GMG Tech Talk- Mobile Me- Don’t Do It!

Many of you may know that I’ve entered the world of Apple computing with the purchase of a macbook pro.  It’s a 13 inch model with a 4GB of RAM upgrade.

I’m in general a fan of apple products but I’m not blinded like some apple fanboys who claim that everything they do is gold.   In my limited time with the macbook I’ve seen some things it will do much better than the way I can do them on my PC but also some things  the PC with Windows 7 does better than the mac.

Windows 7 is a really huge upgrade in the operating system over all previous versions from Microsoft.  The filing system and ease of use and integration of products using Windows Live make it crazy simple to create content for blogs (something I know a little about).

To be fair I’ve only spent a little time with the macbook but in my research to find  desktop blogging software like the Windows Live Writer on a Mac, all of the mac forum users reiterate over and over that there really is no product that is nearly as good for desktop blogging as the Windows Live Writer which comes free with Windows 7.  There are versions for the mac such as Marsedit and Ecto but they both charge for the software and they are missing key components of  desktop blogging software such as scheduling a post for posting at a certain date in the future.  If you create as much content as I do for the blog it is essential for me to be able to schedule posts out into the future.  We keep an hourly schedule of new posts at the top of the hour every hour from 6AM-6PM with an occasional overnight post thrown in if there is something timely that we want to get out.  So that feature being missing is brutal.

I don’t want to create a post and have it uploaded directly to the blog because often times I create 5 posts in an hour and I don’t want them all going out at once.  They need to be spaced out.  Of course I could go back in to the blog and edit the times online but the post has already been delivered to the people who subscribe to the GMG rss feed and view it in a reader like Google reader.

That is just one example but it is significant (to me anyway)

Things that I’ve found to be way more polished on the Macbook than on the PC using Windows 7- iMovie for editing movies although you can create movies way faster with Windows Live Movie Maker using the auto-movie function, the options are not going to look as polished as they will with iMovie on the Mac.  iPhoto software is much more polished on the Mac than it is using Windows Live Photo, and Pages will make far more stunning brochures than you will with the Windows equivalent.

There is one thing that I’ve discovered about Apple’s mobile me product that is beyond horrible and everyone should know about because you could be in for a world of hurt if you rely on this system of syncing your data between all your Apple devices “in the cloud”.  The cloud is the future for sure.  Saving your pictures to sites like Flickr, Photobucket or Picasa is a brilliant way to store them as long as you physically back the pictures, videos or documents up onto external hard drives as well.

I would say the same thing for Apple mobile me but there is a huge catch that is probably not explained to people when they buy their iPhones or Macbooks.  You pay $99 per year for the privilege of uploading your picture, video or documents to mobile me for sharing anywhere you have access to a computer.  (You can get a discount the first year to something like $69) The problem is that they are telling people that they can host their iWeb websites on mobile me and also their content to mobile me but what they don’t tell you is that if you ever decide to stop paying that $99 per year and opt out of mobile me that your content will be deleted after a short grace period!

Holy crap I couldn’t even imagine creating a website using Apple’s iWeb, hosting it on mobile me, and then being locked in to paying that $99 vig every year or else all that content that had been created and all those links from pictures to where they belong on the sites would all be broken.  All you would have is a bunch of little red x’s where pictures are supposed to be.

They cap you out on mobile me at 20GB of storage to the cloud per year.  For most people that would be fine but I can tell you that for GMG we would smoke that in a couple of months.

So people I would tell you not to pay for this mobile me and be locked in to that $99 per year under penalty of losing all your stuff.

A difference between mobile me and the Windows Live Sky Drive is that Windows Live Sky Drive gives you 25 GB of storage to the cloud (it’s virtually the same setup as mobile me) but they give it to you for free.