Apple’s MobileMe service had its fair share of growing pains when it launched back in July, but like The Beatles once said: “I’ve got to admit it’s getting better / a little better all the time.” Of course, on the same album they sang about cellophane flowers towering over your heads and rocking horse people eating marshmallow pies, so they’re not what you might call an iron-clad source.
Still, Apple would just like you to know that even if you don’t notice MobileMe getting better, they are working on it. To that end, they’ve gone ahead and published a list of improvements to the service that they rolled out back in late September. I enjoy their mildly passive-agressive explainer:
Since server-side updates are a bit more innocuous than a standard software update to Mac OS X or Microsoft Windows, it’s easy not to notice that updates are occurring. Usually the only hint of these updates is that things just “work better”.
Haven’t you noticed all the work we’ve been putting into this? Don’t you appreciate us? I mean, your dinner’s on the table when you get home every night, isn’t it? Why won’t you love us?
The improvements range from the major—“Re-enables the ability to export vCards from MobileMe contacts”—to the truly minor—“Improves page title when you only have one message in a mailbox”; that one’s for Inbox One fans. A couple of the fixes allude to both Firefox 3 and Internet Explorer 7, showing that Apple is intent upon having the service work well on more than just their own Safari.
From a personal standpoint, I admit I haven’t noticed most of these changes, which seem to largely be confined to the web interfaces. I did run into calendar syncing issues last week, which I ended up having to resolve by reseting my sync data, but since then, things have seemed pretty smooth for me. How about you, readers; how’s MobileMe been treating you lately?
I really haven't had any issues since the initial launch issues except that once in a while emails won't get pushed to my phone until I wake it up...
I wonder if one of their updates was to break my autologin? Hasn't worked since, oh, late September.
Only issue I've had *knocks on wood* is the same issue TJ Draper mentioned. It's annoying but I have a feeling its an issue with the phone. Not mine personally but just how the software works.
iDisk sync failed me this weekend when I really needed it. The service is useless at any price if I can't rely on it. It really doesn't do much for me anymore and I probably won't be renewing next summer unless they can make a compelling case for it. It's not a service they've ever really paid much attention to before. Maybe they will now? Who knows.
Overall, it's better than it was originally, but it still has hiccups. More than I liked, I would see M2 try to sync and somehow get stuck spinning and not include some new data element, or tell me there is a sync conflict with some old data that surprisingly showed up again. I've since set it to sync once a day when I'm not at home - it's enough for my purposes - but I'm still not confident that I could count on it 100%.
I haven't lost any mail for a long time, but I still regularly get other people's mail sent to me. Also I am still unable to receive mail if it's sent to one of my alias's, but only sometimes. so there is still definitely something wrong with the whole alias thing and addressing in general.
Calendars work but are useless because you can't use subscription calendars (what most everyone uses at this point)
Pffff.... MobileMe... a really stupid name.
I'm still receiving the inconsistent data message when trying to sync my contacts with my mac. This is completely unacceptable.
I did notice some slight improvements with the interface. It does play better with Internet Explorer 7 and in Firefox, it's pretty snappy. I just hope that they provide the option of sending a link to others to access a file in your iDisk. It says it's coming soon. How soon? We may never know.
What I'd like to know is when they're going to add the ability to email files stored on my iDisk (a feature they listed before and even after the launch of MobileMe).
What a coincidence! MobileMe is fixed and I experience my monthly disappearance of contacts!