You are here: macography.net » MobileMe

Started deleting my stuff from MobileMe

22/07/2011

Today I have started deleting pictures that I have uploaded to MobileMe throughout the years. This is a sad moment and I am now debating where to store those pictures.

I am already using a Picasa Web account for that purpose but I am assessing other options.

I have also started moving data away from iDisk. Good or bad, iDisk was a place where I knew I could store data that I didn’t need on my Mac all the time. It also made very easy to share large files.

It’s not clear if Apple is going to introduce alternatives to these two services but I am not that optimistic. An era is coming to the end.

Easily migrate your iWeb site from MobileMe

13/06/2011

If you host your personal website on MobileMe it’s time to plan your exit strategy, moving your site to a different web hosting service that is.

Luckily migrating your website from MobileMe is not that difficult. Follow me.

Yesterday MacRumors reported that iWeb and MobileMe website hosting are going to be discontinued once Apple introduces iCloud. This rumor comes from an allegedly email that Steve Jobs sent to a concerned iWeb user:

Question: Dear Mr. Jobs,

Will I need to find an alternative website builder and someone to host my sites?

I have invested a lot of time and effort and the thought of re-training sucks more than MobileMe ever did.

Reply: Yep.

Sent from my iPhone

Somehow I sensed that something like that would happen. I personally never used MobileMe web hosting but it was a nice addition to the services offered. iWeb is a simple and honest web authoring tool. It does what it promises, nothing more nothing less.

By pure chance just yesterday I posted an article on how to move your data away from MobileMe and did not include any instructions on how to move your website away from MobileMe hosting (I’m going to edit that post and put a link to this article).

Anyway, here are the simple steps to grab your website and store it safely on your Mac. Once you do that you can easily move it to your favourite Web Hosting service.

You’ve got two ways to start:

a. Use Finder
b. Use an FTP client like Transmit or Cyberduck

If your website is large and contains plenty of pictures you might want to use an FTP client thanks to the higher speed.

Either way you need to connect to your iDisk. If you use Finder, you should have an icon that allows you to connect to iDisk:

  1. Browse to iDisk –> Web –> Sites –> [your website]
  2. Copy the whole [your website] (Test_Macography in the screenshot above) to the Desktop
  3. Done

This folder contains your index.html, Welcome.html and the rest of the files that makes your website on MobileMe.

This morning I easily moved a test website that I uploaded to MobileMe to a subdomain of macography.net. I used Transmit to upload the content of Test_Macograhy folder to the public_html directory of my website. It worked straight away.

Simple steps to move away from MobileMe

13/06/2011

[Edited on 18th October 2011. If you are looking for information on how to switch from Gmail to iCloud, go this post.]

After the announcement of iCloud at WWDC 2011, the majority of Apple users can’t wait to get their hands on the new service.

There is a minority of users that for many different reasons would like to switch to a different product to manage email, calendar, contacts etc. Many of these users think that a free product like iCloud is not going to offer the reliability that they want or maybe they simply are worried by the fact that up to now no web interface has been announced for iCloud. I have touched on this subject right here.

In my opinion, iCloud will be the best service to integrate all our Apple devices together. In spite of that, I thought that users that are afraid to put all their eggs in one basket could benefit from a post on how to safely move away from MobileMe.

The main concern when you migrate your data to another platform is to avoid data losses at all costs and at the same time reduce the disruption to a minimum. When you delete MobileMe on an iOS device or when it simply expires you easily risk losing data. Nobody should come across such a scenario as Apple has extended, free of charge, the MobileMe subscription to all users until 30th June 2012.

Your MobileMe account can contain lots of data and you should employ different methods to move that data to your new account. Let’s check what your MobileMe account can store:

  • Emails
  • Notes
  • Calendars
  • Contacts
  • iDisk files
  • Bookmarks
  • Pictures
  • Keychain passwords
  • Application preferences and settings
  • Back to My Mac
  • Find My iPhone

In this post we’ll go through each of these items and see if and how we can export that data from MobileMe and make it available in a standard format, ready to be moved to a different service (Google is the first that comes to my mind). Throughout the post I will assume that you have access to your Mac. All iOS devices are still closely tethered to Mac so if you want to move away from MobileMe you need to use a Mac. I believe that once iOS 5 is out, similar steps will be available to iOS users too.

