Apple has finally assembled a set of features for its hosted MobileMe service that makes it worth its subscription fee for the right user. As a critic of the service in the past, I find myself with naught but praise these days.

The purple Ws denote using the web interface, the red Xs denotes using Webdav disk or other method to access documents on iDisk.

Notice that there’s one component I choose to keep consistent across every item: calendars. It’s amazing that any change made on any of the 10 devices will show up on the others in just a minute or two. Yes, it “just works”.

And setup is a breeze. Tying this all together was little more than visiting a system preference on the Macs, logging into MobileMe, and checking a few boxes. On the iPhone it’s pretty much the same, and on the PC there’s a MobileMe control panel to install. You set, then forget, it just keeps in sync after that; I never have to think about it.

I’m not even using every sync feature. I could also sync Dashboard widgets and Preferences across the Macs. I don’t do so only because the varying screen sizes means I use different widgets and prefs on these machines.

Further, I use other features not listed on the chart, like the excellent “Find my iPhone”, and the ability to wipe data off a device. I have these features enabled on all four mobile devices. It’s great.

Some people balk at MobileMe because they claim Google or Yahoo or Microsoft provide email, contacts and calendars for free. True, but MobileMe does so using powerful native apps on Macs and the iPhone, and is so much more than just email anyway.

Bottom line is I’d have to collect numerous third-party apps (e.g., mail, drop box, Google sync, etc.) to try to get all the above items in sync, and they still wouldn’t cover all the bases or be anywhere near as easy to administer. I consider MobileMe a bargain, and can’t imagine my computing/mobile life without it.

Posted via email from The Small Wave.

Next up in my discovery series on Snow Leopard is MobileMe. Apple didn’t talk about it much for this upgrade, but I’m writing about it because I ran into a frustrating snag, and found a great new option.

Bad News First

I keep a local iDisk on both my Macs. I use the data on whichever machine I want, and never worry about it being current because MMe keeps it all in sync. The beauty of this approach to Cloud computing is that I’m not at the whim of the Cloud in terms of whether performance is slow, or if I can even log in at all. Further, since I’m using local data I get great performance, and can use desktop apps with capabilities that exceed Cloud alternatives.

Since I launch some apps via documents, I kept a handful of document aliases in the iDisk’s Documents folder. These aliases would point to the correct local file no matter which Mac I opened them from. Not any more.

On Snow Leopard, if I used an alias on one machine, the other would balk when it tried to sync it. I could override it, but the resulting synced file was garbage text instead of a functioning alias for that machine. It took some experimentation with three different aliases to confirm this was the problem. I could no longer get a good alias for one machine if it worked on the other.

To get around this, I deleted the aliases from iDisk and created them locally on each machine. They don’t sync, of course, but they don’t need to.

This really isn’t a big deal, but it was frustrating today as I tried to figure out what was going on. Anyway, since I deleted the aliases iDisk syncs have been fine. No more errors and all seems well.

And Now For The Good News

Personally, I think Apple should have shouted from the rooftops that MobileMe iDisk syncing has a new option:

This is great. I don’t get a lot of sync errors, but when I do I can’t think of a single time that I didn’t take the most recent version of the file. From now on, if the sync issue is due to a time discrepancy I won’t even be bothered.

I understand the idea behind any discrepancy stopping the process and prompting the user, but I also believe that some of the prompts are overkill. In my opinion, having the option to always use the most recent file is a great addition.

I plugged it into iTunes, and saw the (common) message that it needed activation and that could take a while. I’d read this could take up to two days, so I kind of expecetd it. No biggie, since I could still sync it, put it on WiFI, etc.

I took the option to restore it from the latest backup (of my current iPhone). This worked great, with all my apps brought over, including all my settings and their positions on the various home screens. Connecting it to my home WiFi network, my Microsoft Exchange account asked for a password, and it was all set. MobileMe did as well, but it claimed it could not get a secure connection to the server. The Inbox worked, but I could not see or interact with any other folders in my account.

Without MobileMe I don’t have bookmarks, contacts, etc., but I used Safari to browse to some sites and could see the speed improvements. Then I tried Tweetie and it failed. Like MobileMe, it could not get a secure connection. So I deleted it, thinking maybe it just needed re-installing. To re-install it I went to the App Store. Connecting there was fast, and so was browsing, but when I went to purchase Tweetie it failed because it could not get a secure connection.

