Gordon's Tech

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

MobileMe - Sharing Contacts and Calendars in a Family account

If you have a MobileMe Family Account you probably want to share your Contacts or Calendars among family members.

You can't.

Use Google Apps.

See: The MobileMe Massacre begins

Mobile Me back to my Mac for remote maintenance – a complete fail

I’ve had some luck so far with MobileMe, but this time I ran into a complete fail. It wasn’t completely unexpected.

I’ve been using LogMeIn to do remote maintenance of my mother’s Mac Mini, often using my old XP machine. It connects at the machine level; I can log out of her account and connect to the admin account in one session. Today performance using the Firefox plugin was excellent.

MobileMe’s Back to My Mac works very differently. It connects at the account level, and it’s designed as it’s named – to connect between two OS X machine-user-accounts that share the same MobileMe name. In other words, to connect to one’s own account – at the machine level, not the account level.

I had to setup an account on one of my machines with the same MobileMe user name as my mother. Then I could try the connection. As promised it did show her machine in my Shared device Finder display, but when I tried to connect I got a “connection failed” message. I assume my mother’s cable modem/router configuration is not supported.

Even if it had worked though I wouldn’t have been able to switch to her Administrator account, B2MM is an account level connection only.

OS X remote maintenance is certainly unimpressive. I’m even more impressed now with LogMeIn. This MobileMe feature failed.

See: The MobileMe Massacre begins

MobileMe – The iPhone iDisk.app

With MobileMe and the free iPhone iDisk.app files copied to an OS X or XP mounted iDisk (WebDav) share can also be viewed on your iPhone. I know there are other apps that do something similar, such as Air Sharing, but I think this will work for me.

Note that as the “Master” of my family MobileMe account I have 20GB of iDisk storage.

Here’s an illustrative example

Work around XP SP2 bugs so you can mount an iDisk as a Windows (WebDav) file share.
Drop a PDF into the share. It’s now accessible through all iDisk clients, including my server synchronized iDisk folder.
Open iPhone iDisk.app and view PDF. The iPhone PDF viewer is quite impressive.
From iPhone PDF viewer you can send an email. The email will contain a link that points to the shared file (doesn’t actually contain the file).

Slick. I assume the iDisk viewable file types are the same as those viewable as email attachments:

Viewable document types: .jpg, .tiff, .gif (images); .doc and .docx (Microsoft Word); .htm and .html (web pages); .key (Keynote); .numbers (Numbers); .pages (Pages); .pdf (Preview and Adobe Acrobat); .ppt and .pptx (Microsoft PowerPoint); .txt (text); .rtf (rich text format); .vcf (contact information); .xls and .xlsx (Microsoft Excel)

MobileMe – Getting WebDav (iDisk) support working on XP

No matter what I tried, I couldn’t get my XP machines to mount an iDisk using the WebDav protocol per Apple’s directions:

Connecting to your iDisk from Windows Explorer

Click the Start menu and choose Network Connections > My Network Places.

In the window that opens, click "Add a network place" to open the Add Network Place wizard.

On the next screen, click "Choose another network location."

When prompted for the URL for your iDisk, type the following URL address (replace "YourMemberName" with your own member name):
http://idisk.me.com/YourMemberName/

I thought the problem was that my user name had a dot ‘.’ in the middle of it. MobileMe usernames become webdav directories.

Wrong. Google (praise be) gave me the fix …

I'm not sure if this is the right place to post this but I found a solution to my problems with XP and Apache2 here: http://blog.pclark.net/2005/03/fun-with-windows-xp-and-webdav.html...

The secret is to add a port number to the URL - for instance, use:
http://my.site.com:80/mydirectory
rather than
http://my.site.com/mydirectory.

When you do this, you'll get the AuthName from your httpd.conf file in the authentication window above the username and password fields, and the username and password should work, without having to have my.site.com\ prepended to the username…

So I tried http://idisk.me.com:80/first.lastname/ (actually, I forgot the terminal ‘/’ but it worked first try. I just had to enter my username and password, telling XP to remember the password.

