.Mac? Jump back!

Apple’s .Mac service got upgraded last night, perhaps preventing it from sliding into irrelevancy. All users are supposedly upgraded to 1GB of online storage and email space although as of this morning my iDisk was still limited to 250MB. They’ve also added some features like Groups for online collaboration and allowing other users to edit web pages.

Probably the biggest update to the service is a complete overhaul of the aging Backup application. Now version 3.0 allows multiple backup profiles and the ability to backup and restore from local drives, network locations or CD/DVD. I played around with it a little this morning and it not only looked slick, but it seemed to be working. I’m still miffed that I have to pay a subscription fee for .Mac access in order to use Backup which should be included without restrictions. Or, I guess including rsync is sufficient.

Lastly, I’m somewhat disappointed with this update. The storage space is nice, and the backup software is decent, but what I was really hoping for were some .Mac-specific widgets. This was a rumor floated awhile back on one of the various unofficial Apple rumor sites that the upcoming update would include some widgets and, well, there aren’t. What could these widgets do? I dunno, but I like widgets and a tie-in with some new .Mac services would be a sensible place to implement them on the client.

The other big disappointment was that the stupid Address Book synchronization bug that causes the obliteration of URLs stored in Address Book entries has not been fixed. This is the single most-annoying feature of .Mac’s sync services. All the other iApps seem to update fine but this renders Address Book unsyncable for me. As a result, I’m forced to go through hoops to keep my Address Books on my laptop and desktop machines in sync.

So yeah, as upgrades go, this is getting 2 out of 5 stars.

boolean is listening to: Vampire/Forest Fire from the album “Arcade Fire” by The Arcade Fire