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.Mac - The Perfect Complement to your Mac

Prachi Gauriar

.Mac is a $99.95/year subscription service available from Apple to add value to your Mac. Apple likes to say that "every Mac needs .Mac," is this true? In this article I'll talk about some of the services offered with .Mac to help see if it's right for you.

Services

Apple offers a variety of useful services with .Mac, including email with an online address book; integration with many of Apple's iApps, including iPhoto, iCal, and iSync; virus protection and automatic backup; HomePage web publishing to quickly and easily make great looking web pages; an online iDisk to store and share your documents, pictures, and movies; and more.

Email and Address Book

Of these services, the one that's usually mentioned first is the mac.com email address, though it's not the most important by any means. When you sign up for .Mac, you will get an email address at UserName@mac.com, where UserName is your .Mac user name. Your mac.com email address gives you 15MB of space on Apple's servers to store your email, which you can access either on the web via webmail.mac.com or using an email client like Mac OS X Mail or Microsoft Entourage. This is really helpful if you travel, because you can check your email from any computer, but when you come home, you can check using your normal email client. You can also pay extra to get more space if a 15MB mailbox isn't enough for your needs.

The greatest advantage of having a mac.com email address is that your email address doesn't change, even if your internet service provider does. So if you were subscribing to MSN's internet service, but then decided to switch to Earthlink or AOL, you still have your mac.com email address. Your friends can still send you email to the same address.

To complement your online email account, you can also have an online address book to store your addresses. Again, this is perfect if you're away from your Mac and need someone's address. However, there's nothing spectacular about having an online address book unless it stays in sync with your address book on your Mac...

iApp Integration

Perhaps Apple's greatest accomplishment with .Mac has been its integation into the iApps. If you have a .Mac subscription, applications like iPhoto, iCal, and iSync are greatly enhanced. For example, .Mac users can put photo albums on the web using iPhoto's HomePage feature. After setting the titles for the images, you can have a web page set up in minutes with just a few clicks... and it looks good too! For example, here's an online album I created called In the Yard. I was able to get this page online in just a few minutes. This type of speed and convenience is perfect for special occasions like weddings. Imagine having pictures from the wedding online for relatives to view within minutes of getting home from the wedding.

But iPhoto isn't the only iApp that benefits from .Mac integration. You can also publish your iCal calendars to your .Mac account for all to see. For example, to let my friends know when I'm in class, I post my school schedule online. Then, anyone can view my calendar online, and other iCal users can subscribe to my calendar and see when I update it. This is ideal when you want friends, family members, or coworkers to know your schedule. For example, my boss subscribes to all of his employees iCals so that he can schedule conference calls.

While iCal publishing is cool, I'd have to say the real jewel in Apple's .Mac integration crown is iSync. iSync's main purpose is to allow you to your Address Book contacts, your iCal calendars, and your To-Dos to multiple devices at once from a single, simple application. This is really useful if you have a Palm OS-based PDA, an iPod, or a cell phone, but it's even better if you have .Mac. When you have .Mac syncing turned on, iSync will store your all of contacts, calendars, and to-dos on the .Mac servers. You can then access all of your addresses online through your online .Mac Address Book. Your online address book and your computers address book are always kept in sync. If you add items to the online one, its added to your local one, and vice versa. Also, you can sync your Safari bookmarks, so that your bookmarks are always kept in sync between computers. And just like your Address Book contacts, you can access your bookmarks online... perfect for when you're in a computer lab and you've forgotten the address of site you've bookmarked at home.

If you have multiple Macs, or you use a Mac at home and at work, iSync and .Mac become even better. You can have multiple Macs sync with your .Mac account. So if you add contacts to your address book at work and add events to your iCal at home, syncing will add the contact to your home address book and the even to your work iCal. Very, very cool and very, very convenient.

HomePage

Just as you can quickly create online photo albums, you can also quickly create other sites using HomePage, an online web site creation tool. Apple has created a variety of attractive templates online so that you can put newsletters, resumés, school events & invitations, and iMovies online. Site creation is as simple as picking a theme that you like, typing in what you want, and clicking publish. You can also add pictures and links to your sites, and share files online. I created a menu for my .Mac homepage in about three minutes. It's definitely a wonderful thing if you want an attractive page without much work.

Of course, HomePage's greatest pro is also its greatest con. Essentially, HomePage was designed for making quick web pages with Apple's templates, but it's essentially useless when you want more advanced web authoring features. For example, there is no telnet/SSH access to your web space and no support for running CGI scripts or server-side includes. This isn't a huge concern if you're not interested in advanced web authoring, but if you are, HomePage probably isn't for you. Don't misinterpret me, you can create your own custom web pages using HTML/XHTML and CSS, but don't expect a whole lot more.