So I have a phone on my own WiFi network that somehow cannot connect securely. I’ve tried:

• Turning off SSL for MobileMe email, but it still won’t connect.
• Blowing away the MobileMe account and re-added it, but that was no help.
• Double-checking all network settings, but everything is fine (and matches my existing phone which works great).
• Turning off 3G and hard-resetting the device. No help.

I do not know if — and do not see why — activation would have any bearing on secure connections via WiFi, but at this point I’ve decided not to trouble-shoot the secure connection issue any further until the phone is activated and I verify the problem persists.

So I’m waiting…

It’s been nearly 24 hours and I’m waiting.

[UPDATE:] I visited my local AT&T and they got it activated. That’s the good news. The bad news is that — as I feared — this didn’t address the secured network connection issue. So I’ve now got a valid phone but no contacts, email, bookmarks, etc.

[UPDATE #2:] After resetting Network Connections and a few other tricks failed, I found a forum post that said to click OK on the initial error about an invalid certificate, and then just wait. According to the post, it would take a while but the phone would chew on it and apparently reset its certificate. Well, it worked, and everything is working now. To be honest, I think I had done that yesterday, so it’s possible it only worked in conjunction with many other things I tried today.

• Password protection
• An expiration date for the link

Then you key in the email address(es) of those you want to share the file with, and they’d get an email with a download link. 

It all looked pretty slick, but there was just one little thing wrong: When MobileMe went live, this feature was MIA. 

Read the rest of this article on theAppleBlog >>

Contacts, calendars, and bookmarks on a Mac automatically sync within a minute of the change being made on the computer, another device, or the web at me.com.

So we now have “push” for those items on the desktop, as we’ve always had on the Web and the iPhone. That’s good news.

However, the MobileMe changes go deeper than that. Apple didn’t just change Contacts, Calendars and Bookmarks to “push” distribution (for Macs only), they changed the sync times for all items in the MobileMe control panel, and also made changes to the MobileMe service itself. Let’s take a look…

Read the rest of this article on theAppleblog >>

Doesn’t “push” your email instantly, rather every 15 minutes.

This is wrong. In this article I’ll touch on what gets synced with MobileMe, when it occurs, and why I’m happy with it. 

Read the rest of this article on theAppleBlog >>

To be sure, Mr. Stallman and others make valid points in that if you trust your data to the cloud, where is your control? Where are your options in case of failure? If the entity has a catastrophic error, you could be in a world of hurt.

Read the rest of this article on theAppleBlog >>

The article link in the email points here. 

At this rate, I may never need to renew my subscription.

Like many people, I subscribe to a holidays calendar and, perhaps not like many people, a moon phases calendar. I wanted these back on my iPhone, and on the new Calendar web app as well.

Doing this is actually easy, it consists of bringing the calendar in as local instead of subscription:

1) Select a subscription calendar.

2) Choose File/Export… and use the standard dialog box to create a local iCal (.ics) file on your Mac with a slightly different name then the subscribed calendar.

3) Choose File/Import… to import the iCal file you just created. The Mac will ask which calendar you want to add the events to, choose New Calendar. It will create a new local calendar with the same name as the file.

4) Right-click the subscription calendar and delete it.

5) Now you can assign the calendar a color and then let them sync up to the web app and iPhone.

There’s a couple things I’d like to point out:

• I have issues with MobileMe whole-calendar syncing to the iPhone. For both my iPhones I needed to turn OFF calendar syncing, then turn it back ON, before the new calendars appeared. Given the variation in MobileMe issues, YMMV.
• The supposed advantage of subscribing to a calendar (e.g., it’s maintained by someone else, always current, etc.) are obviously lost when you make them local. However, in my case we’re talking US Holidays and Moon Phases. The latter does not change, and the former rarely so. Further, they extend into the future longer than I’m likely to be using them.

While the number of calendars you can subscribe to is broad, how many do you really need to keep on a subscription basis? Just as well to have them local as far as I’m concerned.

I’m happy to have both these calendars back on my iPhone, and it took just a few minutes. It was so easy even I could do it.

