Comments on: Free Alternative to MobileMe

By: rebipe

rebipe — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 03:18:50 +0000

“This means you have a Picasa account, even if you haven’t activated it. Just head over to picasaweb.google.com. Your storage is shared with your email (most people have about 7GB). If you need more space, it’s available for a reasonable rate (see my picasa post for more details).”
You can out more?

By: macman

macman — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 09:22:41 +0000

I found your article reassuring as i have a mobile me account plus a gmail account. My main beef is that apple have never got round to having more than 4 address formats in mobile me and (as is usual with mobile me) whenever it falls over – i am left having to re- format every single entry due to the perpetual sync conflict .

I am now going to try using just google system as i am due to renew mobile me in a month or so and if it all works okay then bye bye mobile me.

By: ab

ab — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 21:38:18 +0000

Hi Mike,
Sorry for the delayed response
- I think your multiple sync setup should work without you needing to do much else. As far as I’m aware, there isn’t a max number of sync-able devices.
- You can sign into mobile me from the preferences panel on your devices, creating your own little “skynet” and syncing your photos.
- I had a bit of luck getting non-standard toolbar icons using Command + drag. Careful though, this also allows you to remove stubborn icons (and I’d hate for you to be without another icon if my idea doesn’t work…)

Thanks for reading the blog and taking the time to comment.

~ab

By: Mike Mintz

Mike Mintz — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 06:46:39 +0000

I TOTALLY hear you on this post. After getting my new Macbook Pro last month I tried Mobile Me for the second time. I have about 21 days left in the free trial and have seriously been considering whether to keep it or not. As a big fan of Dropbox and Google Apps I’m just not sure I see the point.

The one thing that is keeping me from canceling right now is I’m not sure how the sync of mail, contacts, and calendar items works across Macs (we have 3 in the house, 2 of which I use regularly along with my iPhone and soon-to-be-acquired iPad). If I am using the same Google account across all 4 to 5 devices will the information sync when I open up Mail or iCal on different ones?

Also, I have tried to like Picassa for a few years now, but I do find the interface confusing, especially how it organizes photos for you. iPhoto is much cleaner and with the facial recognition I am liking it more and more. However, I cannot figure out how to get iPhoto to sync across machines either. Do I need to upload my photos to Mobile Me or is there a way to just indicate that each iPhoto on each device should point to a single Mobile Me account?

Finally, the big thing keeping me from jumping on as a paying customer for Mobile Me (and it may seem trivial but it’s important) – I cannot, for the life of me, figure out how to get an iDisk icon to appear in my menu bar. As you demonstrated above, Dropbox just puts it there when you install the application on your computer. For some reason Apple has no documentation on this (I’ve read about needing the file for the Library folder, etc. but it is not even clear where you’d get a file like this for idisk). Is there a way to get an idisk icon in the menu bar / task tray?

I know your post is about alternatives to Mobile Me, but if have any answers on these please let me know.

Thanks,

Mike