Actually, if the made in Apple Internet suite makes you pay, among various services, a dear price for a (very) limited amount of disk space and a (very) slow iDisk, .mac could still be considered by macusers as more convenient than many 3rd party solutions, so far as calendars synchronization is concerned. To sum up, if you create your calendars in iCal, then sync them via iSync with your Bluetooth cellphone, in order to be able to add modifications on the Mac or on the phone, the missing link was called .mac. This solution limitation is that on another computer (typically: PC at work or at a friend's), you can't edit calendars, as this can only be done on iCal, or on a cellphone that's not necessarily made for that.
As often when speaking of a free alternative, that's where the Google ogre came. If it is very easy to pu online calendars created in iCal via Google Agenda, for the reciprocal — import in iCal the modifications made online using Google Agenda — to be true, it was quite difficult, for instance: "I save the Google calendar on my desktop, reimport it in iCal, then sync with my Bluetooth device".
This is not true any more, thanks to a new missing link in the iCal/ iSync/ Bluetooth device trilogy : Spanning sync. During the day, edit your calendar events on your Mac, or a PC, or the phone... using Spanning sync, which looks like a simple system prefpane, once you entered your setttings, synchronization is transparent and sur, so you won't lose any modification by mistake.
As this works flawlessly, you'll soon become addict. As for me, I've used it over two months without trouble before writing this news item. Of course, now that beta testing is over, spanning sync comes at a price : $29 for a year, $65 for a lifetime licence. A price to compare to .mac $99, provided you don't use many other features of the Apple suite of course... A a French user, I wasn't even disturbed by a very approximative French version...
Even if Spanning sync is not free any more, it's worth its price given its use. And it shall certainly not remain alone in this sector.
If Apple hope .mac will have a future with the upcoming iPhone (directly concerned as it is a WiFi and Bluetooth peripheral at the same time), they should probably think of a way to make it more attractive: what does the iWeb/ .mac duo that you can't do with Picasa for instance? Even macusers aren't guaranteed customers...
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