So, I finally got one of those .Mac subscriptions.
It’s totally worth it.
It all started with a sudden, intense need to back up my scripts.
I spend a lot of time writing, and I need that writing backed up somewhere, so if my hard drives all crash, and I lose all my solid state media, and somehow, have absolutely no back-ups of any of it, I still have back-ups of some of it. That’s where iDisk came in. I keep all my scripts on iDisk now, and OS X keeps a copy sync’d locally on its own for me so I don’t have to be online to work. It copies the newest stuff out to iDisk whenever I change something.
That was all well and good. But, of course, there’s more.
I started using iCal this week to keep track of appointments, because I was having so much to do and not remembering to do any of it. It’s pretty basic, which is good, because if calendaring software has too many bells and whistles, I blank out and ignore it. Case in point: Microsoft Office Outlook 2003. Even the name is too complicated for me.
Tonight, when I opened my iBook, I thought, “Man, I wish I could get at my calendars from here, too.” A quick Google showed me the light. OS X has what’s called “iSync”. If you have a .Mac account, it can copy all of your calendars, bookmarks, address book entries, mail accounts, and everything, out to the .Mac server. It does that for you automatically, and keeps .Mac up to date with the latest changes. Now, here’s the cool part. I can set my iBook up with the same thing. So now, when I make changes to my calendars, add some contacts, and bookmark a cool new site, when I open my laptop, it pulls all that information down and has it. So my data follows me around. No. It’s even simpler than that. My data is always out there on .Mac, and any Mac I touch can pull it down if I put in my username and password. I can also get at it all through the .Mac website.
This seems like a sales pitch, because it is. I’m trying to sell you on how freaking happy I am that this just got so easy. The technology’s been here for awhile, I guess, I just never took the time to learn how to use it.
I’m glad I finally did.
Tags: Miscellaneous