“My .Mac membership is about to expire, but deciding to renew it at $100 a year was a no-brainer. After all, having a .Mac membership makes me appear far more talented than I actually am. And .Mac offers other features I don’t want to do without,” Bob Levitus reports for The Houston Chronicle.
Levitus reports, “The feature I find most compelling is the way .Mac is seamlessly integrated with iPhoto. With this killer combination I can quickly and easily create Web-based photo galleries complete with thumbnail images and built-in slide shows with just a few clicks of the mouse. There are more than a dozen beautiful page templates, and customizing them with text couldn’t be easier.”
“So first and foremost, .Mac makes me appear to be a Web page genius, but that’s only part of its appeal. As a .Mac member you get a 250-megabyte personal hard disk on the Internet, or iDisk. It can host Web pages, share files and store backups of important files,” Levitus reports. “I’ve had my .Mac membership for years, and it just keeps getting better.”
Full article, along with links to .Mac-created webpages that Levitus has created, here.
In related news, Apple is asking .Mac members for feedback:
We want to hear from you. What do you love about .Mac and how has it changed the way you use your Mac? Tell us about the fun things you’ve done with the service, or how it saved the day at your home office. Are you doing more with your photos? Movies? Music? Tell us about it — and thanks for sharing.
Online form at Apple.com here.
Advertisement: Learn more about .Mac and sign up for a free trial now.
Actually, I had to think about it. I think the iDisk is so easy to use, that’s what makes it a no brainer. Photos are easy enoygm but the templates are mostly crappy, and it insists on putting links to other pages at the top.
I don’t want links to photos of some things available to everyone. I don’t want to post pics of me disassembling an iPod nano that might get looked at by a whole bunch of strangers, to have links to pics of my kids.
So I use Galerie instead. It also had a load of crappy template, but a couple of simple ones that are nice and clean. It also runs straight off iPhoto, and can generate its stuff straight onto the iDisk. You just have to know what the URL’s going to be.
Somthing like http://homepage.mac.com/hywel.thomas/images/gallery/oldst/index.html
It’s about time someone had some praise for .Mac
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“I don’t want links to photos of some things available to everyone. I don’t want to post pics of me disassembling an iPod nano that might get looked at by a whole bunch of strangers, to have links to pics of my kids.”
You can password protect your pages. You can also use iPhoto to export a plain hmtl page and just copy to your iDisk.
As a .mac user from jump street, .mac has been ignored for a long time. I like and use some of it, but think $100 is too much for what they are currently offering. Add more features/content or cut the price. It also still syncs WAAAAAAYYYYY TOOOOO SLLLLLOOOOOOOWWWWWW.
Hi all,
I’m thinking of getting a Mac. I already have my own website, and webspace.
Can I tie in the features like iDisk and iPhoto to use my (already paid for) webspace?
Everyone loves to complain about .Mac, but I’m definitely in the camp that loves it. Posting pictures and videos is fantastic. Posting ical calendars and bookmarks are great bonuses. Sure it needs updating, but I’ll gladly renew next time around regardless.
I know it’s an old joke, but which Mac University did he graduate from?
hammer: you can also set up seperate folders that you post things to straight form iphoto. such as family / apple / misc and thsoe do not link to anything at the top that are not in thier respective folders.
$100 a year for a fraction of what my hosting company overs for $5/mo? i’ve tried to justify it, but i get 5gig storage, 10gig email with 100 accounts, 10 ftp accounts, and my own domain name. why pay alot more for alot less?
.mac is $69. They have the $69 promotion for almost half the year. Anybody who pays $100 has never walked into the Apple Store.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again…..never pay retail for .Mac!
I got it in the box in the closeout section of my local mac retailer for $75 2 years running and it’s always on Amazon for about the same.
As for its usefulness, I’d say it’s worth it (@$75) if you put a lot of photo web pages up for family and friends, want to coordinate bookmarks and contacts in 2 or more locations and use Backup.
As for the links at the top issue Mr. Hammer brought up, you just need to make a different site (folder) for each subject and .Mac will keep it separate. It will add links only to pages that exist in the same directory (folder). It won’t add links at all if you don’t use .Mac to build the pages. I’ve been using it this way to keep the family photos inaccessible to my other sites.
And yes, you can password protect any pages too.
I renewed my dot mac membership. I like the homepage cuz it is so easy and fast. I like the deals they have with free stuff or good discounts which if you add them in really defrays the cost. And iDisk is handy for work. I have also used it as a really easy to use FTP site with filesharing.
