MobileMe: Not for Me.

(From a few months ago)

I recently took some time to play around with MobileMe, Apple’s entry into the server exchange (?) market. You can head over to the site and try it out free for 60 days and see what you think, but after a week or so of using it, I really don’t think that the $99/yr price is justifiable.

First, I’ll run down the major features. For the aforementioned price, you receive syncing of your contacts, calenders, and (technically) mail. Also, you receive access to iDisk, your little peice of storage on the internet (10GB in the trial, and 20 after purchase, I believe). MobileMe also works with iPhoto to give you web galleries online, or you can upload on to the site or even use a created email address. Of everything included, my favorite feature was most certainly the compatibility with iWeb, and the provided web hosting (the URL is made for you, though).

Now, all of this is nice, and if you ask me, the price is questionable even if everything worked well. But that’s the problem: much of it doesn’t. The syncing of your contacts and calenders is spotty, at best. Sometimes it works properly, and other times names show up without information, or no changes happen at all. The syncing isn’t even instantaneous. From your Mac or PC, everything is updated every fifteen minutes. Your iPod touch or iPhone will sync via push, but that still means it isn’t as quick as it could be. Furthermore, one of the main features, the email address, would be somewhat useless to most people. I already have a two gmail accounts, and it works great. My family has the one address, and the other is used for website registration, which forwards to the other one. It’s perfect. So with all of that set up, what am I going to do with a new email address? That’s a hassle. You can set up the address to take in other mail via POP3, but I really need IMAP. The iDisk is probably the most hassle free feature. I have a Mac, and it shows up right in the sidebar of the Finder, and you can just drag and drop. Perfect.

What does require more explanation is the photo gallery and iWeb use. The gallery gives you space to upload photos so others can see them. You can hand out the URL to family members and friends, so they can navigate to the page with their browser (more on that below), and enjoy your photos. Also, you can hand out an email address if you wish so others can upload their own photos. However, sometimes this doesn’t work as planned. My iPhoto library failed to really upload correctly, often hiding albums that I had not told it to. 

A final note: If you have a PC, you need to download the MobileMe control panel to do anything at all, and PC users will notice that the experience is much worse for them. Another issue with compatibility is the fact that web browser support is terrible. Safari 3/4 and Firefox 3 are the only that fully work. All others have problems, and considering IE 6 is still one of the most widely used browsers in hotels and businesses, you’re out of luck if you travel a lot and need to access something using a computer with it.

Apple is well known for it solid software that delivers well all around and is easy to use. But compared to everything that I have used that is developed by them, I can easily say that MobileMe is the least solid and easy to use.

Why the Future isn't Ready for Us.

There are a lot of things with today’s technology industry that really get on my nerves. The natural evolution of a business, specifically videogames, means that eventually the mainstream audience gets involved, and that’s where we see something such as the Wii, or Microsoft’s pushes out of it’s hardcore market (Xbox 360 Arcade Bundle). Those kind of things don’t bother me quite that much, as long as they don’t really affect me that much, which they haven’t. However, there is one issue that is present all over the technology industry, and is something that really bothers me about today’s videogames.

While I know, that as a developer, it is really hard to get something to be utterly bug free, there are limits. Today’s software, be it on a computer, a phone, or even a TV, is just riddled with bugs and glitches. I’ll even admit that my beloved MacBook does some rather odd, and frustrating, things sometimes. My phone decides to restart at certain points, and I’m pretty tired of game killing errors in $60 video games. That isn’t what I paid for.

I have a great example of that, too. I had invested quite a bit of time into Far Cry 2. Honestly, it is one of the best games I’ve played in a while. But, one day, for a reason I still cannot figure out, the game decided that the save file was corrupted. Anyone who has ever been there knows how frustrating that is, and what it’s like to try to figure out if you should even replay. Luckily for me, however, there was another save file from earlier still there. That’s lucky, but sometimes I haven’t been quite that forunate.

Fable II, also one of the best games I have ever played, has one glitch that really annoys me. Sometimes, during a specific quest, the game will not load a region of the map. And once this little glitch happens, it stays, so no matter what you’re doing, you cannot load that region. So, your progress within that game is essentially stopped in its tracks.

Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of games out there that are really solid, and that I haven’t had problems with, and the same goes with other software. It just seems where we’ve gotten to the point where this is something that is going to be regular. The old Palm OS was behind, certainly, but it was really solid, and days with things like that won’t work. And that’s just because as consumers, we demand the cutting edge. we want to see cool looking stuff. And unfortunately, that means we’re basically asking for something that isn’t here. We want the future, and it hasn’t had time to work out its kinks yet.

There is Sex on My Screen

I can’t say that there have been a whole lot of topics as touchy with as how video games are treated in the mainstream. Violence within gaming is something that has always been there, but as we’ve come to an age that media plays into life and politics more and more each day, we see how the public looks at the industry. Grand Theft Auto IV is a fantastic example, as is Mass Effect.The latter of the two is a prime example of how things are just taken wrong. Bad reporting might go hand-in-hand with Fox News, depending on your opinion, but saying that Mass Effect allows you to choose when to have sex, how to have it, and who to have it with is just terrible journalism.

But look at the big difference between “gamers” and the rest of the world. We look at that and ask how such a deep piece of entertainment can be taken like that. Others look and see a game with sex- and that’s just an issue: GAME. Of course it’s a game, but that’s the big problem. Movies, TV shows, books, and the like all have deep elements and full fledged stories that come along with them. So when there is violence on the television, people don’t think much of it because if they recognize good writing or an engaging plot of any sort, it makes everything else a side note.

Not so with a piece of software. People don’t expect top of the line stories with character development and the like – at least not those that think games are still just that. How can one expect the industry to gain respect if everything it spits out is seen only as a game. Sure, that’s what it is, and there isn’t another option, but until the mainstream consumers think beyond a control pad and guns, they won’t realize that video games are much more nowadays. As far as I’m concerned it won’t be a time when video games are seen the same as movies until the older generations have passed on.