Thank you Apple (finally)

Thank you Apple! I received my MobileMe Calendar Beta invite yesterday (after all other accounts in my mobileme family pack got it :-S).
I love the MobileMe service, but was always annoyed to see that you could not share a calendar for read/write access and sync it at the same time through MobileMe. So I was forced to use Google Calendar for this. Annoying, since I don't use google for anything else.

So in the past few years, I've mailed with some very friendly Apple support people, filing my complaints, I even sent a mail to Jobs (never got an answer though) about this. Lo and behold, a week after I sent my complaint email to Jobs, the Calendar Beta was introduced, with exactly the featureset I proposed in my many emails. I guess I wasn't the only one complaining then :-)

Yesterday, after upgrading my wife's iPhone to iOS4.0.1 I moved everything from google calendar to MobileMe. I hope to never have to look back again.

Sigh - the iPhone with iOS4 is still not MobileMe Family Pack compatible

Everyone jumped for joy iOS4 is released! But why didn’t Apple add support for multiple MobileMe accounts, next to the new update to allow multiple Exchange accounts? Now the iPhone is still incompatible for Family pack usage, and Apple forces me to keep using Google Calendar for a shared calendar in our family.

My wife and I both have our own MobileMe account. The kids each have one as well. And I created one general account which is for all of us (mostly my wife and I).

The current situation is that for our shared calendar I setup a CalDAV Google Calendar account. Since MobileMe does not allow shared calendars which can be both read and written to. This has not changed in the new MobileMe update. I already sent a new request to Apple support for this, again, I’d recommend everyone who want this to do the same!

But even if this could be done, the iOS does not support adding multiple MobileMe accounts, so I would never be able to use our shared account on the iPhone.

To make MobileMe really work, Apple should really work on this. I love the service, and I am generally very pleased with the support, but this lack of flexibility is a major issue, especially if free services are providing this a long time already. It’s way overdue.

MobileMe beta - oh and why gmail search still fails

Finally got my invite and started playing with it.
A few issues found within the first ten minutes of playing with it:

- Creating a rule based on the "From:" field only allows a full email address to be entered as criterium. You should definately be able to create a rule on parts of an email address (domain name for instance), so I've requested a "contain"/"does not contain" addition. Please do so as well.

- Search still does only search one folder, and not across folders. Which is a big annoyance since I quite often don't remember exactly in which folder a mail has been stored. On my Mac I just use the spotlight and boom, it's found. But MobileMe web search at least allows for searching on part of a word, example:

In my inbox I have a mail with subject "Welcome to MobileMe beta". When I search on "Welc", it will pop up that exact message (and possibly other mails with "welc....." in it.

Then why the hell doesn't google mail do this? In my gmail inbox I have a mail with subject "interview". Search on "inter" (nor "inter*") does return nada zip zilch results.. Major #fail on google's part!

All in all, I very much like the new MobileMe beta, can't wait until the rest is updated too.

Apple MobileMe calendar syncing iPhone not quite syncing

We have a MobileMe family account and with the event of iPhone OS3 I thought my wife and I would finally be able to share our calendars. So, I published my calendar on iCal, my wife published hers and we cross-subscribed to eachother's calendar on our iPhones.
 
However, new events weren't visible for either party. Sucks. And what do you know? According to this support article: http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1213 The shared calendars do NOT sync through MobileMe! Which means to get this working computer syncing is a neccessity. Big bummer and fail.
 
So, since MobileMe family package allows for 5 accounts and we're with 4 people in our family (not counting the cats, who may want an account too..), I thought I'd just set up one central "family" account and use that. Bummer again, the iPhone does NOT allow two active MobileMe accounts and activating one account will remove the other account's calendars on the iPhone.
 
Dear Apple, please solve this, it's rediculous that if you have a family account you cannot do anything that is really shared and it's even more weird you cannot have more than one MobileMe account on your iPhone!

Macworld Expo 2009 predictions

On a lighter note than previous posts.. Everyone seems to be doing it, and I'm going to have a go at it too.

 - lots of crap talk about iTunes, Appstore successes and other sales
- 17" "unibody" MBP is a 99% cert
- New Mac Mini w/new intel CPU and no more Firefire (which would suck)
- no iMac update, these will "silently" be updated after MWSF09 I think,
unless they're going to pitch this as a "first quad core consumer
all-in-one desktop"
- updated iLife and iWork suites and
- improvements on MobileMe (again) for functionality in above suits
- no iPhone Nano (but possibly an iPod Touch Nano!)
- demo of Snow Leopard with a few bigshots in the industry and it'll be
available right after the WWDC09 possibly

 I don't think there'll be much iPod/iPhone related stuff, it'll probably
be mostly Mac related. I expect a "special event" by the end of
February, March with more iPhone/iPod announcements.

 There, now I am among those geeks that consider themselves important
enough that their predictions actually matter... (no, really)

Mobile me buttons ...

Mobile Me is still in a state of flux. Somehow the authorization doesn't
stick, and I get spontaneous reloads of the website for some weirdo
reason.

And funnily enough, the buttons have all gone blank..

Apple, fix this! My subscription is about to expire, but I'm having
serious doubts to extend it with the current problems.. (I probably
will, since I depend on it heavily... Sigh)