Kiwis Eye: Is iLife becoming too .Mac attached?
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Jan 26, 2006 at 1:20am
Glenn Wolsey is the “Macsimum News” man in New Zealand. He offers news and opinions with a “Kiwi perspective” whenever the spirt moves him.
The new iLife ‘06 is an amazing upgrade to the iLife suite; the new features are single-handedly changing the way we use our Macs and the way we create, organize, and view media. Yet .Mac is starting to become a dependent part of iLife, especially if you want to use iLife to its full potential and employ use of all its features.
No argument, iWeb is an exceptional application, with prodigious potential, but it relies on .Mac to publish your site more than you would like. It offers no simple way to upload your site to a normal web-server from the application, Apple is almost forcing the beginner user, who is new to iLife, to purchase a .Mac subscription. What new Mac user knows how to export a site from iWeb, open and connect to a FTP server, and upload the files? Not too many, I’d guess.
One of iPhoto’s new features is Photocasting. Click on an image in your iPhoto library, click the Photocast button, and the image is now included in your personal Photocast feed on your .Mac account. Sounds nice, but what about those without .Mac? I think we’ll pass on that.
Do you get the picture? Apple needs to offer simple, easy ways for those without .Mac to get there content out there. My thought: Apple should offer .Mac as a free service. This would make the iLife suite much more appealing to users, as they could use all of its features without having to splash out more cash.
Anyhow, none of this takes away from the fact that iLife is a wonderful software suite, which I dearly love, and I use daily. Look out for a full iLife 06 review in the next few weeks.
Dru Says:
No, in fact iLife needs to become more .Mac centric. There is an interesting balance that many users fail to grasp. Though .Mac is built upon open standards, it’s implementation is designed to maximize the Mac user experience. Extending the ‘it just works’ paradigm to internet publishing. This can’t be said about most alternative publishing methods. That’s the real key here, iLife can be used with any static content provider. you can mount your remote file system as a local volume, be it SMB, NFS, WebDAV etc, and simply publish to a folder, iLife doesn’t care if that volume is local or not.
But that’s not the point. If you know enough about wanting to publish to your bargain basement web provider, this shouldn’t be an issue. The issue is that there is a minority group of users that seem to have this firm belief that they are entitled to things free, and that .Mac should be tweaked to take advantage of free.
The reality is the .Mac, is and should be, the internet extension of the Mac paradigm, and as such it should be a tightly integrated add-on, one that is a value add to the customer and a reasonable revenue generator for the publisher.
Let’s take a look at what it offers. Mail via IMAP or Web, Plenty of disk space for most basic users. Web space (wihtout ads), Backup & Groups. Some other basics, but nothing that isn’t available elsewhere for free or nearly free. That’s where the rub comes in. .Mac isn’t free, because it consolidates all of the above into one package, unifies the experience and integrates with it’s own line of software. Spymac’s Wheel does the same thing, it’s also non-free.
Google is the exception here. Google is banking on advertising revenue to fund these services, it remains to be seen if Google can continue to offer everything that it does for free, I question the economics of supporting the infrastructure required completely ad supported. Unfortunately, my views are not that of the general technology public, because quite frankly, in all those bad cold war era Russian accents, I *am* a capitalist pig. It’s all about generating revenue.
Full disclosure, I am not an Apple employee (far from it, I write software for Windows by day), but I am a .Mac subscriber for my Mac’s at home, and I think iLife iis a good tool, particularly for my wife, kids, mother and mother in-law whom all want to use the internet, and share information, but using the arcane ‘ftp to htdocs/www’ on your bargain basement provider was never going to work.
As far as I’m concerned, the only thing that Apple hasn’t done yet that would make .Mac a slam dunk would be to offer a DNS service in association with .Mac, and I think it’s only a matter of time until see .Mac expand in scope even further.
Posted on January 26, 2006
Dru Fan Says:
I just have to say, Dru hit the nail on the head. Too many folks whine about .Mac not being free. You can get it cheaper than the advertised 99.00US. However, that being said, if you know where and how to get all the features of iLife and .Mac separaetly, then by all means, save your money and do it. Some of us would rather pony up the dough and have a simple interface into which we can quickly drop our data and be done with it. This is the Mac way. Program it for the masses, make it easy and those who want more advanced tools or want to do it on the cheap have that option.
By the way. You don’t have to have .Mac to use iLife or iWeb. It is just that having .Mac gives you advantages the non-payers don’t have.
Posted on January 26, 2006
John Doe Says:
I don’t need the .Mac email, or about 90% of what they offer. However, the key is, if they want it to be such an integral part of the Mac experience, then bundle it with the software. Give a year away for free when you purchase a new Mac. That’s the major point. I do feel $99 is too much for something that I’m not going to use many of the features. I don’t want the email, my email address has been the same for about 10 years and it works. To get people to adapt to it, it’s going to take more than a free 3 month trial to get me interested.
