.Me - Apple’s missing link

Except it’s not.

It’s a nice thought that the revamp of .Mac will yield a brilliant and usable service to connect everything in your digital life, but the likelihood of that happening just isn’t very high.

Colin Pape of Seeking Alpha thinks that Mobile Me (or .Me as some are calling it) is going to be the magic bullet for Apple, and it will suddenly tie all their products together. I’m sure that’s what Apple is aiming for, but they’ve neglected .Mac for so long that I’m not sure an overhaul and a new name is going to be enough to breathe life into it.

On the other hand, some rumors suggest that Apple will be turning .Me over to Google for a portion of it’s revenue. Though with Steve’s ego, I find this hard to believe. It’s a nice idea though, imagine a Google run service that would allow for unlimited email/file storage and instant syncing of your contacts/calendar/photos/email/music from your phone (iPhone or Android) to the web, and your home or office computer.

While the promise of an easy solution all in one place is nice, why pay for it? Nothing .Mac currently offers is worth the yearly fee, you can easily find free or cheap alternatives to most everything it offers.

Only time will tell I suppose. I’d be more than happy to be wrong on this, the more innovative products and services Apple launches the better.

[ In the interest of full disclosure, I currently hold stock in Apple ]

Tags: .Mac, .Me, Mobile Me

Eee PC

I just purchased an Eee PC from Newegg.com and I’m pretty excited to see what a budget Linux laptop is capable of. I’d also really like to replace the screen with a touch screen, but since the computer is meant for my girlfriend I’m not sure she’ll exactly support that idea. Oh well.

Now I started writing this post on Monday but I didn’t finish it, and since I just got the computer today (Wednesday) this is going to be more of a review, as opposed to a “oh man, this is gonna be sweet” post.

Like I said, I just got the computer. Obvious first impression is “holy crap! It’s small!”, because frankly it is… Moving on to a more technical note, I clocked the boot time at 33.7 seconds, just over double the claimed 15 second boot time, still not bad. This is the 2G Surf model, so it has a slightly slower processor which might explain the slower boot time. When compared to the 31 second boot time of my Macbook Pro it truly is an impressive feat.

More random thoughts on the Eee PC after the jump
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Mint.com - Reloaded

After using Mint.com for a few weeks, it certainly has grown on me. So I thought I’d give another go at reviewing it, now that I’ve spent more than a few hours using Mint.

Anyhow, they recently made some changes to their site (Build ph363.43), I have mixed feelings about the update. On one hand, I was excited to see that I could manually enter the APY for my accounts!

However, my inner obsessive self was disappointed to see that the Update button for manually updating my accounts was gone…

There used to be a nice Update button right there next to the Edit button, Mint! What have you done?!
Edit: The answer is here!

Minor things I know, but here’s the big kicker. Stability, Mint has gone a little janky since the update, now when I delete one entry from my alerts it hides all of them until I refresh the page, then they come back. Also, the email and mobile alerts I have set up haven’t been working 80% of the time, I might get the email update, but not the mobile one… or I may get it three days after I get the email. Rather annoying.

The Spending at the Pump feature on the Accounts page also seems to omit random trips to the gas station, one day it told me I’d spent $124 on gas, and the next it said $83. The truth is I’d spent like $113 for the month.

Then there’s the Spending Trends page, which random display little to no information , here’s what it told me my expenses were for the entire month of November:

Clearly, $48 + $64 do not equal $1,091. On top of that, I know I had more than 8 transactions for the month, that and I spent well over the claimed $1,091, after all I spent $948 at Newegg.com alone. The Spending Trends feature was working prior to the update, so hopefully they’ll get that fixed soon.

I’m still waiting with baited breath for them to start supporting brokerage accounts, I don’t even know if this is a planned feature, but if they ever add it I will be ecstatic. In fact, I might even do a little dance.

Another feature I’d really like to see soon is the ability to import/export transaction records. But I complained about that in my last review as well, so I’ll shut up now.

Leopard Upgrade

I upgraded to Leopard the other day, and overall I’m pretty happy with it. I like all the new features, tabs in Terminal is awesome, Spaces has increased my productivity by 7%, Stacks are so-so, Front Row going all Apple TV on me is amazing, Web Clipping almost makes Dashboard relevant again, iCal finally getting a dynamic icon is minor, but a nice touch, and OS X finally playing nice with my NAS (network attached storage) and the rest of my network is saving me a lot of trouble, however, there are some things that bug me.

Booting is slow, I used to start my computer up and 30-35 seconds later I was good to go, but since I upgraded to Leopard its been booting in 55-70 seconds. It started taking over a minute to boot right after the upgrade, but after resetting my PRAM, and clearing my cache it sped up a bit.

Sluggishness. Randomly, I’ll get beached balled. I’m just sitting there browsing the web and next thing I know, I’m looking at a spinning beach ball… for no apparent reason. This has happened a couple times since the upgrade, might be an issue with Firefox.

Ejecting discs. I was burning a few CDs using Disc Utility, and after ejecting them from within Disk Utility I went back to my desktop to find them still listed… odd, I tried ejecting them from the desktop, that made them disappear, but then I opened Finder and one of them was still listed under devices, but I couldn’t eject it, I had to drag it off to the side and then it poofed out of existence.

The latest build of Joost never quits since the upgrade, it just hangs, you have to Force Quit, then it cries. But that’s a problem with Joost, not Leopard.

As justifcation of my speed complaints, I’m running 10.5.1 on a Macbook Pro, 2.4Ghz dual core and 4GB of RAM, so I think I should be running a bit faster than I am.

Compared to my experience when upgrading to Windows Vista, my complaints with Leopard are minor, Vista caused me to suffer from depression and self loathing… Yeah, I’d rather not relive that time in my life. Back to focusing on the present, Leopard actually offers a worthwhile set of new features that are actually useful, Vista on the other hand, offers eye candy and headaches (Windows XP forever!).

But Vista sucking so bad keeps me employed, so thanks Microsoft!

Mint.com - Financies just got really shiny

I know, the hype is over… Everyone else has already reviewed Mint. So what? Maybe I’ve held off on trying Mint.com for a while, I’m quite happy with my current financial management program, even if it is rather basic. Anyhow, I broke down, registered an account and gave it a try.

Long story short, Mint is hot. But if you need a little bit more incentive to try it, here’s the break down.

The good…

• Slick interface, staring at numbers has never been more attractive
• Wide range of banks and credit cards are support
• Automatically downloads transactions and categorizes your spending (it’s not always correct, but you can easily change things)
• Great range of information is available at a glance, you login and right away you can see the key numbers for all your accounts
• Ridiculously easy to use

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