This was a good idea, and they seem to be “coming clean” with some details of the extent of the damage caused so far. For example, in referring to the infamous 1% of users with no email access: 

As of today a team was able to restore limited web access to those accounts so the affected members can use their browsers to read mail that has arrived since last Friday (though not before) as well as send and receive new mail. The team has already begun rolling out restoration of full access for all the accounts and expect to finish by the end of next week. We particularly regret to report the loss in the affected accounts of approximately 10% of the messages received between July 16 and July 18.

Not the best of news, but better than Apple’s communicated so far. Another interesting tidbit is this: 

We’ve since added server capacity and tuned our software to scale better — i.e. behave more gracefully when traffic spikes. The team has also fixed over 70 bugs…

They’ve already added server capacity? They only launched two weeks ago, yet they had servers sitting around available for adding? Either they got those servers in place very fast — and clearly miscalculated what was needed at launch — or they launched without all the servers online. 

I’ve subscribed to the feed and am anxious to see what updates we get in the coming days.

Compared to the 1% above my problems are minor (but quite annoying), and in total they harm the MobileMe experience. Further, it’s hard to be comfortable with this system knowing that some people are getting rocked by it. Until the system truly settles down, there’s no particular reason to think any subscribed account couldn’t be next.

Walt Mossberg and David Pogue both blasted Apple on this today. Even the extremely pro-Apple MacDailyNews site had this to say in their “take” on Pogue’s article (emphasis theirs):

We’re pulling all ads for MobileMe until further notice. If we miss some or one of them slips through via third-party ad network, please do not subscribe to MobileMe until Apple gets their act together. We’ll resume running ads for MobileMe when we’re more confident in the service.

I’m “happy” about this only in the sense that it was absolutely necessary. My concern is that it took so long for these people to come on board. I’ve been through enough product rollouts to see this one stank pretty much from the get go. It was not difficult to see something major was happening here, and that we weren’t just talking about version 1.0-type glitches.

This kind of bad publicity is necessary because, as the smoke cleared from the super duper major almost-everyone-is-getting-them-issues, Apple tried to breath a sigh of relief with their apology and 30-day extension. Yet all they’d done is peel back the first layer of onion to reveal more layers of rot underneath that, while perhaps not affecting everybody, were just as major. Even now, their simplistic status implying there are only email issues, and only for 1% of users, is absolute nonsense.

Apple has a bona-fide crisis on its hands, and deservedly so. I wonder what they’re gonna do about it…

I’ve made no secret of the fact that the MobileMe rollout was a disaster. It isn’t over yet.

Apple’s apologies (one to all users, another to trial subscribers erroneously billed early) were the right thing to do, and I appreciate Apple for doing it. And of course their 30-day subscriber extensions (one each to the two groups above) are also a great gesture.

But I can’t help thinking that despite Apple implying the problems are all behind them, they made the extensions for 30 days because they figured they’d need a month to sort this mess out.

To be sure, they’ve made good progress:

• Totally unusable performance on the web apps has been fixed (for me) since Monday. I find performance now to be good, even better than the old .Mac.
• Push email was down for me one day only, and had been fine until the subject of this post, though the current outage isn’t about Push so much as it is email in general.
• My iWeb hosted family web site was all but garbage, and couldn’t be published to, until today. (My last check was Thursday night so this could have been fixed yesterday).

But I’m still having issues. And from reading numerous message boards and discussions it’s clear that some things working for me do not work for others, and vice versa. I think what Apple has managed to do is get past the more or less global issues, but as near as I can tell they still have a lot of fires to put out:

• Address auto-correction in the Mail web app. You may have all your email addresses memorized, but I don’t. Without auto-correct it’s near unusable. The workaround would be to at least call up the address book from within Mail, but earlier this week that just generated an error message, and starting a couple days ago the button is grayed out! I can still reply to an existing email easy enough, but if I wanted to email a few people it would be tedious at best using web Mail.
• Bookmarks do not push, and never have. Mail, Contacts, and Calendars push just fine, but Bookmarks do not.
• Calendar colors do not work. My calendar is green, but I just get the same ol’ blue on the iPhone.
• Calendars subscribed to do not push. This seems to be one remaining global issue.
• The Account page says there is a problem with my credit card. There is not.

For any one jumping in to tell me it works fine for you, or what I can do to “fix” these, please read the following carefully:

“It works for me.”