Warning: Don’t log out of MobileMe in System Preferences on your Mac or delete the MobileMe account on your iOS device before exporting the data you want to preserve.

Email

To move your emails away from MobileMe your best friend is mail.app on your Mac. The process you need follow is straightforward:

1. Download all messages and attachments to your Mac

a. Open mail.app b. Go to Mail –> Preferences c. Highlight the MobileMe account and go to the Advanced tab d. Make sure that the Download messages and attachments option is checked

At this point, if the option in d. was not selected you might have to wait for all messages to download locally. You can check the progress by clicking on the Show Mail Activity button on the bottom left corner of mail.app (second button from the left):

The reason you need to start with this step is because MobileMe email is an IMAP messaging system where your emails reside on a remote server and are mirrored on all your devices. In order to view those messages while off-line you need to tell the mail application to download a local copy of the email message stored on the server.

2. Copy your emails from MobileMe to local mailboxes

Now you should have all emails stored locally on your Mac.

a. For each MobileMe folder in mail.app you need to create a local folder. Go to Mailbox –> New Mailbox b. When prompted give an easy to remember name to the folder so that it reminds you of the folder in MobileMe. For example, if you have a mailbox called Apple call the local mailbox Apple Local or similar c. On the Location pull down menu choose On My Mac d. Once you have created the local mailbox, go to the MobileMe mailbox that you want to copy locally. Select all messages (cmd+A) and choose Message –> Copy To –> The local mailbox you created in step c. e. Repeat for all your MobileMe mailboxes

Note: In step d. I chose to use Copy To instead of Move To. I prefer to leave the originals untouched in case something goes wrong during the copy.

What you’ve just done is to create local mailboxes (i.e. stored on your Mac) that are independent by MobileMe. Now your emails are safely stored locally on your Mac and even if you deleted your MobileMe email account, you’d still have them.

3. Copy the emails to the new email provider

If you have already chosen your new email provider (for example Gmail), make sure to setup the new account in mail.app using the IMAP protocol. The instructions are simple, just google “gmail IMAP mac setup” or something similar.

If your new Gmail account has just been opened, you will have to start creating new folders in it, with the same name as the mailboxes you have worked with in step 2.

To copy your emails from your local storage to Gmail you need to repeat the steps in 2. but choosing the source emails, the local ones and the destination the new email account.

Depending on the number of emails you need to move to the new service, this process can be very long. When I tested it for an archive of around 2.5GB, it took me almost one night.

If you have chosen to move to Google Apps for Domain you can automate step 3. by using this handy tool.

During this process your email will continue to be active so you will still be able to receive/send emails.

Notes

Depending on the number of notes you have stored on MobileMe, you might just want to copy them manually onto text file. There is also an Applescript created by Veritrope that automates this process and creates a text file for each note.

This is really handy if you decide to store your notes on Dropbox or like me using nvALT and Simplenote sync.

The script works very well and the website contains precise instructions on how to export your notes.

Calendars

Calendars are not difficult to export but you need to be careful because they are stores only on MobileMe. If for some reason you delete your MobileMe account before backing them up, you’ve lost your data.

The best source on how to export (Apple calls it back up) your calendars is this KB article by Apple

Contacts

This is a very simple process and well documented by Apple here. Remember to export your address book using the vcard format which is recognized by most vendors.

Be aware that if you decide to move to Google, and more specifically to Google Sync some details will not be moved across. It turns out that Google puts a ?limit of three email addresses that can be stored in a contact on your iPhone. The limit also applies to Home Numbers (two records), Home Fax (one), Mobile (one), Pager (one), Work (three records and one will be labeled Company Main) and one Work Fax number.

iDisk

The best way to copy the documents from iDisk to your filesystem is to use a software like Cyberduck (donation-ware) or Transmit which is available at € 26.99 from the Mac App Store.

With both applications the transfer is reliable and fast.

