Evan Sims

A Week with MobileMe: Day Four

Once again much of my day was consumed with class. I’ve had a few emails trickle through that required attention, but most of the day I haven’t touched things.

I discovered a site-specific browser (SSB) app for Windows today called Bubbles. Just as Fluid does for Mac users, Bubbles allows you to create instanced browsers devoted to specific web pages. They sit on your desktop or system tray, and look and behave much like a standard desktop application. Their guts are your web services, though. Bubble’s site has scripts for Facebook, Gmail, Google Reader, and others, but I decided to give it a try with MobileMe as a workaround to the issues I face with Mail locking up Firefox. It works, though you will get a few nag notifications that you shouldn’t be using Internet Explorer with the service (which is a bit absurd, honestly), as Bubbles uses an embedded version of IE rather than Gecko or WebKit, as Prism and Fluid do. This works great, and allows me to keep an open instance of Mail in my system tray at all times.

Honestly, the two big usability issues I’m facing with Mail’s web UI right now are these: no new mail notifications, and no mailto: link integration with the OS. Apple already has the MobileMe control panel and background service running on my machine, so why not do this? It’s extremely simple to do, and would add so much value to the software.

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The X-Files: I Want to Believe

Stopped by the theater this afternoon and caught the second X-Files film, “I Want to Believe.” I was really excited for this one. I was a big X-Files fan back in the day, so the thought of a second stab at a big screen X-Files adaption was thrilling. The first movie, as you may remember, received universally bad reviews; it kind of summarized everything that went wrong with the show in the last 2 or 3 seasons.

I Want to Believe takes a step back from the “epicness” of the previous film, and instead presents us with a more down to earth (literally), enjoyable story very much along the lines of a traditional X-Files episode. This film centers around three factors: an organ-snatching Russian and his husband (yes, they’re gay), a pedophile physic priest (say that 3 times fast) and, most shockingly of all, the relationship between Mulder and Scully.

First, let’s discus the story. It was very creepy, but not in a supernatural sense, which was a nice change. It boils down to this: an FBI agent is abducted, and a priest claiming to have psychic visions of the event approaches the Bureau, telling them that he can help them track her down. The lead in charge of the investigation isn’t particularly comfortable with the idea of psychics, so they ask Mulder to come in and consult for them. By this time Mulder and Scully have long been out of the FBI game; Scully is a Doctor at Our Lady of Sorrows hospital, and Mulder has been hiding out at their home, dodging the FBI. Yeah, they live together. Even shows them in bed together. Weird, given the incredibly ambiguous relationship the two had throughout the TV series. A nice change, though.

Mulder gets right back into the swing of the things and becomes obsessed with the case, while Scully finds herself unwilling to get completely involved. In fact, a good deal of the film deals with the lovers quarrel that arises from Mulder’s devotion to the case. It’s nice to see the writers giving the relationship some real depth here.

The acting was pretty great, with one exception. Callum Rennie (you might recognize him as Number Two on Battlestar Galactica) does a fantastic and pretty frightening job of his role, and Gillian Anderson has really come a long way from the actress we were introduced to in the early days of the X-Files. Billy Connolly, who has long been one of my favorite performers, does a unnervingly good job of making you feel bad for the child molesting, eye-bleeding psychic priest. David Duchovny was… well, David Duchovny. I’ve never found his acting to be anything to write home about, but he’s the Fox Mulder we’ve all grown to love. My only complaint was with Amanda Peet. Her dialog felt dry, as it always does. Not sure how she keeps landing jobs, but I guess some people can get by on looks alone.

So, how did I feel about the film overall? I liked it, more or less. The story was interesting, and they didn’t try to go over the top like they did before. They stayed true to the traditional X-Files formula and it worked well. I do feel the whole thing was drawn out a bit too long, and they could easily have shaved a good 20-30 minutes off for my taste, but beyond that I didn’t have any major complaints.

I give it a 3.5/5 —

A Week with MobileMe: Day Three

Day three of using MobileMe was fairy unexciting, as much of my day revolved around Calculus homework and running out to do errands.

I was hoping I might be able to use Mozilla Prism to place MobileMe Mail into a seperate Gecko instance, and thus have a workaround to the lockup issues I’m experiencing with the service under Firefox 3. Unfortunately, Apple has chosen to use browser sniffing and a broken JavaScript redirect method that makes this impossible, at least in my experiments. Unfortunately using more robust SSBs like Fluid is not an option in this experiment, as it is Mac-only. Hey Todd, I don’t suppose there’s any chance of a Windows port, eh? ;)

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A Week with MobileMe: Day Two

Day two of my week with mobileme challenge has begun…

Morning — MobileMe and I were off to bad start yesterday, and I can’t say this morning as been much better. I woke up to find a MobileMe pop-up on each of my systems, informing me that my trial had expired. Clearly this wasn’t the case, given that I have 59 days left of said trial. Attempting to sync manually didn’t resolve the issue, but a reboot appears to have done the trick.

I’m encountering two other rather obnoxious issues with Mail, as if the rest weren’t enough. It appears each time Mail does an AJAX refresh (every couple minutes, I think) it locks up Firefox for a good 20-30 seconds. At first I thought this might be an incompatibility with Firebug so I disabled it, but it hasn’t resolved the issue. I haven’t encountered this problem with any other site, let alone Gmail which works in a similar fashion in the backend.

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A Week with MobileMe: Day One

Thinking about switching over to MobileMe? I’ve been pondering the logistics of moving all my stuff over to MobileMe since they announced the service, and today I decided to give it a try. I’m committing myself to a one-week challenge with this, and I’ll chronicle my ups and downs on this blog as I use the service exclusively for email, contacts and calendar.

I’ll play with the file hosting, but it’s unlikely I’ll touch the photo or bookmark sync; for photos I already have SmugMug and Flickr and am very happy with both, and unfortunately MobileMe does not support bookmarking syncing for Firefox, so I’ll continue to use the excellent Foxmarks extention for that.

My Configuration

I will not be testing this on my Macs; I consider the data on those systems too mission critical for an experiment like this. Instead, I’ll be using my Windows XP Desktop and Laptop. In the interests of fully testing the software in a Windows environment, I will likely load Vista in a virtual machine on my laptop to give the software a try in that environment. I won’t be picking up my iPhone 3G until next month at the earliest, so this experiment will be running on my iPod Touch instead. Touch users have the same experience as iPhone users for MobileMe, so you can interchange my experiences on the Touch with the iPhone.

The Format

I’ll make a new post each day, and will update that post continually with my discoveries and experiences with the service as I encounter them.

Day One Begins

Signed up for 60 day trial of MobileMe. Process was very simple, only a two pages and a few fields to fill in. Got the PCs, Mac and iPod Touch setup with the system in less than 5 minutes. First disappointment, they don’t support Firefox bookmark sync.

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