I suspect this is actually an XP bug. There’s something familiar with it, it wouldn’t surprise me to learn I’ve had to do this before (yep, I solved this one a year ago with DreamHost, it’s known as the /# hack!)

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

MobileMe – Locator Service

To configure the locator service you need to add a MobileMe account in the Mail, Contacts, Calendar Settings domain. I added my phone and, for the moment, turned off all synchronization other than location.

Push support must be enabled on the phone.

Once you’ve enabled this feature you have several features related to finding your phone:

You can make it play a sound, even when it’s in silent mode.
You can locate it on a map. Currently Apple uses Google maps. Getting the refined location takes a few minutes. When the phone was in a room in my home I could locate it within a 2 block radius. I put it on the window sill where it might get a GPS lock and it centered on a spot between my home and my neighbor’s home – about 30 feet from its actual location.
You can display a message to whoever might have your phone, such as “I am looking at your house now ..”
You can lock the phone using the remote lock.
You can remote wipe the phone, after which it cannot be located.

See: The MobileMe Massacre begins

MobileMe Family Pack activation and account information

The activation procedure I followed was identical to a single user activation. I tried reactivating using my old .Mac username, but MobileMe was unable to connect it to the current password. I wonder if a .Me version of the old account is in limbo with an old password*.

So I have a distinct iTunes/Apple account and MobileMe account. That’s probably a good thing.

The first account you use is the Master account. So I am the Master of my family. That’s nice.

In Settings I configured my Mail to 1GB (it will not be used) and iDisk to 19GB. The Family Pack comes with 20GB of storage and a 200GB monthly data transfer limit.

It turns out that package description is misleading. I thought there were four MobileMe accounts. It appears there’s 1 Master account (20GB) and four minion(?) accounts, each with 5GB of storage. So total storage is 40GB. I don’t know if the 200 GB data transfer limit is for the master account or for all accounts.

I put a reminder in ToodleDo to renew a few weeks ahead of the displayed expiration date.

See: The MobileMe Massacre begins.

* So if you discontinue a MobileMe account, you may wish to keep the last good password around.

Update 10/21/09: See MobileMe- Perspective of a crusty Palm veteran, a review I wrote in July 2009. Back then I was able to get my original .Mac username and convert it to me.com, so I should have tried to claim my un with a .me extension.

Update 10/21/09b: You can remove family member accounts and thus recycle them. It's in the Account Options menu.

The MobileMe Massacre begins

After several years of watching with vague disgust, I purchased a MobileMe 4 5 person family pack (via Macintouch referral link) from Amazon for $123. It took 12 days to arrive, which is about 3 times as long as I’d expected.

I’ll be using it for Emily, my mother (remote maintenance) and me. The sum of services that I think will make it worthwhile include:

iPhone locator, send message, lock and remote wipe services
Outlook 2003/2007 synchronization to MobileMe contacts, as used in my Contacts project. (The SyncWiz failure persuaded me to seek the only Outlook AddIn Contacts Sync solution I’ve had success with).
Webdav (iDisk) shares and large file messaging
Remote maintenance/access (esp... for my mother)

I don’t think I have any use for the Calendaring, bookmarks, email, or photo gallery services. I certainly don’t want to commit my data to MobileMe; Apple is to Data Freedom as the Birthers are to Obama.

I will have more to say about each of the features I use, which is best done in stages because MobileMe is a fairly amorphous and fluid set of services. Some of the capabilities are OS X specific, and some are probably 10.6 specific (or less buggy on 10.6). Some are iPhone specific (locator), some are iLife specific (albums, iWeb) and a few work with a PC (which I actually need).

In general the more Apple products you use, the more MobileMe becomes a reasonable purchase.

I’ll add links below to the next few weeks of reviews.

10/20/09: MobileMe Family Pack activation and account information
10/20/09: MobileMe – Locator Service
10/21/09: MobileMe – Getting Webdav support working on XP
10/21/09: MobileMe – The iPhone iDisk.app
10/21/09: Mobile Me back to my Mac for remote maintenance – a complete fail
10/21/09: MobileMe - Sharing Contacts and Calendars in a Family account (doesn't work)
10/23/09: MobileMe: Integrating Work and Personal Contacts