Bookmarks

You can easily export your bookmarks from Safari going to File –> Export Bookmarks. Not much to say here beside the fact that you might have a hard time finding a solution that sync bookmarks across devices so seamlessly and transparently. There are solutions out there (I’m thinking of Xmarks but they all require some manual steps.

Pictures

Chances are that if you are using MobileMe to store your pictures, you probably use iPhoto. This makes the whole operation of leaving MobileMe very simple. You already own those pictures and they appear in your iPhoto library. If you can’t see them, there is an easy solution:

a. Log in to https://www.me.com/gallery/#home b. Double-click on the Gallery you want to export to your Mac
c. Click Adjust the settings for this album (second button from the left in the center of the screen) d. Make sure to select Allow Downloading of photos, movies or entire album and click Publish e. Now click on the Gallery link that appears on top of the window to go to the published album

f. You’re almost done. On the gallery page that is displayed in Safari you will see a Download button that allows you to download the whole album as a handy zip file

Keychain passwords

Nothing to do here, keychains are only synced across devices via MobileMe, they are not stored in MobileMe. That means that when you disable MobileMe from your Mac you still own the logins.

If you still want to sync password across devices, just use 1Password that combined with Dropbox allows you yo keep the login/passwords in sync on your devices.

Application preferences and settings

Same as above. MobileMe simply syncs these settings across devices so you don’t need to manually set the preferences of your second Mac. Again, if you disable MobileMe you simply cut the cord to the sync with other devices.

I am not aware of any other sync service that allows you to that.

Back to My Mac

When you decide to ditch MobileMe, this feature disappears and you need to find an alternative software. The first that comes to my mind is LogMeIn

Unfortunately I don’t have any experience with this service so I am not able to tell you if it’s a valid alternative to MobileMe or even better.

Find My iPhone

There’s no data associated with it. The tracking is in real time and if you really want to move away from MobileMe you should at least keep this service. Find My iPhone remains the best service to track, lock and wipe your iOS device remotely.

iWeb site stored on MobileMe (edited)

You can read this post that I have published a day after this one for the simple instructions.

Conclusions

I am going to stick with iCloud for the time being. I think that Apple’s vision for cloud services is both fascinating and ambitious and I want to use the new services. What are you going to do? Use iCloud? Move to Google Apps for Domain maybe? Anything else?

iCloud predictions

03/06/2011

Following the rumors, patents registered by Apple and different opinions on the matter I’ve come up with an idea on what functionalities iCloud might include. This post of course is going to have a short life. Next Monday everything that I am writing now will be the past and probably non sense. Still, it’s fun to make some predictions about what I think iCloud will be capable of doing.

My prediction is that Apple iCloud will be made of two components: A public cloud and a private one.

The reason behind my belief is because Apple is now one of the few companies that have control over hardware, software and cloud. Public clouds are great but because broadband speeds are still a bottleneck, a classic public cloud is not the ideal answer to Over The Air (OTA) OS upgrades and so forth. You need an additional layer to mitigate the bottleneck caused by the limited speed.

A private cloud is also a good solution to media streaming across devices.

I have summarized my idea in this simple diagram. Please forgive me for not having created a more artistic one (it’s awfully bare, isn’t it?).

1. iCloud

This is not going to be a cloud in the strictest sense but a digital hub used to store user data and sync devices. Apple would never settle for a normal cloud offering. Other companies have been in the business before and Apple now need to differentiate itself from other solutions already on the market.

I think it is going to be fully integrated in iOS 5 and Mac OS Lion. You would simply need to enter your Apple Id during the initial setup. After that you can forget about how it works. It could include:

  1. File Locker. It extends the idea behind iDisk and iWork.com
  2. Music Locker and sometimes in the future a movie locker
  3. PIM, Email, Pictures and Notes sync. Pretty much what MobileMe now offers
  4. Sync engine for 3rd party applications

2. iOS 5 Device outside the home network

iOS 5 devices connected through 3G or on wifi but outside the home network would be able to do more or less what you can do now with the exception of having these features:

  1. Music streaming from your music locker
  2. Files saved locally would be automatically synced to the cloud so that they would automatically be available to all other devices

3. Airport with Time Capsule

This is a big piece of the infrastructure that Apple could put in place and the core device of the private cloud. It could be the perfect companion for these tasks:

System updates

Mac OS X and iOS updates would be downloaded silently and in the background when the network utilization is low. The updates would then be available to all Apple devices as soon as they are connected to the home network. The result could be very fast OTA updates and the effect to cut the cord with iTunes which would become obsolete.

