I have been using apple products now since 2007 and on the whole have enjoyed the design and functionality of their devices. I started out quite small with a 13” MacBook but then progressed to an oct-core MacPro in 2008 but It wasn’t until the release of the iPhone 3G that I needed a way to keep all of my devices in constant sync with each other.
Enter MobileMe
Apple offers their MobileMe service as a way to sync bookmarks, email, calendar and contact information between macs and iPhones / iPod touches. I originally had a bit of an issue paying for a service I believed should be free but without a better alternative I stumped up the £59 and set about using the service.
For the main part I originally was happy with the service and enjoyed the push new calendar and contact information very much, it was nice to have almost instant updates from home if a new contact needed a call back or if there was a change to a meeting. Another part of the service was the iDisk, an online cloud storage area for hosting and sharing files. This was never an important requirement for me but it came in handy on a few occasions. Shortly after I signed up in my first year Apple released the “find my iPhone” feature, this allowed you to track down a lost mobile via GPS, send messages to it or make it sound an alert so you could find it under the sofa and in extreme circumstances, if you were sure you could never get your phone back, you could remotely wipe its data. Great I thought so I renewed my subscription at the end of the year.
During my second year however, things were not so rosy. Frequent issues with calendar syncing on my MacBook and even more frequent issues with keeping the iDisk in sync to my MacPro were getting ever more annoying (I now used my iDisk to back up important information) The final straw came when I signed up for the calendar beta program, decided I didn’t like it and opted out of the beta, Mobile me promptly deleted all of my calendar appointments and no matter what I or the apple tech department did, it kept on deleting appointments as soon as they were re-instated from a back up. This made me decide to look for alternatives to the service apple offered and happily charged for.
Apple to the rescue?
Fortunately Apple had enabled easy syncing of calendar information to google calendar (another company I dislike but we wont go into that here) Set up of the Google sync was pretty painless, much to my surprise! I had managed to replace the iDisk with Dropbox a great, free alternative which actually offered more functionality than Apples service, all be it at a reduced storage capacity. As soon as we got to contact syncing we ran into a big road block. For what ever reason the Apple-Google syncing wasn’t going to work for my contacts which threw a huge spanner in the works.
Out of desperation and much googling later I discovered Spanning Sync. A software layer that works as an intermediary between iCal, Address book and Google calendar and contacts. With this bit of software I am now able again to keep all of my calendar appointments and contacts up to date across all of my devices and with the addition of Dropbox and some clever uses of folder aliases I can also keep my files and bookmarks up to date as well.
Are these alternatives like scrumping?
I cant say the migration away from MobileMe has been painless, mainly because of incompatibilities between specially formatted address book entries and google contacts but these all can be overcome. In the end, the only reason I moves away from Apples service was because they failed to update, improve and fix the problems. Would I go back? Maybe but once burnt and all that.
Software I used to move away from MobileMe-
Dropbox – A free file hosting service which links nicely with both the Mac and MS operating system, initially offers just 2GB of storage which is expandable to 100GB if you subscribe; although if you sign up via one of my links you will receive a further 250MB free!
Spanning Sync – Bridges the gap from iCal and Address book to Google calendars and contacts. Comes with a free 15 day trial and then costs $25 a year (around £14) but if you follow one of my links it costs just $20 and you still get your free trial.
show hide 1 comment