[llamalord13]

After the 60 day free trial, how much is it to have a .Mac account? I want to use the iWeb application and publish it. Thanks you for any help.

[TETENAL]

Apple .Mac

[Art Vandelay]

You can get it cheaper from other retailers. Amazon.com sells it for $79. If you're buying a new Mac soon, you can get it for $69 with the purchase of a new Mac.

It's also rumored that a .Mac upgrade is happening tomorrow at Apple's Mac event, since it's going offline during the event. So, it might be prudent to wait till tomorrow to see what happens.

[rickey939]

I hope .Mac get's upgraded tomorrow.....way, WAY overdue.

[kman42]

Let's hope we get iCal/iPhone OTA sync through .Mac and push email, in addition to the other much needed .mac upgrades.

[Randman]

Originally Posted by rickey939 

I hope .Mac get's upgraded tomorrow.....way, WAY overdue.

Agreed, especially since my renewal is coming up soon.

[Gankdawg]

Originally Posted by Randman 

Agreed, especially since my renewal is coming up soon.

Mine comes up in July every year.

[frdmfghtr]

Originally Posted by kman42 

Let's hope we get iCal/iPhone OTA sync through .Mac and push email, in addition to the other much needed .mac upgrades.

That would be enough for me to make .mac my primary e-mail and subscribe.

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by llamalord13 

After the 60 day free trial, how much is it to have a .Mac account? I want to use the iWeb application and publish it. Thanks you for any help.

You want to publish iWeb? That is illegal.

[Brass]

NB: You don't need .Mac to publish web sites from iWeb. It is certainly a lot easier with .Mac, but I do it without .Mac for my wife and daughter's sites. You simply publish it to a local folder then upload that folder to your web server (FTP, SSH, whatever). I use rsyc so that I don't have to upload the entire contents every time (actually, I developed a Cocoa app to do it all for me by drag-and-drop).

[wulf]

.mac has been upgraded to 10 GB storage. I haven't noticed any other changes.

[besson3c]

Commercial broadband upload speed is generally so slow, I don't see why this would be a terribly compelling feature, but that's just me...

[-Q-]

The storage space upgrade is well overdue. The iPhone integration is nice. But I'm not seeing a whole lot other than that, unless I've missed something?

[jamiemcf]

I wanna know, if I buy the .Mac pack from Amazon at $80 will I get the upgrades to 10GB and stuff? Or is it only with new packs bought from today onwards at Apple?

[rickey939]

Pretty lame .Mac upgrades in my opinion, oh well...

[Art Vandelay]

Originally Posted by jamiemcf 

I wanna know, if I buy the .Mac pack from Amazon at $80 will I get the upgrades to 10GB and stuff? Or is it only with new packs bought from today onwards at Apple?

Everyone gets it.

[wulf]

The only other new thing I've seen is "Personal Domains", on the account page:

Personal Domain

If you own a web domain, you can enjoy one-click publishing from iWeb '08 directly to your personal web address by having .Mac host your domain name.

To use .Mac with your personal domain, you will need:

• A registered domain name that you control
Use the domain registrar of your choice. .Mac does not sell domain names.

• iWeb '08 installed on your Mac
iWeb '08 is part of iLife '08. Don't have it? You can buy it at the Apple Store.

[rickey939]

Dear .Mac member:

We'd like you to know about some exciting changes to your .Mac service. Read below to see how .Mac gives you new ways to share, more online storage, larger email attachments, and better control over spam in webmail.

Introducing .Mac Web Gallery. You can now easily share photos and movies directly from iPhoto '08 and iMovie '08. Friends and family can see your photo albums in a variety of views. With your permission, they can download photos suitable for 16-by-20-inch prints and contribute photos by browser upload or email. To create a Web Gallery you will need iPhoto '08 version 7.0.1.
Publishing photos to your Web Gallery

10x the storage. To make room for your photos and movies, your .Mac online storage will increase as follows:
- Basic memberships will have a total of 10 GB of combined email and file storage.
- Family Packs will have a total of 20 GB (10 GB for the master account, 2.5 GB for each sub-account).
- If you upgraded to 2 GB, you will have a total of 20 GB of storage; if you upgraded to 4 GB, you will have a total of 30 GB.

You should see the storage increase in your account by August 14th.

Improved iWeb site hosting. Using iWeb '08, you can embed dynamic web widgets like Google Maps, Google AdSense, Web Gallery albums, or HTML snippets in your .Mac site. You'll also find new themes and one-click theme-switching. And if you have your own personal domain, new settings in iWeb '08 let you assign it to your .Mac site.

Larger email attachments. You can now send and receive larger email attachments - up to 20 MB.

Improved webmail spam filtering. .Mac Mail also helps you better manage unwanted email with enhanced junk mail identification and sorting in webmail. To activate this new feature, just turn it on in your webmail preferences - go to Apple - .Mac, click Mail, and select Preferences in the upper right.

