Apple has posted a nifty tip for Mail users who miss the discontinued iCards feature from .Mac: You can use Mail stationery to create an attractive card-like message with your own photos.

In a post on the Mobile Me blog (hey, it's not dead!), Apple says "...it's like the old Make Your Own iCards feature on steroids, and a whole lot easier to use in the bargain."

For Leopard users, Mail comes with 30 email templates you can customize in lieu of sending an iCard. Personally, I think an email is better than an iCard anyway, what with all the greeting card spam that goes on.

You can use photos that you take with Photo Booth, for example, or pictures from iPhoto. Customize it with a clever note, and away you go.

If you don't have Leopard or still want to use an online greeting card site, there are plenty to choose from.

(And if you like our series for beginners, Mac 101, there's much more to learn.)

We've all awaited the .Mac to MobileMe switch for a while now (some more than others). However, Apple's 6 hour time table for upgrading to MobileMe turned awry and led into an almost 24 hour up, down, up, up, down cycle.

If you're like most users experiencing the 24 outage, then you haven't been able to login and experience MobileMe first hand. So why not take a look at our gallery? We've got pictures of the entire MobileMe suite of web applications and user preferences: from the login screen to storage partitioning.

Yesterday, we noticed that the .Mac status page listed a MobileMe launch date and time of July 9th between 6 p.m. until 12 a.m. PT. Tonight, there seems to have been a change.

As of this writing, the .Mac status page says, "MobileMe Launch: 7/9/2008, 8pm-2am PT -- As part of the MobileMe launch, www.mac.com will be taken offline at 8pm PT on Wednesday, July 9th."

So, we've got to wait two more hours? Oh, no! Actually, we'd rather the folks at Apple take the time necessary to do things right. Oh, who are we kidding ... we want MobileMe!

Stay tuned here for the latest information on this transition.

Thanks to everyone who sent this in.

Tonight, we will all say "goodbye" to .Mac, a service that has been a small part of Apple for almost 8 years. iTools, .Mac's predecessor, was launched on January 5, 2000 at the Macworld Expo in San Francisco and was a free service that included a HomePage, iCards and the much coveted @mac.com e-mail address that is commonplace today (as well as the forgotten 'KidSafe,' which was a database of kid friendly websites Apple compiled so you could make sure your children weren't up to no good on your Mac). As more users came to the service and the cost of bandwidth went up, Apple began charging for the service and called it .Mac.

The name ".Mac" was born at the Macworld Expo in New York on July 17, 2002 and provided several new services including: a beefed up iDisk (with a dizzying 100 megs of space), Backup, and a free copy of Virex. On September 17, 2002, Apple announced that it would discontinue the free iTools service in favor for .Mac.

That brings us to, well, tonight. Apple is scheduled to take down .Mac and replace it with a newer, rebranded service named "MobileMe." While some scoff at the name, TUAW can't help but see the other side of the picture: look how far iTools has evolved over the past 8 years. So, join us in saying, "So long old friend, we hardly knew ye."

Do you have a favorite story to tell about iTools or .Mac? Be sure to mention it in the comments below! Apple is scheduled to take down the .Mac service between 6 p.m. and 12 a.m. pacific time.

Early Tuesday morning, Apple started offering boxed versions of the much awaited MobileMe web service. While buying from Apple costs $99 for the boxed version, Amazon is offering MobileMe for $89.99 (US).

According to Amazon, MobileMe has been on sale since "July 1, 2008," however, they also say "This item will not be released until July 12, 2008."

We did learn last night that MobileMe is scheduled to launch on Wednesday, July 9th around 6 p.m. pacific time.

Stay tuned to TUAW for the latest information regarding the .Mac to MobileMe switch, iPhone 2.0 software, and the iPhone 3G coverage.


Thanks, Jay!

Apple has just updated the .Mac status page with the date/time of the .Mac to MobileMe switch. So, for those of you wondering when Apple might start the switch will not have to wonder any longer. July 9th from 6 p.m. until 12 a.m. PT is the scheduled date and time.

Apple says that during the switch, users will be "unable to access www.mac.com or any .Mac services ... with the exception of .Mac Mail accessed via a desktop application, iPhone, or iPod touch."

According to Apple, "MobileMe will be available as soon as possible during this maintenance window." Be sure to stay tuned to TUAW for the latest on the .Mac to MobileMe switch.


Thanks, Andy and Barry!

According to Apple Support documents, personal domains will be kept intact with MobileMe. Blogger Sean Sperte noticed a "personal domain" option while watching the MobileMe quick tour. That prompted some investigation which led to this support document. Sure enough, it confirms that .Mac personal domains will remain untouched by the change:

"...If you have a personal domain setup for your iWeb site, it will continue to work without changing any settings at your registrar."

Thanks, Apple!

[Via Geek&Mild]

.Mac web services were "temporarily unavailable" for a time this morning, and things are still a little shaky. No explanation was given for the outage.