Of course, one question remains. If you can create your own custom-coded web pages and add your own images and movies online, how do you get it on the web? One word... iDisk.

iDisk

All of the information that you put on .Mac is stored on your iDisk. Your online photo albums, addresses and calendars, and your HomePages are all stored on your iDisk, which is essentially a hard drive you can access via the internet. Even with all of the stuff you put online on your iDisk, you'll probably have no trouble with space. By default, your iDisk comes with a generous 100MB. If you do need more space, you can buy more, with sizes of 200MB, 300MB, 500MB, or even 1GB.

Apple has integrated iDisk access into Mac OS X, so Accessing the iDisk is really simple. Just go to the Finder, click on the Go menu and choose iDisk, and it will show up on your desktop. Then you can drag any files to and from the iDisk just as if it were another disk on your computer. This is great if you are using several computers and want to share files between them. You just save the file onto your iDisk, open and modify it, and save it back to the iDisk. There's a Public folder on your iDisk that anyone can access, so if you want to store files for others to look at, just drop them in there. Apple has integrated iDisk access into the standard Mac OS X save panel too. Just click on the Destination popup menu in any save window and choose iDisk. Your iDisk will automatically be loaded and you can save to it.

One place I use my iDisk the most is for backing up important files, like a big paper or presentation I'm working on. While doing this manually is no big deal, if I want to make sure that my changes every night are saved, it can get to be more of a pain. Apple has a solution for that too.

Backup and Virex

Apple provides the Backup application to help you backup important files to your iDisk, CD-R/CD-RWs, or DVD-Rs. You can either choose to backup manually, or schedule to backup certain files on a daily or weekly basis. You can specify which day of the week to backup on, and during which times of the day. To backup a file, just click on the Add button and choose the file using a standard Open panel. To help you out, Apple has what they call QuickPicks. These QuickPicks find particular types of files on your hard drive that you might want to backup. For example, the QuickPick for "Word Files in Home Folder" will automatically find all of the Microsoft Word files in your home folder and back them up.

Backup is a good tool for doing quick backups, but if you need to do serious backups or you need a lot of flexibility, Backup might not be right for you. In these cases, using a commercial product like Dantz Retrospect might be a better option.

In addition to a backup solution, Apple also includes McAfee Virex anti-virus software for .Mac customer. I've never encountered a virus on the Mac, so I rarely even use this application, but it is good to have sometimes. I usually run a scan once every month just to be safe. Unfortunately, Virex isn't particularly fast at scanning, so that's a definite downside. However, if you do share files with Windows users often, Virex also scans for Windows viruses, so if you want to make sure your Windows buddies are safe from viruses, Virex might be a plus for you.

Is it right for you?

Okay, so now you basically know what .Mac offers. Is it right for you? Ultimately, only you can decide, but maybe I can help. If one or more of these applies to you, .Mac is probably good buy:

• You own a digital camera or digital video camera and want to share your pictures and movies online
• You want to make good looking web sites, but you don't want to learn HTML and web design
• You own multiple Macs and want to make keep your addresses, calendars, and bookmarks in sync
• You want to access your addresses and bookmarks online and keep them in sync with the addresses on your computer
• You want to put your calendars online quickly and easily
• You need to backup a lot of files on a regular basis online
• You work with a lot of PC users and don't want to spread or be infected by computer viruses
• You need storage space online to store a variety of files conveniently
• You need an extra email address that you can check via the web and an email client

.Mac is probably not a good investment if all you need is an email address or online space. Other services provide those features individually for less than $99.95/year. However, if you want to share your digital pictures and videos, I highly recommend .Mac. If you want to sync your addresses, calendars, to-dos, and bookmarks between multiple Macs, I highly recommend .Mac. If you think the idea of an iDisk is really neat and useful for you, I highly recommend .Mac.

The perfect complement to my Mac

While .Mac isn't perfect, it is certainly a great service for a reasonable price if you use at least a few of its services regularly. At roughly $8.33/month, you're getting a whole lot for not too much. Apple's done a great job of integrating .Mac into Mac OS X and many of their iApps. If you'd like to try it yourself, you can sign up for a free 60 day trial. This trial gives you all the benefits of .Mac, except that your iDisk is only 20MB, and your email account is only 5MB. You also can only backup to iDisk, and you don't get a copy of Virex. If you do choose to go ahead and get .Mac, you'll get the full 100MB iDisk, the full 15MB email account, full backup capabilities, and you can download Virex. It's free, so you have nothing to lose by trying it. I can has I can honestly say that .Mac is a great complement to my Mac, and it could very well be a great complement to yours too.