We hope these improvements help you get even more from your .Mac membership. And, as always, thank you for being a .Mac member.

Sincerely,

The .Mac Team

[rickey939]

Oh and exclusive new .Mac widgets....

<crickets chirping>

[Randman]

Originally Posted by rickey939 

Oh and exclusive new .Mac widgets....

<crickets chirping>

Been waiting for that one.

[jamiemcf]

Has anyone noticed a speed increase in the loading of .Mac published iWeb sites?

Also, I'm looking on Amazon and they are selling what they call .Mac 4.0 for $79.99 or the new one .Mac 5.0 for $95. Is there actually any difference in them? Won't I still get all the same features with the $79 version?

[64stang06]

It's the same thing, the activation codes do not determine what features you would get over the version. 4.0 codes behave just like 5.0, it's just that you won't get the pretty box for 5.0

[jamiemcf]

Well I went ahead and bought 4.0, as pretty as Apple's packaging is I wasn't paying an extra $15 for it

[Cadaver]

I am liking my 20GB of iDisk, though.

[MacosNerd]

I'm pleased with the extra space, I'm now able to upload the majority of my document folder to .mac which gives me another safety net in backing up.

The next time, I'll probably create a disk image of my documents and upload that, a lot of time was spent closing files on the .mac server and I understand the process is not as fast as many of us would like. The great thing about broadband though is just initiate the action and leave the computer to do it.

[Appleman]

Still way too slow

[mpancha]

yup, too slow over here as well. I try the 60 day trial every few months. After a couple days of poor sync speeds I end up disabling .mac in system preferences.

[Randman]

Transmit is a great third-party app to use with .Mac. Only way to transfer things other than simple syncs.

[Appleman]

What is very annoying to me, is the lousy way webmail version of .Mac Mail works on a Windows machine.
Ever tried to open an attachment?
Have you seen the speed? Neither have I!

Even free Yahoo! Mail is faster and better, and has web 2.0 specs.
Hence I forward my .Mac Mail to Yahoo! Mail to be able to read it quick at work :-(
and get notification with Yahoo! Messenger when new mail arrives.

Way to go Apple!

[besson3c]

Applman: just out of curiosity, what do you mean by "Web 2.0 specs?"

[Appleman]

Originally Posted by besson3c 

Applman: just out of curiosity, what do you mean by "Web 2.0 specs?"

Web 2.0 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by Appleman 

Web 2.0 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Yes, I know what the definition of Web 2.0 is, but I was wondering if this rather vague and misused term is simply thought of as interchangeable with AJAX or straight Javascript driven sites (which I'm assuming is what you meant). By asking this, I don't mean for it to sound like I'm correcting you, because I honestly don't even know what people mean when they toss out the "Web 2.0" phrase half the time to know whether any correction would even be necessary...

[Appleman]

I am just an enduser, and hence do not know that much in depth about these matters.
All I understood (maybe wrongly) is that these Web 2.0 specs deliver, or at least should deliver a richer content.
With dotMac that is not the case.
Though when you start comparing the webmail part of dotMac with the webmail of f.i. Yahoo! you can clearly see that dotMac does not use these new possibilities.

[besson3c]

I'm not sure what you mean by "richer content" either, but basically AJAX allows a site to query a database or take some sort of action without reloading the entire page. Using this technology, one can make web applications behave more like desktop applications.

For instance, in a desktop application preferences dialog, often simply clicking on a checkbox will cause that change to take effect immediately. Prior to AJAX, one would have to click on a "submit" button and wait for the entire page to reload for a chance such as this to take effect.

[Appleman]

Originally Posted by besson3c 

I'm not sure what you mean by "richer content" either, but basically AJAX allows a site to query a database or take some sort of action without reloading the entire page. Using this technology, one can make web applications behave more like desktop applications.

For instance, in a desktop application preferences dialog, often simply clicking on a checkbox will cause that change to take effect immediately. Prior to AJAX, one would have to click on a "submit" button and wait for the entire page to reload for a chance such as this to take effect.

Without going into technical detail, one can easily see that f.i. Yahoo! webmail is so much better in ease of use and faster than dotMac webmail. And if that is due to ajax or javascript: for the enduser it doesn't matter; the enduser just wants to have a good experience, something dotMac is lacking at the moment imho.

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by Appleman 

Without going into technical detail, one can easily see that f.i. Yahoo! webmail is so much better in ease of use and faster than dotMac webmail. And if that is due to ajax or javascript: for the enduser it doesn't matter; the enduser just wants to have a good experience, something dotMac is lacking at the moment imho.

Fair enough. I'm not disagreeing with you, I'm just trying to get you to be more precise in your language so that I can follow your meaning. So, you're saying that you just generally find Yahoo to have a higher degree of usability and performance?

[Appleman]

The discussion is about dotMac and its goods and bads. Imo the whole dotMac service is too slow in general and the webmail part is outdated.
I took Yahoo! as an example. I am sure there are other webmail services around which are better than dotMac webmail as well.