Great, I’m happy for you. Really. But as I’ve already explained there are plenty of people seeing the same issues I’m seeing (and many seeing issues I’m not). There’s a lot here for Apple to sort out.

“Here’s how to fix it.”

Suggestions are appreciated, but bear in mind that Apple’s published support tips on this and I’ve done them all. Further, I’ve tried things that seem to have worked for some people in the discussion forums. So before you suggest what to do be aware that among other things I have:

• Turned on and off syncing on the iPhone numerous times.
• Blown away the old .Mac acount and created a brand new MobileMe account. (I tried this twice.)
• Done numerous Sync “resets” (from the Mac to cloud and vice versa).
• For the Calendar color issue I stopped iPhone pushing, changed the color of the calendar on the web app, watched that color push to the Mac (iCal) just fine. Changed it on the web back to my preferred color, again watched it push to the Mac, and then turned iPhone syncing back on. But, no, just the same ol’ boring blue.
• Verified, re-verified, and triple-verified settings, etc. on the iPhone (let’s face it, there arean’t that many to begin with).

Of all my remaining problems the web Mail address book issue is the biggest. It makes web Mail difficult to use for new emails. Next in line would be Bookmark pushing. Not sure why the other three items push so well but Bookmarks do not. I get around this issue because Bookmark syncing with iTunes still works.

I should say that, when the pieces work, MobileMe is a thing of beauty. Now that the web sites are finally fixed, even in its current state it’s useful, and its potential when Apple gets everything ironed out is phenomenal.

There’s little question that, aside from me being the “1%” right now, Apple has come a long way in the MobileMe mess. That’s good. But there’s still more to fix and, frankly, I’d then need to see it functioning consistently for a while before I would breathe easy about this thing.

Finally, I was finishing this article when I noticed Apple’s MobileMe Support page says MMe will be down for maintenance for three hours starting tonight:

To implement the system they predicted six hours and it became around 41 (for me). Let’s hope this three hours doesn’t become 20. Seriously, I’m glad to see it’s going down for maintenance in that maybe some of the above will be rectified.

Bummer.

When I updated my system to MobileMe, I was kind of surprised that the Sync settings in the MobileMe system preference were no different than for .Mac. You could turn it off, pick a time period, or set it to “Automatically”. Where was the setting for “Push”?

Turns out there isn’t one. Your Mac still syncs the old fashioned way.

What does that mean? Simplest way to explain it is just to demo it yourself. When you have an iPhone (with 2.0 software set to push) and you’re at your Mac, do this:

1. Open your calendar on the iPhone, and on your Mac open both iCal and the MobileMe web app calendar. Make sure you can see all three calendars at the same time.
2. Add a meeting to the calendar via the iPhone.
3. Wait 10-20 seconds, and see the new meeting show up in the other two places (in this case the web app and iCal).
4. Delete the new meeting via the web app.
5. Wait 10-20 seconds, and see the new meeting deleted in the other two places.
6. Add a new meeting in iCal.
7. Wait for 10 seconds, 60 seconds, 2 minutes, etc., up to as much as 15 minutes, and you’ll eventually see the new meeting added in the other two places.

The above works the same way for Contacts as well.

Why is this? Well, the “Automatically” setting of MobileMe is not a continuous “push” as you might think, but rather a frequent check every 15 minutes. Go figure.

So, if you’re sitting at your Mac with your iPhone, and you want to add something and have it show up on all your computers, iPhones, and the web ASAP, use the iPhone or the web app. Strangely enough, using the Mac’s native apps to enter your data is now the slowest way to spread it to all your devices!

I have one .Mac account and purchased an additional email account, so how did I do it?

With .Mac and the old iPhone OS I accomplished sharing via the following:

• iPhone A synced everything with the iMac, and the iMac’s .Mac system preference synced everything up to the cloud. This phone/Mac combination was the “master”.
• iPhone B synced everything with the MacBook, and the MacBook’s .Mac preference (with my login credentials) synced only Calendars and Contacts. Meanwhile, the Mail app on the MacBook used the additional purchased .Mac mail account.

In this manner, phone A/iMac and phone B/MacBook each had unique emails, bookmarks, preferences, widgets, dock settings, music, videos, etc., but contacts and calendars were identical.

