My problem with Apple

It should be pretty clear that I like Apple products.  I am still buying the products after the company dumped me a couple of years ago.  Apple's OSX is my default operating system even after I tried very hard to switch to Linux and to tolerate Windows XP.  I stay with Apple because I'm more productive using Apple products.  Still there are some things that drive me crazy about Apple.  One of them is dot Mac.  The other is my continuing disappointment with Safari in certain areas.

My problem with dot Mac illustrates one of the biggest challenges for Apple.  It's a huge one.  Apple needs to deliver the same kind of excellence that it normally creates in hardware products in everything that it does.  I seriously doubt that's going to happen because Apple has a bandwidth problem.  So many things at Apple are constrained by the inability of many very good managers to make decisions.  It often seems that things which you would expect to be really good are at best a hodgepodge of some very good things and some not so good things.  There is very little at dot Mac that can't be replaced with better products if you have a little technical expertise.

Dot Mac email has been crying in the wilderness for an upgrade for ages.  So I absolutely welcome the new interface and the ability to do drag and drop in the webmail interface.  I think the client looks great, but what about some management tools for email only dot Mac accounts?   If I have five email only accounts, why can't I as the person paying for them, administer the accounts enough to reset the passwords?  That sort of a basic requirement in the world of email.  Yet  that's pretty hard to do if you have given the accounts out to family members who have set the passwords themselves.  In the world of real email, someone is an administrator and has the ability to reset passwords.  Dot Mac comes up short in this and other areas.

Before I get into details, I am sort of an email junkie with "well over ten" email accounts.  Contrary to some rumors, I do not have that many so that  Apple cannot track me down. They already know where I live.  They paid for the move to this mountainside.  Email is important to me because I've been around since the dawn of time when it comes to email so I enjoying trying to figure out what's the best system.  I even worked with an email services company, Webmail.us, for nine months so I know what a MX record is  and how to change it.

Dot Mac started out on the right foot by offering IMAP which is absolutely critical if you're going to use your mail from multiple computers without getting a headache. POP only client access is the one big fault that I would like to see Google correct with Gmail.  Doing POP is fine on one computer, but IMAP is just a better way to do it on multiple computers.

Dot Mac was also at one time the absolute easiest and quickest way to put pictures up on the web.  Now that iWeb has been introduced, it just a pain in the rear.  I did one picture this morning just to see if things had improved.  It (iWeb) still went through all sorts of contortions and published everything which was on this computer.  Of course iWeb demonstrates a near total lack of understanding of the way the web should be by not knowing about my dot Mac Blog which I have published from another computer to the same dot Mac account.  If Apple ever wants to be taken seriously in the blogging world with dot Mac and maybe they don't, they need to fix iWeb so it behaves like a real web application.

Beyond administering dot Mac, I have some other concerns. The first is that somehow Apple managed to bill me for dot Mac this year even though my credit card had expired.  I just happened to check my personal info and noticed that my credit card expiration was the month before Apple renewed my dot Mac account.  I am not particularly excited about Apple having the power to bill my expired credit card.  Then again, maybe I should take that up with Citibank.  However, I regularly get notes from other web services companies that the card on file is about to expire.  Is this beyond Apple's programing ability?

Next on the list of my dot Mac wishes is the inability to allocate any additional storage to the email only accounts.  Actually it's pretty hard to tell what you're using in storage in those accounts unless you're using all those accounts yourself.  Apple has mastered the art of telling users of those accounts that they're over their storage limit, but offers no real solution other than deleting email.

On that most recent trip to one of my dot Mac email only accounts, I also found out that according to Apple, I was "over my data transfer limit."  When I clicked on details I found out that the next screen didn't agree with the first assessment.  This is the information that I got when I clicked on help.

.Mac monitors the amount of data transfer associated with each .Mac account in order to ensure a high level of performance for all .Mac users. When you purchase a .Mac membership, you receive 1 GB of storage and up to 10 GB of data transfer per month.

If you are close to exceeding your monthly data transfer limit, you will receive a message from the .Mac team. You can use up to half of your monthly quota during the first 15 days of a month. If you exceed your data transfer limit, any site, blog, or podcast associated with your .Mac account is turned off and service will not be reinstated until the beginning of the next monitoring period (the 1st or 16th of the month, whichever comes first).

My point in all of this, is that I don't see Apple excellence in the details of dot Mac.  If I'm using dot Mac's webmail user interface, I have a number of tabs which are irrelevant to me.  When clicked, they give me annoying screens which remind me that I'm not a full fledged dot Mac user.

I have given up on address box synchronization using dot Mac.  I've had too many problems, and I just don't want to face the hassles. I would prefer to see a calendar better integrated into the email client, but I don't think that is going to happen.   

I guess the question is why do I keep using dot Mac.  The trust is my wife and youngest daughter are people who don't like to change email addresses, but this year I can guarantee you, will be my last with dot Mac.

