With all of my problems and grousing about the iPhone 2.0 upgrade, MobileMe, etc., I do have something positive to say. One 2.0 application I find surprisingly good is the New York Times viewer. Not only is it a clean, simple program (which is mandatory for a small mobile screen), but it turns out to be a great way to read the newspaper. Who knew? Good timing, too, since I just canceled my home-delivery subscription. It appears to be the full stories and there’s just enough of the photos and graphics. None of the other apps I’ve tried are as interesting, and quite a few of them crash rather easily (Movies). One of them even rebooted my iPod Touch (Where). BofA is another handy vendor-specific app. Twitterific also looks pretty good. I may start using that as y primary client. I sort of like having Twitter in a handheld device even while working on a desktop or laptop machine. Something about the immediacy and separateness from my mainstream work.
I predict that we’re only seeing the beginning of Apple’s horribly botched migration from .Mac to MobileMe. I’ve been following the discussions on the Apple’s forums, and I’m not the only one with some rather serious problems. My personal issues (shared by others) include:
- Usernames aren’t necessarily carried over to Mobile Me. My .Mac ID is dougkaye@mac.com. But apple has allowed someone else to register the ID dougkaye@me.com.
- iDisk is down, and there’s no word from Apple when it will be fixed. I rely in iDisk to keep multiple computers in sync. I store all sorts of things there such as a page of bookmarks and a password database (using 1Password). This a fee-based service, and the multi-day outage is a significant blunder.
- My fear is that when you combine the above two issues, the recovery is going to be ugly. The WebDAV configuration used to access the iDisk appears to also be hosed or at least confused.
I don’t normally think in these terms, but if I were running Apple, there are a number of people who would lose their jobs over the way the iPhone/iPod 2.0 and MobileMe migration has been deployed. I’ll cut Twitter some slack for their infrastructure problems — they’re still a startup — but Apple has no excuse. This will cost them bigtime in their efforts to penetrate the enterprise market. And I’m going to pass on buying that iPhone after all. I think I’ll just stick with my Blackberry and iPod Touch for now. I’ve lost a lot of faith in Apple over this.
Update 7/12/08 1:30pmPDT: Tried a Software Update and got MobileMe 1.1. I can know access my iDisk, but for some reason they moved it from file:///Volumes/iDisk/ to file:///Volumes/dougkaye/, so code I’ve written to use the iDisk has to be reconfigured. Still can’t login to MobileMe via System Preferences, however. Doesn’t like my auth.