Filed under: Rumors, Internet Tools, .Mac
Big changes coming to .Mac?
Rumors are flying about major changes coming to Apple's .Mac online service. Perhaps most interesting is this post from Dmitry Chestnykh, the CEO at Coding Robots. He went through the iCal Localizable.strings file in the recently released 10.5.3 update and found a number of changes. In particular, he found a lot of evidence that the .Mac brand name is going to be replaced. Apple is apparently using a placeholder %@ which will be dynamically replaced by the new name, whatever that is, when it's released.A while back we posted on another rumor that .Mac syncing was coming with iPhone 2.0 to bring the enterprise features to those of us without Outlook server access. My guess now is that Apple is going to announce a radical overhaul of the service (including iPhone syncing), together with a new name at WWDC. As far as I'm concerned it can't happen soon enough.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
jonathan ober said 9:40PM on 5-29-2008
.apple or .life
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evariste said 9:40PM on 5-29-2008
Alternate explanation: they're getting ready to let you use third-party sync providers on your Mac as you will be able to with your iPhone, e.g. employers with Exchange setups, or Google and Yahoo.
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Steven Sande said 10:00PM on 5-29-2008
Nice. Now if they'll just cut the price in half...
TUAW Steve
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Christopher said 12:04AM on 5-30-2008
Try amazon - not half but a good deal at 69.00 vs 100.00
Zews said 10:01PM on 5-29-2008
Does that mean, that we may finally get a decent calendar app on the phone that works and looks just like iCal on the Mac?
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Mike Schramm said 10:02PM on 5-29-2008
iNternet.
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Blaktornado said 10:20PM on 5-29-2008
"Lifeline: Your Life Online"
iPhone/iPod Touch syncing, Direct upload of iPhone photos, video clips, iCal syncing, Back To My Mac from iPhone/iPod Touch... and so on.
Heh. We can only dream.
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Chris said 10:21PM on 5-29-2008
If I could connect to my home PC using the iPhone on the road for documents, I'd pay the $90 or whatever it is.
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Denton said 10:29PM on 5-29-2008
Interesting...ever since I installed 10.5.3, I've had some "conflicts" in my .mac syncing...
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imatt said 10:33PM on 5-29-2008
I was just about to buy it from Amazon in the next few days too...it's listed at $69.95, which seems reasonable (moreso than $99, at least). Maybe now I'll wait (been waiting for a Touch til the update anyway (not gonna pay for the new software upgrade when I could get a new one free (and hopefully after a price drop.)) Damn that's a lot of parenthesis!
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Liski said 2:38AM on 5-30-2008
imatt,
It's cheaper to buy it form eBay.
David Chartier said 10:42PM on 5-29-2008
DO WANT
But seriously, this would rock.
I also think it's a pretty wild world when stuff like this is getting transmitted over Twitter. And that isn't a dig, seriously. I think the ubiquity and power of Twitter is pretty amazing, and it's great that information, rumors, developers, companies, readers, writers, and fans are able to use it for stuff like this.
Good catch guys.
We also know who to go after (iTod) if this doesn't pan out "soon." :)
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antimatter said 11:53PM on 5-29-2008
Didn't anybody else get this survey from Apple about .mac a few weeks ago?
"Please take this survey.
Apple values your opinion and invites you to participate in a survey about .Mac. Your responses will remain completely confidential and results will be viewed only in aggregate. The survey should take 15 minutes or less to complete.
Thank you for participating.
Apple
If you are having trouble viewing images, click the following URL or copy it into your web browser: http://www.nqresearch.com/s/08007/cgi-bin/ciwweb.pl?studyname=AP20&a=ut4ro5gf2hb"
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thomas040 said 12:06AM on 5-30-2008
Let me just point to this story, about a 100GB .mac which I saw on my idisk a while back...
http://digg.com/apple/iDisk_to_gain_a_significant_upgrade
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PSM said 12:20AM on 5-30-2008
Agreed. I've been paying for .Mac for years, but I always feel like I'm getting ripped off. If it would just allow reliable and invisible wireless syncing between my Macs, future iPhone, etc. I would be happy. And push e-mail pretty please??? All the pieces are in place, it just seems like they don't care about .Mac. I hope this is true, as it would be a huge missed opportunity not to tie it in more with the 3G iPhone and iPhone 2.0 software.
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Matt said 12:48AM on 5-30-2008
Perhaps what is most intersting is a name change? If that is the case then there is nothing interesting (still) about the service.
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i to the phone said 1:15AM on 5-30-2008
New Name: Apple Connect or iConnect
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mike said 1:21AM on 5-30-2008
There's also the file in /System/Library/CoreServices/AOS.bundle
from Contents/Resources/AOS.strings
AOS_BRAND = ".Mac";
AOS_DOMAIN = "mac.com";
Suggests a modular approach with a new .bundle files to install for a new service...?
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Zach Everson said 1:56AM on 5-30-2008
I never said nuthin' about it as I figured it was just a glitch, but a couple of months ago my Finder showed that I had 1 TB of space remaining in my iDisk. I had that reading for a week before it reverted to the normal allocation.
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Arnoz said 5:10AM on 5-30-2008
I'll ad my 2 cents:
1) In the past few weeks, .Mac has been under maintenance quite a lot of time. I'm in Europe so these downtime affect me during the day and it never happened before.
2) As I have a lot of issues with speed on my iDisk, I've been emailing with a .Mac Specialist (which seems to be an upper level as the first-level support) to try to resolve the issue and he told me that the .Mac system was under maintenance, they were modifying some things so this could also affect my speed...
However, if the email addresses @mac.com are just replaced by something else I'd be disappointed. One of the reason of my subscription is to be able to have an easy email address that I thought would keep "for life". Or at least for a long time.
After my two previous ISP were bought out and just dropped their @extension.be I was kind of angry.
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