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.

Another minor annoyance is the Contacts tab. If I browse to the section in Firefox 3 while it’s maximized, the site move my entire browser window by anywhere from 5-30 pixels away from the top and left. This doesn’t occur if you hit the page when the window is in a non-maximized state, but I almost never browse like that. I like my screen real estate. Is anyone else encountering this? I haven’t had it happen on any of the other MobileMe tabs, just Contacts.

Afternoon — Decided to install Outlook this afternoon on my laptop, as the MobileMe Mail interface has proven itself to be quite crippling to me for daily use. I’ll continue to use the web UI on my desktop. I’d forgotten how much I hate Outlook. It’s already locked up twice. Sigh. At least I’ll be able to get new mail notifications with Outlook, when it works. I’m surprised MobileMe’s IMAP interface doesn’t force SSL. No POP3 support as far as I can see, either.

Can I go back to Gmail now? Please?

Evening — Warming up to the web UI a bit tonight. It may lack a lot of basic functionality you’d expect, but you can’t deny it’s beautiful and simple. Still trying to get Outlook to play nice, unsurprisingly.

As my good friend Jim so eloquently brought to my attention, Calendar events don’t support alerts. That’s a huge, glaring flaw… ouch.

Read my thoughts from day one, two three, four, five, six or seven.