Mail was working when tested, but iDisk access through afp:// still appears to be shut off (at 10:50 a.m. ET). Homepages and access to iDisk public folders seem to be OK, too. We'll keep tabs on this, and let you know when the service is back up and running. Check back soon!

Update (11:20 a.m. ET): Web access seems to be up and running, but iDisk via afp:// is still down.

Update (1:45 p.m. ET): iDisk access is back up, but I'm not sure when that happened. One computer is still unable to connect, and the other computer connects just fine.

Thanks to everyone who sent this in!

Part of the fun of watching the Guided Tour videos that Apple has been producing lately is obsessing over every minor detail. With that in mind, we've gone over the MobileMe Guided Tour with a fine-toothed comb. Here's what we found.

What's next for .Mac, Apple's much-maligned online service offering for OS X users? TUAW has learned that .Mac will no longer be sold by Apple after WWDC, as new users will migrate to the new MobileMe service (not too shocking, given the swirling rumors as of late). Existing users will have their @mac.com e-mail addresses forwarded to their @me.com address in perpetuity, which should provide some relief for nervous .Mac users who depend on that email.

MobileMe is slated to include a host of new features, which we alluded to early in May; in addition, there will be new web interfaces for all aspects of MobileMe -- calendars will look just like iCal, Contacts will look just like they do in Address Book, etc. This is similar to the way .Mac Webmail works today, though we've heard that the new interfaces will be much snazzier (yes, that's a technical term). Apple should also be updating the .Mac dependent applications (iChat, iWeb, iPhoto etc.) to work with the new service. The new service will be backwards compatible with .Mac protocols for the time being -- so developers will not have to rush out updates as soon as they hear the official word.

MobileMe is scheduled to be available sometime in late June/early July. We have also heard reports that the latest build of the iPhone beta firmware (2.0) has already undergone revisions to handle the new MobileMe service. Some of the features of the service on iPhone will include: over-the-air syncing of contacts, calendars, and photos. Interestingly, there is also a Windows version of MobileMe planned.

Though we're confident in the source of this information, this is still a rumor until Apple reveals all. We should hear more information about MobileMe at the World Wide Developer's Conference starting on Monday (June 9th).

One of the biggest questions that I had following the iPhone SDK event was how we non-Enterprise users were going to get the cool new wireless syncing features promised to ActiveSync Exchange users. My first guess was that Apple was planning to fold something like that into .Mac, and now iPhone Alley has unearthed something to suggest this might be right.

In the just released SDK beta 2, iPhone Alley found a string within a preference bundle that reads: "Syncing with this Dot Mac account will turn off syncing for other Dot Mac accounts and delete any existing synced data." This suggests the possibility of wireless syncing for non-Exchange users. Frankly, this would make a lot of sense. It would add considerably to the (presently somewhat questionable) value of .Mac and give us consumer types access to some of iPhone 2.0's neatest features.

In what appears to be a clear case of "Mental Health Day Syndrome," the .Mac website has been down for much of the afternoon. Email and Homepage/iWeb services appear to be up, though, and I'm able to connect to my iDisk, so the plumbing is still operational.

Our tipsters note that the site was down for quite a while before the 'maintenance' page went up, so it's possible that this is not a planned outage. If we hear anything else we'll pass it along.

Update: Although I personally can get to the services noted above, comments point out that the .Mac service page is showing red lights across the board except for some users able to get mail.

Update 2: As of 5:05pm ET it looks like everything is green again, with the exception of .Mac Sync still showing issues for some users.

Thanks to everyone who sent this in.

As you may recall the notMac Challenge was a contest to produce a free method to duplicate most of the functionality of Apple's .mac, with the winner receiving upwards of $8k from various contributors. A few days ago we mentioned that Ben Spinks had posted a possible solution and that it had been released for testing. Yesterday the Challenge sponsor declared that the Ben had in fact won the challenge and would be receiving the prize. As per the rules of the contest Ben's solution, based on his commercial cross-platform CrushFTP product, will be released as open source freeware. A SourceForge repository has already been set up, and the notMac binary is available for download (dmg link).

Some loose ends still remain to be tidied up (particularly in documentation and installation), but Ben's solution "appears to be functioning perfectly for most users." So if you have a spare Mac to run as a server, this looks like it could be a great way to get most of the .mac functionality without forking over the cash to Apple.

Thanks ed!

The new .Mac Web Galleries sure are pretty slick, but their dependency on iPhoto '08 can have some unfortunate side effects. When I first installed iLife '08, I moved my original iPhoto library so I could tinker around with the new version using a few pics I had lying around on my Mac. I then created a Web Gallery with these images just to see how things looked. After deeming it safe to proceed, I replaced my original library to actually begin using the new iPhoto features - the only problem is that, somehow, the .Mac Web Galleries you create seem to be library-specific. In other words: when I created a gallery with my test library and then swapped it out for my true library, the .Mac Web Gallery listing in iPhoto's sidebar was no longer there. I couldn't find any kind of web admin panel at the .Mac site for managing these galleries either, so I quickly found myself in a predicament.

