The iNexus

Unless you’ve been living under a rock you likely heard the news - Apple is recreating .Mac as a new service, MobileMe. It’s quite an impressive offering from what I saw in the guided tour and I look forward to trying it out soon.

The most common question I’ve received since Steve made the announcement has been - “when / will you be updating dotMac Menu for MobileMe?” To address this we’re going to look at dotMac Menu itself.

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There’s a fresh new update for dotMac Menu now available. This has been verified against Leopard for those that were curious (it’s been working well since day one, no issues.)

Changes:

• Improved iDisk size calculations (handles KB, MB, and GB now)
• Added Show menu option to configure display as GB or MB; KB is automatic
• Updated iCards URL  [yes, it works again]
• Optimized all helper tools  [leaks begone!]
• Restart Menu Extras is now a Universal (AppleScript) application  [finally]

As always, you can find the Installer package at: http://www.infinitenexus.com/dmm/

It’s been quiet in the world of dotMac Menu lately, mostly because I’ve been focused on my day job, the Growl 1.1 release, and wrapping up Compare Folders 3.0. This weekend though I sat down and pounded out a nice little update (2.7.1) that I’ll be testing this week for release. It’s not an earth-shattering, feature-adding update but does address concerns that users have noted and I’ve found myself.

These include:

• iDisk size calculations now handle KB, MB, and GB gracefully
• iCards URL updated (the old one stopped working…)
• Memory leak fixes for all the helper tools
• Universal version of the Restart Menu Extras AppleScript application

Update: Now that I’ve finished the above changes I noticed that Apple shows MB throughout the OS for iDisk sizes, but that could just as easily be a bug as a feature. For those that may have a preference, I’m adding a toggle for this behavior in the Show menu (Size in GB).

As I’m sure you are aware, Apple had a media event recently covering a topic near and dear to my heart - the Mac. Outside of the new iMac and iLife ‘08 and iWork ‘08 (wow, that’s a lot of excitement already to pack in an hour and some odd minutes!) there was a little announcement about your favorite online service and mine - .Mac.

And what a doozy the news was! The standard storage space for each .Mac member was multiplied by a factor of ten for a total of 10 GB (yes, GB) of storage. All those who doubted there was any value in the ‘paltry’ service should now see there’s a lot more to offer there in terms of webmail, storage [you could set up 9GB for mail and 1 GB for iDisk if you so choose], and even “Web 2.0″ features for photo galleries and web pages (authored in iLife ‘08, of course.)

I think this is great news and I was excited to read about all of the changes. It means dotMac Menu’s iDisk size calculations are a bit dated now and don’t account for this, but I’ll take care of that along with many other great enhancements in the next major update

This is just a little note for dotMac Menu users that the new version, including the aforementioned short display names and a display all option, is ready for shipping right now and it’s just a matter of updating the documentation and website, which I’ll be working on tonight and tomorrow to hopefully get it out tomorrow.

By far my favorite feature is the new installer package - it’s incredibly simple and learning and using PackageMaker was a fun excursion. The end-to-end experience is now seamless and enjoyable. Feedback is always welcome, comments or e-mail.