it in the Finder. Can be done if you don't mind the extra work.
I like the idea of putting an encrypted DMG file system on iDisk. Disk Utility lets you do that. Such a file system looks just like a normal disk, except that it can live inside another filesystem - like iDisk - and it can be encrypted. Unfortunately, iDisk is not reliable.
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| Big files on iDisk |
I have never lost a file on my iDisk. The challenge is to get a file stored on iDisk. If it's small, there is usually no problem. But if it's moderately large, like tens or hundreds of megabytes, the upload has a significant chance of failing for no apparent reason. If it does, you get one of Apple's trademark infuriating notices like the one above. It tells you exactly nothing, and I have no idea what went wrong and what I can do to fix it. "A problem"? What problem? Trying again later is pretty much guaranteed to accomplish nothing but pop up another identical error dialog. Of course it's futile to press the question mark button, MacOS X is just as puzzled as you are. MacOS X is a joy to use while everything sails smoothly but it will abandon you so quickly that your ears pop when anything goes wrong.
Back to My Mac
Back to My Mac lets your local Finder show folders on a remote computer, if they are both connected to MobileMe. It is also a screen-sharing service, which shows the entire screen of your remote computer on your local screen.
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| Back to My Mac in the System Preferences |
Consider Skype, for example. Skype always works. If things aren't set up the way Skype prefers, it will work around the problem. It's so good at it that I suspect it would work just fine if your Internet connection is based on avian carriers. It's indestructible.
Back to My Mac is the opposite of Skype. Whoever designed it must have been a first-year CS student who is absolutely clueless about Internet protocols. He did every damned thing possible to make it impossible to set up. It's one of the finest displays of incompetence I have seen in the Apple world. It requires half a dozen ports, UDP and TCP, to be open in both firewalls. I know no other Internet protocol that is anywhere near as convoluted as Back to My Mac. No system administrator who wants to keep his job would ever dream of opening these ports for you, so Back to My Mac is never going to work anywhere it's needed: hotels, airports, cafés, or company networks. Granted, Back to My Mac will do the complex firewall setup for you using UPnP, but the first thing every sysdmin does is making dead sure that UPnP is disabled on the firewall, because if you do have it you might just as well throw the firewall out completely. I have no idea what Apple was smoking when they designed that, but they clearly never tested it under realistic circumstances.
I have a Mac in France and one in Germany, and I was hoping I could use Back to My Mac in this case. I control both firewalls, and with great trepidation I made the necessary changes to both. Even under these perfect, rare, and unlikely circumstances it works poorly. It's highly unreliable. Occasionally you might get a look at a folder, or perhaps a shared screen for a few minutes, but then something goes wrong and you need to kill it again.
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| Back to My Mac failed, as usual. Why? Nobody knows. |
Chicken of the VNC is a MacOS X application that also lets you work on a remote screen. It's not as good as Back to My Mac's screen sharing because it doesn't have progressive refinement and compression. This means that it's much slower, and often too sluggish to really use the remote screen. It does not suffer from the port problems described above though - as long as port 5900 is open on the remote side, it just works as it should.