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As my seventh and final day in my one-week experiment with MobileMe draws to a close, I find myself wondering why Apple would have set themselves up for failure like this. My week using the service has been anything but pleasant, and in fact I’ve found it to be a huge hindrance in my day to day activities.

This isn’t to say I don’t think MobileMe is a great idea. I’m a big fan of synchronization between my machines, and if I can expand that to my phone or other devices then all the better. The fundamental concept of MobileMe is sound, and I think it’s an idea that’s long overdue. One, integrated solution for keeping all your important stuff synced up and working. Great. I love it. Just make it work, and if you’re going to charge me for it, make it work better than the free services already out there.

I love the look of the web UI. It’s sleek and sexy, and it really looks like a desktop app being rendered inside your browser. With some fine tuning and elbow grease, I think Apple can certainly fix the issues it’s users a facing with it. It’s a new service, and bugs are to be expected; I just wish Apple would have spent a little less time making the UI pretty and a little more time adding useful features and making the ones already there, you know, work.

Another big concern I have with MobileMe is security. Nowhere on Apple’s site does it state how secure my data is in the cloud. Are they encrypting my bookmarks? How are they storing my settings? How about my mail? The fact that they don’t immediately recommend Outlook users enable SSL when they set up their account (as Gmail does) and the fact that the me.com web UI doesn’t support on HTTPS is truly frightening. iPhone and iPod Touch users aren’t able to tweak the security settings of their MobileMe configuration, so I question how secure that data is as it’s being passed over the airwaves as well.

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Another day with MobileMe passes. Lazy Sunday afternoon, with little traffic coming through the inbox. I played a little more with my Firefox mailto handler, trying what I could to make it work, but to no avail. I’ve given up on it. I can only hope Apple comes around and realizes how huge turn off this usability problem is. It takes so little work to hook into the OS to do this, but they chose not to spend the extra day to implement it. Ohy.

Third time I’ve gotten this message in the week I’ve been using the service. I have no idea why it crops up. If it’s due to servers being offline for maintenance, you’d think they’d have a less erroneous error to display. If you can’t validate an account, why not use the cached trial end date you clearly have stored somewhere? It’s not like any of the sync capacity could be used if someone simply faked their trial date; it’s controlled by the servers, not the client.

I’ve noticed one additional flaw with MobileMe Mail: it appears to “freeze” internally every so often, causing refreshes and new mail notifications to fail. Now, this is different from the whole-browser-freeze I’ve been ranting about since I started this challenge; this is strictly a backend thing. Things simply stop working. Haven’t found any specific rhyme or reason to it, but I can only assume it has to do with a server becoming unavailable on Apple’s end, and the client AJAX being unable to recover from failed connection attempts. Once again, Apple, just attach some damn timeout functions to your AJAX calls so you can track this stuff.

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I was hoping the discovery I’d made yesterday (using the Bubbles SSB as a MobileMe Mail container) would make things easier for day-to-day use, but it really hasn’t. With Gmail, I never had a problem just keeping a tab open for email, and using GTalk for mail notifications. In fact, it worked splendidly! MobileMe continually freezes Firefox 3 on all my machines, making the option of keeping it open in a tab impossible, and won’t work with the Gecko-based Prism SSB. What’s worse, I have no way of getting email notifications unless I run a desktop email client like Outlook, which I loathe doing with every fiber of my being.

Another problem I’ve noticed is that MobileMe doesn’t even try to set itself as the default email handler in Windows. It’s as if the Apple team tried to do the least amount of work possible on the Windows client. One solution I considered was using Firefox 3′s new web protocol handlers interface to set MobileMe as the default mail handler in the browser. It obviously wouldn’t work in Windows itself, but this would be the next best thing. Taking a demonstration I found on Lifehacker, I created this:

javascript:window.navigator.registerProtocolHandler("mailto","http://www.me.com/wo/WebObjects/Webmail2.woa/wa/DirectAction/emptyPage?action=compose&to=%s","MobileMe")

Don’t bother using it; it doesn’t work. It opens a MobileMe tab, but it doesn’t load the Mail Composer UI; just a blank page with the Mail toolbar. Herein lies the problem with web developers wielding AJAX without giving it some proper thought. Read my lips people, AJAX should be used to enhance a functional user experience, not to create it.

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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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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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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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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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