Exhaust fumes have exhausted me

the city animal

Time to call the chinaman.

I’ve tried out Apples 80€ MobileMe service and wanted to highlight the actual benefits for creative professionals. I don’t need an easy way to create simple websites or a new way to share photo’s and movies. But MobileMe has grown to be much more than that since its launch in 2000, then named “iTools” and later “.Mac“.

Features can be broken down to 2 groups: online storage for your data / media and keeping them in sync between Macs, PCs, phones and iPods. If you work mostly on 1 computer and swear by that indestructible Nokia 1100, there’s cheaper or free ways to get online storage. But imagine arriving at at your clients office with your laptop, only to discover you left that last version of your design at home. Or scheduling a meeting over the phone, suddenly thinking your most recent calendar is on the other computer.

None of the technologies in MobileMe are new, they’re just easy to set up. If you work for a large company, chances are they’re using MS Exchange to work the magic. That’s why MobileMe is often referred to as “Exchange for the rest of us“.

Here’s what I love about MobileMe in order of importance:

• Syncing calendars, contacts and bookmarks wirelessly between computers and phones. If you want to create events and contacts on several devices, this is the way to go. Synchronization is automatic whenever something changes. If you hate connecting your phone using cables watching the progress bar for 5 minutes, you’ll love this.
• 10Gb email without changing addresses. IMAP mail folders stay in sync if you modify them with different email applications. I kept my old address tied to my domain sworl.be, but I’m using this 10Gb to keep my entire email archive online, so I can pull up old project or client info when on the road. It’s nide to have data in the cloud, it’s nicer to have local cache on top of that. My provider’s down 1 day per year on average.
• “Back to my Mac“ allows you to access files on your home computer whereever you are. It shows up in your network, as if you’re at the office. All volumes mounted on this computer are accessible. You can even see the screen of the other computer and work on it. I work with 3D animations that take hours to create. Now I can see how the images are coming along, modify settings and restart the calculation. In the past, I would have lost 8 hours of work. If you own an Apple router (Airport) with network hard disks connected to it, you can even mount these.
• 10Gb of online storage that integrates with your Mac (Finder) or PC (Explorer). There’s an easy way to share (large) files with clients and friends using passwords. You can see all files with a browser or your phone. They even throw in a free backup application that can do stuff like “backup all my preferences and files containing the word client”.
• Syncing password keychains. Extremely handy when surfing the web on your phone: it fills out passwords for you.
• Find your iPhone on a map with any browser, make it ring or show a message. Quick way to find your phone if you put it under a pillow. Or when it gets stolen, you can erase all data remotely.

You may have seen free alternatives to many of these features, but at 80€ this package is a sweet deal. There’s a 2 month free trial, but be warned: MobileMe tends to become indispensable very quickly, like most other Apple gear, meaning you’ll fork over 80€ every year to keep your cloud-data.