Evan Sims

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.

Continue Reading ‘A Week with MobileMe: Day Two’ …

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.

Continue Reading ‘A Week with MobileMe: Day One’ …

Automattic releases WordPress for iPhone

Guess where I am right now? OK, nowhere exciting, really; but I could blogging from anywhere now, because tonight Automattic- the company responsible for the WordPress blogging platform myself and most of the blogging community uses- has released WordPress for iPhone. It’s free to download from the App Store right now.

WordPress for iPhone isn’t the first method we’ve had for working with our blogs on the mobile device; there are a least a half dozen plugins for creating a more hospitable environment for managing your content on the iPhone, but quite honestly the quality of the ones I’d tried left a lot to be desired.

This app is polished, official and completely native, so you aren’t forced to work on your content from within Safari. Thus far everything I’ve played with has worked flawlessly, and the app is super responsive and smooth, even on very large posts like my previous Gotham Knight review. The app works for iPod Touch and iPhone users alike, but the latter gets several additional bells and whistles, like taking pictures with your phone’s camera and embedding them into new or existing blog entries from the same, integrated UI.

I love this app, and I think a lot if you will too. I believe we’ll be seeing a lot more mobile blogging coming thanks to this, and TypePad’s offering. One feature suggestion foe the next version? Use GPS and include the data as a custom meta variable. We could do all sorts of fun stuff with our archives and Google maps if we had that data inserted automatically for us.

Edit: Here’s an intro video from the website for those who aren’t familiar with the app.

Screenshots

Yesterday’s Apple Keynote in 60 seconds

Awesome. I dig the iPhone 3G changes, and love the price tag for the Touch upgrade; MobileMe sounds really great, though it’s lack of support for non-Safari browsers in it’s bookmark sync makes it a no-go for me. I suppose you could couple it with other options, like Foxmarks, but I love an integrated option. Also, Apple’s choice in the “me” font brought back some very bad memories for me.

Here’s the full video, complete with exceedingly boring third party app demos, for the masochists among us.

Getting FolderShare for Mac to Play Nice

I’ve been using Microsoft’s FolderShare (now Windows Live FolderShare blah blah blah) service for years now, and I’ve got to admit that as much as I hate most of Microsoft’s Live apps, FolderShare is one utility that I couldn’t live without. Well, OK- I could, but I wouldn’t want to.

My recent addition of a shiny new MacBook Air to the household introduced an odd problem; while my Mac Pro has never had issues syncing files to the PCs in the house using FolderShare, the Air refused to do so. After some cursing, I did a bit of Googling and came across the solution.

Disable FolderShare encryption across all the Macs and PCs you want to sync. Yep.

Now, don’t ask me why my Mac Pro didn’t have the problem with encryption; both machines run Leopard, and neither have their Firewalls enabled. In any case, disabling encryption solves the problem, though I’m not at all a fan of the fact that my data is getting tossed around in plain text now. I suppose I could funnel everything through my Hamachi network to encrypt it, but… bleh.

Anyway, there’s the solution, Mr. Googler with a Mac. Hopefully Microsoft will fix the problem sooner rather than later, but if their track record with FolderShare updates is any indication I wouldn’t hold my breath. I’m hoping to get a Dropbox invite to see if it’s a worthy replacement. Stay tuned on that.