Time Machine

It would of course act as a Time Machine hard drive. Not only that, would it also upload that data to iCloud when the network utilization is low (at night typically). Think of Backblaze on steroids. This could give us the redundancy needed to make our data secure.

Media buffer

It would act as a buffer for music and movies streaming from iCloud to avoid delays when starting to play or annoying interruptions due to limited network bandwidth.

4. iOS 5 Device on the home network

Among the million new features, iOS could be capable of detecting when you are connected to the home network and by a set of new push notifications would tell you what apps have an update and if an iOS upgrade is available.

5. Mac with Mac OS X Lion

I believe that sometimes in the future Macs will eventually be filesystem-less in the same way that iOS devices are. We’re not going to see it in Lion but the new OS X could be capable of mirroring your files to iCloud.

The Automatic Save function could save your document both on the Mac hard drive and to the cloud making it instantly available to all Apple devices connected to your private cloud.

Again, think of Dropbox on a larger scale and completely integrated with Mac OS X.

A few times only I’ve had big expectations for an Apple keynote. This time is one of them. Whatever functionalities Apple is going to introduce I think we are going to see the future of consumer computing in a way that we have never thought.

I’ve had fun writing this post. What do you think we are going to see on Monday? Any additional ideas?

mac.com vs me.com on iOS 4.3

03/04/2011

I’m a long time MobileMe subscriber, or I should say a .mac subscriber. I love my mac.com email address and I was a bit crossed when Apple removed the possibility to use my mac.com email address in iOS 4.2 unless you previously had an account with a username@mac.com address on the iPhone.

When setting up a MobileMe account in iOS 4.2 the email address would default to username@me.com regardless of whether you typed in the login screen username@mac.com.

This was really annoying and I bet that many long time Apple users felt cheated by this. There was a workaround that came as a KB article from Apple. The workaround involved using iTunes to mirror on the iPhone the mac.com email account setup on mail.app on your Mac.

A big surprise happened when I installed iOS 4.3 on my iPhone 4 a few weeks ago. As usual whenever I install a new version of iOS, I also restore the iPhone as a new device.

Immediately after the restore, I added my MobileMe account to the iPhone and expected iOS to automatically change my email address to me.com even though I registered as mac.com.

To my surprise, the email address remained username@mac.com, no need to use the workaround to sync your email account with iTunes.

I believe that this was a bug on iOS 4.2. The proof is this Apple KB where the solution is to upgrade to iOS 4.3.

This ends the speculations that the domain mac.com is going to disappear and all longtime .mac users will have to switch to a less loved username@me.com email address.

Well done Apple, I’m so glad that I can keep on using my beloved mac.com email address.

The (lack) of usefulness of MobileMe System Status

03/04/2011

I like MobileMe, I’ve been using it for nine years and despite the usual complaints about the speed of iDisk and some general reliability improvements that the web interface could undergo, I’ve been quite happy with it.

One of the things that really bugs me is the System Status History which contains entries like this one:

MobileMe Mail Maintenance – 03/17/2011 22:00 PDT – 03/18/2011 02:00 PDT
Due to scheduled maintenance, some MobileMe members may have been unable to access mail for up to 15 minutes. Normal service has been restored. We apologize for any inconvenience.

The keyword here is scheduled maintenance. In IT that is something that is decided days if not weeks/months ahead and it is usually preceded by an email notification or at least an alert on a portal.

Apple has the bad habit of posting these entries during or after the maintenance window.

The process usually goes like this:

  1. Damn, MobileMe is down again…
  2. Check Twitter for other users with the same problem
  3. Check the MobileMe System Status
  4. Huh,… scheduled maintenance. Why wasn’t I alerted?
  5. Go on with your life without MobileMe until the system is back up again

Has this ever bothered you as well or am I the only soul being frustrated by these things?