A year later- Is MobileMe finally worth $99-

A year later: Is MobileMe finally worth $99?
For Web e-mail: NoOn the iPhone and iPod Touch, you get messages as soon as they're sent. On the browser, however, it's missing a lot of features that competitors like Yahoo and Google have had for years. Both of those services are free, and between Gmail's labs, and Yahoo's just-introduced apps platform, MobileMe's Web mail feels rudimentary. It also drives me nuts that the service logs you out after 15 minutes of activity. This isn't my bank account, it's my e-mail. (Note: readers wrote in to let me know that you can avoid having this happen if you check off the "keep me logged in for two weeks" option when first signing on).Web storage: MaybeIf you're a Mac user, MobileMe's iDisk storage explorer looks the same, but on the browser it's missing really important things like search and file previews. If you don't know where the file is stored, you have to hunt it down, which is a pain. Also, despite the fact that you can view photos and videos in other parts of MobileMe, the only way to view those file types from your browser is to download and open them from your hard drive. Most of today's Web storage providers may charge for the kind of space Apple is offering, but they've built in search and preview features that rival the desktop experience.For all its faults, though, you get a generous amount of storage for what it costs. You can also allocate space away from other parts of the MobileMe service to increase your limit without purchasing additional storage from Apple.AppleContact/calendar management and sync: NoWhen MobileMe first came out, management and syncing of your contacts and calendars was major selling point, but since then Google has put the heat on Apple with the release of Google Sync. This free product syncs calendars and contacts from any Google account, and sends any changes over the air, which is exactly what MobileMe does. The one big difference is that Apple's solution lets you sync contacts and calendars without wiping out existing data. But even there, Apple's own data syncing is flawed. When I did my first sync to MobileMe, I chose to merge my existing contacts from Mac's Address Book app and my iPhone (something it does on iTunes every time I sync my phone). Instead of finding the obvious dupes and ignoring them, it made duplicates of all my contacts. Apple is also further cannibalizing the appeal of this feature by letting users subscribe to LDAP directories, and CalDAV/hosted calendars as part of iPhone OS 3.0. If you're someone who's already using services with these data channels, there's no reason to pay for MobileMe since you can set up your phone to sync up to them.MobileMe's online galleries look great, and are one of the most polished parts of the service.CNETPhoto/Video/Site hosting: YesWhile I'm a big proponent of sites like Flickr and YouTube, Apple's hosted galleries are really nice. They're simple and beautiful, and there are no ads or distractions. Sure, they're not as social, and you're limited in storage by how much you've paid for, but if you're trying to send a photo album to friends and family it's a really elegant solution. This is especially true if you're using Apple's iPhoto, which lets you publish and make changes to your Web albums from its software.As for the Web hosting, though, I'm not sold. To make a hosted site you need to use Apple's iWeb or another piece of Web publishing software. There is not a way to build or maintain a site from Me.com alone, which means if you want to make edits from a computer without the software, you're hosed. This is unfortunate considering how many tools are out there that let you do this right from the browser. Apple may add this to future versions, but for now it's a feature you can't fully use without software.So will Apple add more features to MobileMe later this year? I think so. If the company releases a Netbook, you can bet a major selling point is going to be MobileMe, since it's on track to replace hard drives and software with Web apps and virtual storage.At least that's its potential. The problem will always be that MobileMe is treated less as a useful suite of Web services, as much as a direct link to specific Apple hardware and software. It's great to have a tightly-knit ecosystem, which is what made Apple such a success to begin with. I just wish it meant that its Web apps got the same kind of attention as their software counterparts. In the case of MobileMe, it's just not there yet.Update: Several readers have pointed out that MobileMe can be had through Amazon for around $60.