When a change was made on either iPhone or either Mac, a lot of syncing had to take place. It wasn’t too uncommon that something was entered on one device and, because it wasn’t synced, didn’t get to the other device(s) for a day or two. Still, it worked well.

Then came the MobileMe announcement and the promise of Push. Ah, the joy of not having to mess as much with manual syncing any more.

Setting up phone A was a snap, it uses my credentials and pushes everything. Works very well. However, phone B has a different MobileMe account (for the unique email), so if I turn on push calendars and contacts they’re empty! So I set it back to the manual sync above and gave it some thought…

What I ended up doing was this:

• As mentioned, phone A/iMac used my MobileMe credentials and was set to push everything. The iMac uses the MobileMe preference to sync everything up to the cloud as before.
• On phone B, I added a second MobileMe account. This account uses my credentials and pushes only calendars and contacts (obviously, the MobileMe account for email has calendars and contacts turned off). The MacBook uses the MobileMe preference (logging in with my credentials) to sync calendars and contacts as before.

Above is Phone A. “MyMail” is one MobileMe account using my credentials to push mail, contacts, and calendars.

Above is Phone B. “Mail” is one MobileMe account using the purchased additional email account. “Contacts & Calendars” is a second MobileMe account using my credentials and pushing contacts and calendars.

It works! Now both phones push calendars and contacts to the same place! The MacBook for phone B still syncs bookmarks, music, and all the other unique data back and forth via iTunes, but calendars and contacts are shared between all four devices and have all the advantages push offers.

So it’s a happy ending, right? Well, yes, but there is one issue. It seems that the iPhone will only allow one push MobileMe account. Since I push the account for calendars and contacts, it will not let me push the account that does email. I can only fetch. In other words, phone B has the same ol’ “check for it” email it used to have. Kind of a bummer, but that’s far less an issue for that phone than all the hassle of syncing calendars and contacts.

Soon I’ll write about how I put on the iPhone 2.0 software this morning, and have been running it all day. It went smoothly and works wonderfully. 

I’ll write that Exchange sync works great (just email, I’m not using it for contacts or calendars). 

I’ll write that the new MobileMe “push” services work great so far. Tried emails, contacts and calendars and it’s working just like it’s designed. That is, comparing the phone to my desktop apps I can see data entered in either place move back and forth. 

I’ll write about the App store and how sweet it is, and that the new freebie Remote app is so cool. 

But that will all come later, for now I just want to say to Apple that the MobileMe site was up early today, and then shut down (I didn’t try it then). Now it’s back up and, Apple, you should shut it down again. Quickly. Before you become the laughingstock of the industry. 

S-L-O-W. Disgustingly and embarrassingly slow. Setting new world records in slowness. So slow that, for all practical purposes, it’s unusable. And that’s the good news, because at least when it’s slow it’s working. I have yet to get contacts to pull up on this thing. I get calendars — sometimes — but then get server crashes. Or Safari will tell me it can’t display the page. It’s a miserable experience

Apple, shut it down and fix it. Google and Microsoft are both laughing their asses off at your first real step into cloud computing. They may have been a little worried yesterday. Not now.

[UPDATE:] Not very long after I wrote this post the MobileMe site was shut down again. Good. Apple has stated that everything about MobileMe is working except the web aps, but the push features that worked for me all day today are no longer functioning, and other people are having issues as well. This is more than just the web apps. 

Meanwhile, to keep informed about if MobileMe is up just check here.

[UPDATE #2:] As of noon on 7/11, things are no better with MobileMe than yesterday. Apple’s having a bad day today, what with their app store and activation servers getting barraged with requests. No surprise there, and I do not believe Apple should add hundreds of servers just to get over the peaks this weekend. All the issues related to activity will sort themselves out over time, and do not necessarily point to any bugs on Apple’s (or AT&T’s) part (though I think Apple should have staggered the 2.0 availability, i.e., roll out the iPhone 3G for a week and then make the 2.0 software available for the 2G unit). 

However, the MobileMe fiasco does not fit into the above category of issues with the new iPhone, software, and App Store. This is not about server activity because only valid .Mac subscribers and trials would be accessing the servers. And yet Apple’s been at it now for over 40 hours!! There is a problem there. I don’t know what it is, but it’s big, and they can’t seem to find it.