I got a .mac subscription the other day (primarily for other members of my family) but I’ve been playing around with it a bit and have found several uses that I suppose I can point to to justify the $8.25 per month it is costing me ($99 per year). I have found being able to sync my calendar and address book on both my G5 at work and two other machines at home is nice (and may eliminate the need for my Zire 72—which had pretty much come to function as a sync tool between computers). I also posted a quick iWeb one page website and set up a couple of email accounts to give spambots a few more targets. But the most interesting thing thus far has been the iDisk.
With the “basic” plan, Apple provides a 1GB iDisk (a WebDav disk) which shows up on your desktop in cached form and then a “sync” process (either automatic or manual) keeps it current with it’s net-based master. Contents of this “iDisk” are also accessible from any modern webbrowser (Mac or Windows or Linux) that understands the WebDav protocol.
The problem lies in the default desktop interface to iDisk—Finder. It is slow and quirky and offers very little feedback during transfers. Fortunately, a really nice Cocoa application, Transmit (an ftp/sftp/WebDav client from Panic software) also understands .mac and transfers are much faster. How much faster? Well, here are the results of my unofficial test:
Same computer, same network…
I should mention that the test is conducted on a powerbook going over a LinkSys 802.11g wireless router (four rooms away) which is connected via cat5 wire to a wireless broadband network antenna on my roof which in turn is pointed at another antenna on a tower 2 miles away (see RoadStar Internet)…which means I’m not on a really fast connection (it averages around 500-700 Kbps on the Intel broadband speed test page but speed falls off during WebDav transfers).
Test Data: The Dead Kennedys, Viva Las Vegas.mp3 (4.1Mb)
From Powerbook to iDisk (using Transmit): 1 minute, 10 seconds
From Powerbook to iDisk (using Finder): 1 minute, 32 seconds
So clearly, a copy of Transmit speeds things up and if my experience moving a 52Mb Keynote file around between machines via iDisk is typical, it is more reliable as well.
Bottom line: There are much better deals on the net if you are just looking for a hosting site. In fact, if you are planning a “popular” site, .mac will get expensive (Apple’s $99 subscription limits bandwidth to 10GB per month, increasing it to 25GB costs an additional $45 per year, 250GB yet another $45). If your requirements include WebDav (which fortunately isn’t counted against this bandwidth allocation), the list of choices grows smaller and if you also want integration with Apple’s iLife, iCal and Contacts (along with .mac aware applications like Transmit, Quicken, NetNewsWire, Yojimbo and others) then .mac begins to make a bit more sense.