How to use iTunes Match to upgrade audio quality

How to use iTunes Match to upgrade audio quality
Accessing your iTunes library from other computers and iOS devices is the chief benefit of iTunes Match, but it's not the only benefit. You can use iTunes Match to upgrade the low-bit-rate tracks in your library to 256kbps AAC files. After subscribing to iTunes Match and letting it back up your library, all you need to do is create a Smart Playlist to round up all the songs in your library with bit rates less than 256kbps, take the leap of faith of deleting those files, and then use iTunes Match to download 256kbps versions of the songs you just deleted. Here are the steps required to perform this audio upgrade:Step 1: Create a Smart PlaylistScreenshot by Matt ElliottGo to File > New Smart Playlist. In the first line of the playlist, choose: Bit rate is less than 256kbps. Hit the plus sign on the right to add another parameter, and then choose: Media kind is music.Next, create a condition by clicking on the plus sign while pressing Option. You will create two conditions. First, choose iCloud status is matched. Then hit the plus sign and for the second condition, choose iCloud status is purchased. Click OK and from the left panel, give your new playlist a name.Step 2: Delete all files in your new playlistMatt Elliott/CNETTake a deep breath, highlight all of the files in your new playlist, hit Option-Delete to delete all the files, and then choose Move to Trash. Better yet, back up your iTunes library and then hit Option-Delete and Move to Trash. Make sure you leave the box unchecked (unchecked, underline "un") next to "Also delete these songs from iCloud." (You want to leave copies in Apple's cloud, which you'll download in the next step.)If you want to run a quick test before taking this leap of faith, just highlight a couple tracks or an album's worth of tracks and try this step with a smaller group of files first.Don't worry, your files return instantly. Or copies of your files stored in the cloud via iTunes Match, that is. Right after iTunes deletes your files, you'll see 256kbps copies in their place, and each file will have the little cloud icon next to it, showing it's stored in the cloud and ready for download.Before deleting all the songs in my library with bit rates less than 256kbps, I ran a test. I highlighted two albums' worth of songs...Screenshot by Matt Elliott...and as soon as I deleted the tracks I highlighted with 128kbps and 192kbps bit rates, they were replaced with 256kbps AAC files stored in iCloud.Screenshot by Matt ElliottStep 3: Download 256kbps copies of your filesScreenshot by Matt ElliottFrom your playlist, highlight all of the new 256kbps copies of your files, right click, and choose Download. If your playlist updates itself before you take this step, removing the songs because they no longer meet its criteria, just go to your music library and click on the cloud icon from the top menu bar to sort by songs stored in the cloud. You may need to double click on the cloud icon to get the cloud-based copies at the top. Then just go down the list and highlight all the songs in your library with the cloud icon, highlight them, and then right-click to download them. Better yet, create another Smart Playlist with these three criteria:Location is iCloudLocation is not on this computerMedia kind is musicThen hit Command-A to highlight all songs in the playlist and right-click to download all of them.Screenshot by Matt ElliottIf you have thousands of songs to download, you may want to do this before bed, letting iTunes run overnight. In my case, about 5,800 songs from my 6,800-song library had bit rates below 256kbps.(Via MacWorld)

Another new hard disk...and an unsolved problem

Another new hard disk...and an unsolved problem
That drive started feeling a little tight within just a few months, chiefly due to videos downloaded from the iTunes Store. Although I rarely buy videos from iTunes, there's a lot of free stuff there. I have a particular weakness for video podcasts about automobiles, such as VOD Cars and BMW's own video magazine, BMW-web.tv. Oh, and I've also lost some potential productivity to the Onion News Network video feed and the original Onion Radio News, which are also available through iTunes.I hung tight through the 320GB generation of laptop hard disks, figuring that wasn't enough of a capacity improvement to justify the cost.But shortly after Samsung started shipping the Spinpoint M6 model HM500LI, Montalvo Systems shut down, and I had other things to think about than upgrading my hard disk. I decided to wait for Hitachi or Western Digital to introduce a competing model, so I could make sure I was getting the best product when the time came.Hitachi has a 500GB drive, but at 12.5mm thick, it won't fit in the MacBook Pro. Then Western Digital introduced the new Scorpio Blue, a 9.5mm drive with specifications pretty much identical to those of the Samsung drive. I was able to get a pretty good deal on the Samsung drive, so that's what I decided to go with.I went through the same upgrade process I used last time, which I recommend to anyone upgrading a hard disk: back up the old disk to the new disk in an external enclosure before swapping in the new drive. With a Mac, it's easiest to do the backup by connecting both drives to another machine using the special feature called FireWire Target Disk Mode.In this case, I only backed up the Mac partition this way, since Macs can't natively write to NTFS partitions; I used Windows to back itself up separately to a different drive.After going through the usual grief involved in upgrading a MacBook Pro hard disk-- which I don't recommend to anyone who isn't very familiar with safe maintenance procedures for modern laptops-- everything just worked. The new drive is fast, silent, and huge, everything I love in a hard disk.Well, all but one thing. The Boot Camp partition isn't so easy to migrate over. After booting from the new drive, I let the Boot Camp Assistant program create a new Boot Camp partition with an NTFS filesystem, then used Mike Bombich's NetRestore application to copy the old data to the new partition.But although the copy proceeded normally and the new partition received all the files from the old one, it also received the old partition's size-- 20GB instead of the 32GB I had allocated for it. And it didn't come out bootable, nor would Parallels Workstation work with it, in spite of being configured to use the Boot Camp partition on the old drive.I can't find anything online about migrating a Boot Camp partition when upgrading a hard disk. So let me ask all of you folks: does anyone know how to do this?I'll post an update here when I get it figured out. In any event, I can always just wipe out the new partition and reinstall Windows...Update: now solved! See my followup post: "Migrating and resizing a Boot Camp partition". Thanks to everyone who commented.