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.

One of the more useful sections is near the top - .Mac Sections. These are quick links to the various pages throughout .Mac (from iCards to Bookmarks to Address Book to the Learning Center and much more.) In the world of MobileMe, most all of these have been removed or drastically altered. Equivalent behavior is a single bookmark away and accessible from all pages of the site.

The other most useful portions are iDisk Usage and .Mac Expiration. This information is great to have available at your fingertips, but it’s also available in the OS from the .Mac/MobileMe preference pane (via Spotlight or the System Preferences menu item in the Apple menu.)

In addition, Apple has not yet announced the future of the underlying component (DotMacKit SDK) that developers currently use to communicate with the .Mac service. Both of the prior features (iDisk and expiration) utilize this SDK to do their work.

So, my friends, for now the writing is on the wall - dotMac Menu is retired. I have a few ideas that may bring it back in a new and useful fashion, but for now the cards are dealt and it’s time to focus on the great projects already under way. I’ll update the product page soon with a similar explanation.

Thank you for your encouragement and donations, it’s been great working on dotMac Menu and seeing all the positive feedback from users over the past four years.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 7th, 2008 at 11:20 pm and is filed under dotMac Menu.

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