[JKT]

Personally, I find the Webmail to be just what I want - clean and simple. Fwiw, it is "Web 2.0" as you call it, otherwise you wouldn't be able to read messages without page reloads etc. It also works fine for me on a PC, using Firefox, so I have no idea what you are talking about with respect to speed and usability.

Btw, Yahoo Mail could be better, but I haven't used it to be able to compare.

[mpancha]

I think what Appleman is describing is the user experience, vs. what web 2.0 "technically" means. And I have to agree, for an Apple "product", the new version of .mac mail is piss poor, it should be so much better. Look at some of the Web 2.0 features on Apple. How they can make one look amazing, and the other... sub par, is beyond me.

[wulf]

That seems a little harsh, no? I'll readily admit I'm not an expert on the various webmail services out there, and, sure, it would be nice if .mac webmail had more whizzy, slidey, fading things. But it works - pretty well IMO - and looks a whole lot better to me than Gmail (for example).

I don't really ever use it on a PC though, and that was the basis of Appleman's original criticism. Is the performance very different between, say, Mac Safari and Win IE?

[MacosNerd]

I've had little to no issues using .mac's webmail feature and to be honest I've never noticed if there was a performance issue or not. I typically log into .mac and check my mail during the day on a pc.

I like this interface a whole lot more then hotmail's, and squirrelmail which dreamhost uses. (I used to be a dreamhost customer)

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by wulf 

That seems a little harsh, no? I'll readily admit I'm not an expert on the various webmail services out there, and, sure, it would be nice if .mac webmail had more whizzy, slidey, fading things. But it works - pretty well IMO - and looks a whole lot better to me than Gmail (for example).

I don't really ever use it on a PC though, and that was the basis of Appleman's original criticism. Is the performance very different between, say, Mac Safari and Win IE?

When you say it "looks a whole lot better" do you mean that aesthetically it looks better, or that it seems better overall?

[TETENAL]

I fail to see how Yahoo webmail is supposed to be superior to .Mac webmail. Both use the same standard 3-pane view for Mail. The only noticeable difference is the lack of ads on .Mac.

[mpancha]

Its perception, each person has their own view on it... so basically, I think everyone's looking too deeply into it, and jumping the gun to defend Apple in its latest revision of .mac webmail.

to me... .mac mail is one piece of the .mac puzzle. Overall, I wouldn't even spend $10 on it, let along $100. The speed is the nail in the coffin for me. I give it a try every few months, and every few months I'm disappointed. I am glad though that I can sign up for a billion @hotmail.com (or your free webmail of choice) just so I can keep trying the 60 day free trial of .mac. Maybe someday I'll find it worthwhile to pay anything for .mac.

[wulf]

Originally Posted by besson3c 

When you say it "looks a whole lot better" do you mean that aesthetically it looks better, or that it seems better overall?

Just aesthetically really

Obviously Google has a very stripped-down design aesthetic anyway. I suppose what I like most is just having a view window (which is by no means unique to .mac).

Of course there is functionality in Gmail that is way ahead of .mac mail, the most obvious being Search.

[Appleman]

Originally Posted by mpancha 

I think what Appleman is describing is the user experience, vs. what web 2.0 "technically" means.

Thank you for understanding me

Anyway, let me try to put it different:
When I have an email with attachment in dotMac and I want to open that on a peecee with Safari or IE, the webpage simply reloads but I never see the attachment, nor can I download it by clicking on it.
With right-mouse-click you do have the option to download it, but just a click on the attachment gives me a reload.

Tell me what I do wrong and I will listen and say thank you, otherwise I stay put and tell everybody that dotMac Mail is a bad experience on a peecee.

[TETENAL]

I just tried it in .Mac webmail with both Safari and Firefox on a Mac. If I have an attachment I just left-click on it and it automatically downloads to my local hard drive. In true Web 2.0 fashion the web page does not reload when you do this. I doubt that Firefox on Windows behaves much different in this regard.

What different behavior do you expect from webmail?

[Appleman]

Originally Posted by TETENAL 

I just tried it in .Mac webmail with both Safari and Firefox on a Mac. If I have an attachment I just left-click on it and it automatically downloads to my local hard drive. In true Web 2.0 fashion the web page does not reload when you do this. I doubt that Firefox on Windows behaves much different in this regard.What different behavior do you expect from webmail?

On a Mac yes. NOT on a pc. IE and Safari simply do NOT download the attachment but just reload the page.
What I do expect from webmail? Well, that when I click on an attachment that simply opens or be saved.
dotMac does NOT, I repeat NOT do that in IE and Safari.
Firefox does however.

[Art Vandelay]

I just tested attachments with IE 7 and Safari 3, both downloaded the attachments.

[wulf]

Win XP/IE6 downloaded attachments just fine for me. It did do a page redraw - not sure if it was actually reloading the page though - but yes, that does look a bit ugly.

Appleman, just wondering if the download problem you experience is related to settings on your PC, or in the browser?