I currently use three different hosting companies, all of whom provide some number of email accounts.  My most recent account is with Hostway.  I got a much better deal than I've linked to but it was one of those time sensitive things.  Hostway uses Sitemail which I like a lot, but it is POP based, but the FTP access seems to work well, and using a combination of Shutterbug and Fetch, I find it much easier to do photo albums than on dot Mac. For about $150 a year, I have a much better solution than dot Mac, and I would be embarrassed to tell you how many email accounts it included.

If you just want very good, exceptionally reliable IMAP based mail, try my old company Webmail.us. Unfortunately they don't do web hosting so it's not a complete solution.  If your already own your own domain, you can get five 1 gig email accounts for $60.  You can buy up to ten gigs  per email box.

Of course, if you want a great deal and a relatively complete solution, you might try Google apps for your domain.  I actually have account there Oracokewaves.com, but I haven't tried doing photo albums yet, and I'm not sure what type of FTP access I have if any.  The price is definitely right, since it is free, and it comes with plenty of email accounts.

I have just a couple of more point on Apple to close.  The first is that if Apple is serious about blogging they need to figure out how to fix Safari or work with Typepad to get Safari fully supported.  This screen shows the incomplete set of tools you get in Typepad if you log in with Safari.  This screen shows what I see when I log in with Firefox.  I know this looks trivial, but it isn't trivial if you are a serious blogger.  It has also been this way for a very long time.

All of this brings me back to my original point.  The difference between Apple being a company with some hit products and being a great company is all in delivering uncompromising excellence across all of  their products.  While Apple is making boatloads of money and cranking out some great products, it fails when it doesn't bring world class attention to detail in everything.  It's all about creating a culture of excellence and letting great managers do their job under strong guidance so that it all fits together.

Unfortunately that isn't Apple.  Apple is a tightly controlled organization where few people have real decision making power.  It's pretty easy to tell where the real genius is focused, and it isn't Dot Mac.

Comments

[Stephen]

I'm surprised that you don't use Picasa Web Albums from Google, especially since they released the plug-in for iPhoto.

I've asked Google to incorporate Bonjour sharing from iPhoto to Picasa, but no such luck yet.

In the interim, what I do is use Windows file sharing to keep my photos in iPhoto on my G5, and then use Picasa to point to the iPhoto Library. I actually like Picasa better than iPhoto sometimes, and since I dropped .Mac last year in favor of Gmail, the web photo publishing on Picasa Web Albums being much better than .Mac.

[ocracokewaves]

Of course being better than dot Mac photo publishing is no real claim to fame, but you do bring up a valid point. I've been using Flickr for a long time for most of my albums. I did use an iPhoto plug-in but have switched to a drag and drog uploader.

On your recommendation I activated my Picasa Web Albums and uploaded a few random photos. I did the same thing with Flickr uploader. I guess it's a matter of personal choice. I actually pay for the professional version of Flickr, but I did notice the free 250 megs of Picasa storage.

Here's what I get for my yearly $24.95 at Flickr.

* 2 GB monthly upload limit
* Unlimited storage
* Unlimited bandwidth
* Unlimited photosets
* Permanent archiving of high-resolution original images
* Ad-free browsing and sharing

I'm not sure how much storage comes with the free account, but I suspect both Flickr and Picasa are far better than dot Mac when it comes to publishing photos on the web.

My Flickr account is:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ocracokewaves/

My Picasa account is:

http://picasaweb.google.com/dsobotta/

I still find that having my own domain, along with a person website, with it's own email, and FTP access is the way to go if you understand a few basic things about the web.

[pauldwaite]

On Safari and Typepad, are you sure it's Safari's fault and not Typepad using Mozilla-specific proprietary extensions, or just choosing not to fully support Safari?

(I only ask as I've no experience with Typepad at all.)

[ocracokewaves]

Since I'm not a programmer, I have no idea. I've mentioned it to some Apple folks who don't appear to be very concerned.

I have the same problems with slight differences at "Blogger"

http://ocracokewaves.blogspot.com/

and at "Radio."

http://radio.weblogs.com/0143806/

So unless they're all using the same blogging software, my guess is the problem is with Safari.

[Jeff]

It's even worse if you're using WordPress, in which you get zero tools for formatting your text, inserting links, etc. Firefox of course works flawlessly with all features.

[Jay]

It's actually a Typepad and Blogger problem. Really. They query to find out what kind of browser and rendering engine is in use and based on that, allow certain functions.

KHTML (the Safari and OmniWeb engine) behaves slightly differently than Gecko (Firefox, Mozilla, Camino). I'm willing to bet that Typepad and Blogger are running "dumbed down" pages because the Safari user-agent string doesn't exactly match what they are expecting -or- they are using non-standard HTML extensions.

The bottom line is that most sites code and test for Mozilla and IE and everyone else is an after thought. That includes Safari, OmniWeb and Opera users sadly.

[kerflop]

While I enjoy the new interface of .mac mail, it has rendered it useless on my PC that I have to use for work. When I log in to view my mail, it will show me the messages, I can read the messages, but when I click to respond - all I get is a big gray box. I run Firefox on my PC and haven't tried it on IE because I hate IE.

/rant

[subcorpus]

has anyone figured out how access picasa web albums by using an FTP client ... like cyber duck ... ??
thanks ...