If you have a dot mac membership one program you should check out is Filechute from Yellow Mug ( http://www.yellowmug.com/ ). You just drop a file on the icon, it automatically zips it and puts it on your iDisk in a hidden back file. While it is doing this it generates a link that you can paste in an email. The recipient of the email just clicks the link and it automatically downloads the file onto their computer. Since the emails only contain a link they send super fast and you can send really large files easily this way.
As a member, when I go to Mac.com it looks like more advertisements for services I already have rather than useful features.
I use it so my wife can put up photos of the kid without my intervention, so it’s only worthwhile because it saves me time.
The backup program seriously needs an upgrade. That being said, I bought a .Mac subscription. Mainly for being able to keep a calender/bookmarks/address book synced between 3 computers. Works great. Love it.
But the backup program is lame. I wanted something to use to backup my systems to an external firewire drive, and it just simply does not work well. It’s back to using SpeedTool’s backup program
Switcher,
Indeed you can. You can even write your own pages using some other program and just host the pages on .Mac. I have a separate site that I host on a different server and just use .Mac for the photo gallery pages, for instance.
Here is proof:
From the Apple site:
“Tell us how *your* more efficient in exchanging ideas and sharing your documents using iDisk.”
They are only looking for praise, for which I have none. I’m begrudgingly a member because it makes sharing iphoto easy, but that’s it. There isn’t much offered with the service. And storage amout is small. Wasn’t there just an article about how the new Xserve/Xsan puts storage at 1.86 per GB? So why be so stingy?
Oh I forgot to mention that that is the one problem I have with dot mac. Only 250 MB of disk space for a service you are paying for is way too little. They should give you a Gig at the very least.
iDisk ease of use is what made it worth it for me. It’s expensive, but just so simple.
I think the key phrase in the article is this : “After all, having a .Mac membership makes me appear far more talented than I actually am”.
This is why I keep .Mac. I’ve have people say stuff like “OH My God! How did you do that ? You’re a computer genius !”. There is no way I’m a genius, but when a 28 year old Milanese chick tells you that, it makes you feel pretty good !
For 0$/year I get two GIGS of storage from Google on GMail, and a cool domain extension. For 0$/year I get reliable web presence from Blogger.com; or I can get a full web site with templates for lots less than $100.
What’s so compelling about being able to back up maybe four of my two thousand Photoshop images??
For $100/year (plus putting up with ads yet!) I’d be more moved by about 50 GB than .25 GB??
I’ll renew my .Mac membership also, but with about 1/100th the enthusiasm as Dr. Mac. I mean, C’mon! How often do you visit .MAC? About as often as you wish you had a Windows computer right? It’s boring, anemic, and a hopeless experiment of failed expectations and unrealized potential. In short, it’s almost useless and no fun. An occasional card and little Web page and what’s left? OOOHHH!!!! A 20% discount on some obscure software we can all live without. What a benefit!!! NOT!!!! But alas, as I said before, I’ll sign up again. If Apple can finally make a multi-function scroll mouse after 50 years the one-button mouse was conceived, I guess there’s still hope.
Steve J really needs to pay a bit of attention to .Mac – just a fraction of the time he put into the iPod nano. Those guys & gals running .Mac have gotten lazy in terms of improving the offering, especially in the area of storage. I’ll renew as too many people have my email address, but it falls far short of the standards Apple presents with other products.
STORAGE!!!???
Screw storage, Apple is charging for bandwidth NOW!!
It’s a bit of a tease really, get you started by making it somewhat easy to host your own material and then later you’ll hopefully pickup a book on HTML.
I think Apple does more to get people interested in the internet that anyone else, M$ will give you a boot ten inches thick and say your on your own.
I like it because I get a mac.com email address and that shows I’m a Mac Geek 😀
I’ve had it since the good old iTools days when it was free and have only had to pay for my subscription once.
When the paid service came in I was working for an Apple reseller and we got a free account for taking part in some online sales training, that lasted for three years, then when I left I had to pay for one year and since then I’ve managed to win free subscriptions at various Mac events and conferences I’ve attended which means I’m covered for the next 2 years.
MW:want “I want for nothing with .Mac”
no brainer as in those with no brains buy into it.
“no brainer as in those with no brains buy into it.”
AHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA..oh…whew….good one. I almost laughed myself silly there.