In my opinion Apple’s .Mac service is rather slow, somewhat unreliable and it’s quiet expensive. Did you know that you can have all .mac-alike services for free? Truth is, they wont be all in one place and as integrated in the Mac OS X, but they will do the job just as well.
Bookmarks Synchronization: Many people love the bookmarks synchronization offered in .Mac.Free alternatives:
Bookmarks Synchronizer 1.0.1: Bookmarks Synchronizer is a Mozilla Firefox extension that let you connect to an FTP/WebDAV server and synchronize your bookmarks that are stored in an XML file. Setup is easy; just write in your FTP/WebDAV server address, username, password and a name for the XML file. Safari users read this and this. I am sure there is a better way of syncing your Safari bookmarks. You can (if you are adventurous) make an apple script that will back up all your bookmarks to remote server.
Web Design: NVU is a complete Web Authoring System for Linux desktop also available for Mac and Windows. NVU doesn’t have fancy templates but it has some really nice and powerful features. Plus, you can download free templates from the Internet, import them in NVU and customize the way you want it. Alternatively, read this.
E-mail: .Mac e-mail is the most popular feature in the whole .Mac story. You have to admit that .mac mail is often too slow and it can be irritating. My personal favourites when it comes to e-mail messaging are gmail and yahoo mail . Both services will offer over 1 GB of storage space and they are very reliable. They can be configured easily to work with Mail. app or any other e-mail client.
Exchanging files: Exchanging files can be done by opening a free FTP account and then use your favourite FTP client to manipulate your data online. But why bother when you can open a free account at http://www.box.net for your backups and the file exchange. Box.net also has a widget that can be embedded into a website or a blog for easier file sharing.I have already explained how to share your iPhoto images in my previous articles, but I would recommend you to use Flickr for hosting your images. All you need is one of the free iPhoto plug-ins to export all your albums directly on the web.
More plug-ins… I think that now you’ve got everything that .Mac offers for free or almost free as you may find some software to be shareware application. If you still prefer .Mac simplicity and features, go to http://www.apple.com/dotmac/ and buy a copy.
January 7, 2008 at 7:00 pm |
Problem is, even though the other services are free, they’re not all under one account.
So what you get for free, you have the hassle of managing separately…