Fortunately, I'm not alone here, and I found this thread in the Apple Discussions forums that describes a method for deleting a gallery manually if it no longer appears in iPhoto's sidebar. The solution basically involves logging into your iDisk from the web (http://idisk.mac.com/UserName) and browsing to the directory that houses your galleries, then manually deleting it from there. For some odd reason, this folder doesn't appear in your iDisk on your Desktop like your other .Mac website files, even with hidden files turned on (I used the Show-Hide widget to quickly toggle hidden files. As far as I can tell, Apple simply doesn't sync this folder down to your Mac or give you access to it with the iDisk). The only problem I had with the solution as it is described in that forum thread is that I didn't find the _gallery folder where the forum poster said I should; instead, it's in iDisk > Web > Sites. Each gallery you have created is stored in its own directory under that folder, so you should be able to delete just the ones you want without affecting the others.

[Update 2: Matt Ronge, developer of upcoming Mac OS X email client Kiwi, enlightened me in the comments with an even easier solution to this problem: simply go to iPhoto's Web Gallery pane in preferences, and simply click Check Now to cause iPhoto to check your .Mac account for any new photos. This should also cause it to catch any galleries not already listed in iPhoto's sidebar, ultimately allowing you to manage and delete them from the comforts of iPhoto.]

[Update: Some commenters are reporting that the _gallery folder in question does actually appear in their iDisk when viewed in the Finder. I don't know why only some of us see it, but you could be one of the lucky few.]

Considering that your Sites (for the old homepage.mac.com pages) and Web folders are synchronized and fully available in your iDisk, I hope that this strange gallery behavior is simply the result of an oversight. While I understand Apple's desire to use software to manage this stuff instead of forcing users to dig around in folders, having manual access to this directory will be useful in a pinch, especially for users who, for example, buy a new Mac or need to have a sick Mac restored.

When Steve Jobs announced a ten-fold leap in .Mac storage space, most of us were generally happy to hear it; I know I was. For those of us, including myself, who have been synching their iDisk to use it more or less as an online backup drive however, this good news had an unfortunate side effect in the form of lost local storage space. Because of the way iDisk synching works (a setting you must enable in the .Mac System Preferences pane), the amount of free space on your local hard drive will diminish according to the size of your iDisk. This is because your Mac keeps a disk image that serves as a constant backup of everything in your iDisk - that's part of the advantage of enabling the synching feature because you can retain a copy of everything in your iDisk even when offline, and sync any changes you make once you get connected again.

Before the upgrade, .Mac offered 1GB of total storage between .Mac email and iDisk storage, so synching one's iDisk like this didn't gobble up too much space. Now that this total storage has been raised to 10GB, the tables have turned a bit for us synchers, and especially for me since about a month ago I paid for the next tier of storage (I know - I've been bit by the Apple update bug again); imagine my surprise when my iDisk instantly went from about 1.5GB in size to 19GB.

But how can we solve this problem? There are a few solutions, so you can play with these and see which fits best with the way you work.

The first solution is perhaps the more obvious: log into your .Mac account online, go to your account management page and readjust the balance of storage between .Mac mail and iDisk storage. You can knock your iDisk storage as low as you want and perhaps gradually increase it if your iDisk activity grows in the future. There's room to play there, but you get the idea.

The next solution, the one I originally opted for but have since double-backed on, is to turn synching off. You can still quickly mount your iDisk anytime you need it - assuming you're online - via the Go > iDisk > My iDisk command in the Finder (or cmd-shift-I). If you're mounting it for the first time after a fresh restart or login you'll experience a slight lag, but after that your iDisk should act almost as snappy as it did when you kept it synching. The only problem here, and the reason I'm rethinking this, is the catch with being offline: I'm not offline very often, but when I am, I still need my iDisk, so I just downsized the amount of iDisk storage I have allotted and I'm re-synching as I write this. For those who work differently however, turning off synching is still a viable option: if you're always connected or you simply don't need iDisk files both large and small always available at your fingertips, shutting off synching altogether could solve your storage issues.

The final solution I have is to simply start using your iDisk to store more stuff. After all, with a ton of extra space now you can really let loose and keep a lot more stuff in there, making it online, backed up, sharable by moving to your iDisk's Public folder and accessible via a browser on any web-connected computer in the world. That's a darn handy tool when you think about the possibilities. I'm moving more folders of documents and other files to my iDisk since it is now a pretty spacious and effortless way to store files, share them between Macs that keep my iDisk synched and back them up online all in on fell swoop.

No matter what solution you come up with, I'm not sure how much Apple can do about this considering how the iDisk seems to fundamentally work right now. It sure would be nice if the iDisk could simply expand automatically as you add files to it instead of taking a massive bite out of your hard drive, and who knows, maybe that's something we could see in the upcoming Mac OS X Leopard or beyond. For now, if your iDisk is cramping up your hard drive, it looks like you'll have to get a little creative.

thanks Mr. Gaskell