Posted on January 26, 2006
Rainy Day Says:
.Mac started out as a free service. I doubt they’re gonna turn the clock back.
They lost me as a subscriber when they started charging, mostly because it offered nothing i didn’t already have elsewhere.
I’m tempted by the Backup 3 software (available only to .Mac subscribers), but since that’s my only motivation for subscribing, it would be essentially renting the software. I want to “own” my software, so i’m still not a subscriber.
For some people .Mac is worth the price; for others, it is not. Where you fall in the worth it or not camps depends on the price and feature set. So far, Apple is making the latter richer and richer. YMMV.
Posted on January 26, 2006
David Says:
I agree that the “it just works” feature makes .Mac different from publishing to any other web space provider and there is room for such a service to be fee based. However, most broadband providers include multiple email addresses and large amounts of free webspace so it’s hard to justify .Mac from that standpoint.
Posted on January 26, 2006
Iain Says:
I would love to get iLife, but it’s reliance on .Mac makes it a ludicrous option to persue.
.Mac membership is vastly over priced for what it offers, when you can get regular web hosting for far less money. Just find a hosting that uses Apache (Or Zeus if you must) and check to see if they offer WebDAV or have mod_dav enabled. Far FAR cheaper!
iWeb is a good idea, but far to limited (Had a play with it in the local Apple store) If you are looking for a much better option to iWeb, go to http://www.realmacsoftware.com and try out Rapidweaver. Sure it can publish to a .Mac account, but it can also publish via regular FTP as well.
As for the other parts of iLife? Really they don’t make the purchase price worth it to be honest. An integrated suite is nice, but not at the price, and certainly not if you have to for out ongoing subscriptions for .Mac membership.
Posted on January 29, 2006
Boone Says:
I don’t work for Microsoft writing software, I’m in college and can’t afford a .mac account. I make less that $100 per month here in work study and don’t have time to get another job. My college gives me all the same stuff .mac would give me. Why won’t Apple let me publish to my college’s ftp server. That is what I want to know. I don’t have enough money for the .mac, I barely had enough for the iLife suite. I just want to be able to use the features that are “amazing” and “like magic” that Steve Jobs told me I would have. Is that so hard? I had to rely on a demo copy of rapidweaver to make my GAC homepage because iWeb wouldn’t let me publish to where I want to publish.
Posted on February 16, 2006
Iain Says:
Well Rapidweaver far outweighs iWeb in every way. iWeb just exports your site as various images and wraps some basic HTML around it (Which appalled me). Apart from it’s in built templates, there really is very little iWeb offers.
You can publish from iWeb to any server you like, you just have to export the site to a folder on your hard drive first then use FTP software to upload it seperately (Such as Transmit or Fetch)
Posted on February 17, 2006
Val Says:
iWeb is great for someone with my level of expertise. I got as far as getting a podcast published just fine. Then I find out that the subscribe buttons, the rss feed, does not work unless I put the website address in the little box which pops up when you click on publish to folder. SO I put in the url of my site and nada. Can someone tell me just how I can get my podcast to have an rss feed without joining .mac. I have access to an OSX server. Any tiny bit of help will be appreciated.
Posted on February 19, 2006
Boone Says:
Get Rapidweaver. I used it to make my site, and it does podcasts, blogs, basically everything the iWeb does and more. It’s a shiny easy to use program. It would be nice to have the iLife apps do everything so you don’t have to buy more software to get everything to work without a .mac but Apple apparently wont have that.
Posted on February 19, 2006
Mowog Says:
I’m finally getting around to playing with iLife, with a view to putting iWeb to work on my very pathetic website (as I admit on the under construction site made with SiEd and VFSFTP on a Palm PDA). I’ve toyed with the idea of buying .Mac, but I find that Spymac (http://www.spymac.com) Club for $30 or so annually gives me all I need: POP email, blog (not integrated into the webspace), ad-free webspace (3GB, ftp and WebDAV), syncing of contacts and Spymac Disk to desktop, and some other things.
Some people seem to have had trouble with Spymac or deride it as inadequate, but so far I have found it to be generally satisfactory for my needs. Rumors float about concerning Spymac’s long-term financial possibility, if that’s a concern for you. Logging in to their website can be slow at times, but if you only use POP mail, BlogSpinner (their blog software), and your own webspace, that doesn’t matter.
Were .Mac $60 a year, I would have gone for it last year when I bought Spymac Club, but it wasn’t, so I didn’t.
Posted on August 02, 2006
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Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 4,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
John Doe Says:
I agree. Apple needs to either include .Mac in the purchase of iLife, or allow for an alternative export mechanism.
Posted on January 26, 2006