Future of .Mac?

Apple has been offering a set of online services, bundled under the name .Mac, for quite a while now. While I believe it was truly a great value a couple of years ago when web services was still a new thing, it now looks like it has ended up in a downward spiral. Very few new services have been offered recently, and any updates to it have just been minuscule improvements.

Some have suggested ways to revive the services, such as offering the some services separately. The idea of tying desktop applications with the internet is great, and for me personally the ability to synchronize the information on two or more Macs has been great.

However, this year I opted out on renewing my subscription with .Mac. I now exclusively use my email address under vikingstad.com and have moved all my old mail from Mail (the mail client in Mac OS X) to Gmail. Gmail is greatly superior to what .Mac webmail can offer, and even with the new .Mac webmail coming up I have a feeling it will still lag behind Gmail.

But .Mac is more than just webmail, so for my synchronizing needs I have started using a great FireFox extension called Google Browser Sync. This puts all my bookmarks, web password, history, cookies etc. on a Google server, and automatically synchronizes it with any other FireFox I am using. So being at work, I have access to the exact same information from within my browser there as at home.

The other important feature I used .Mac for was the image gallery feature, where you could easily export images from iPhoto to the web. However, that was before, now Apple is forcing you to use iWeb which is a more cumbersome solution. I have found using the two plugins for iPhoto great replacements: FlickExport (for automatic upload to my Flickr account) and iPhotoToGallery (that supports the very popular Gallery web application).

So in a sense it seems like Google was actually the main reason I stopped my .Mac subscription this year. In order for Apple to win me back they will have to offer a compelling set of online features again. However, without a killer webmail, great photo sharing capabilities and lots of online storage it will be hard to be truly convincing.

It will also be interesting to see if Apple will also shift focus to web services, as we have seen Microsoft scrambling to do recently. It might make more sense for Apple to just partner with a giant like Google, and now that Schmidt is on Apple's board that seems to be a very likely outcome.

As I have noted before, just about everything will sooner or later move over to the browser. We'll see of Apple is ready for the change, and if .Mac will receive more attention to be a part of Apple's future strategy...

Ajax, the best thing since sliced bread?

Ok, Ajax has received an awful lot of hype lately. As anyone who has developed web pages since the 90's, most of the technologies that represent Ajax have been around for years. However, it is just recently that its use has really taken of. The funny thing is that HTTP was developed as a stateless protocol. The concept of sessions, cookies and XMLHttpRequest are really just "patches" to compensate for this fact.

JavaScript is fabulous for a lot of things, but developing complex Ajax applications can be quite a challenge. But this may have more to do with a lack of good Ajax toolkits than Ajax itself. Ajax is after all still in its infancy, and there are already several attempts at developing Ajax toolkits, some with more success than others. The question is really if something better should be invented, or if the solution is to build more technologies on top of what now seems like a fairly fragile web.

Because the fact is that complex web applications show some serious limitations. They can be slow, and do not offer the same kind of robustness as tried and true desktop applications. However, I firmly believe that this issue will improve over time as the technologies mature, browsers become better, computers become faster and developers get used to the new frameworks and toolkits.

We have just seen the beginning of where Web applications can go. Up until now, a lot of the Ajax effort has been to resemble on the web what has already been done with regular desktop applications. Take the new Yahoo Mail as an example. It now closely resembles Microsoft Outlook with drag-and-drop functionality, preview-pane etc. (ideas that came from from Oddpost, the web mail Yahoo bought several years ago).

My belief is that any application can be moved to the web. And I mean ANY. Mail and word processeors are only the beginning, and we are already seeing attempts at online movie-editing applications. In a few years, the only thing we'll need is a good web browser and the operating system it runs on will become completely irrelevant.

Ok, enough rambling. Happy surfing :)