Apparently if you believe in God, you will glow and release steam.
While I understand what he’s trying to say, the image of the pickle oozing and steaming at the end doesn’t really convey a good message. It’s sort of like saying “Believe in God and you’ll have steam blowing out your ears”.
I’m sorely disappointed with MobileMe.
First, rules are not available on the webclient. So, if you have any sort of filtering (mailing lists, loved ones, etc.), that has to be done with mail.app. That means a message is received in the cloud, pushed to your Mac, processed my mail.app, then uploaded to the server, where it is then reflected across the wed interface and your iDevice. Since I leave my laptop in sleep mode when I’m not using it, I get a lot of mail in my inbox that would normally be filtered into folders.
Next, although you can specify a personal domain for iWeb, you can’t do so for for email. So any email I send from the web interface comes from <my.name>@me.com instead of <my.name>@<my.domain>.com.
Next, there isn’t any sort of intelligent adding for calendaring. Gmail allows me to add an event by typing “Dinner at Joes on Friday” and it will parse and figure out the correct date.
Performance is also dreadful, though that may be growing pains.
Finally (and I’m not a hundred percent sure about this), I don’t believe there is any spam filtering on the web client, so you have to leave mail.app to handle this. I get a lot of spam (though I’m using gmail to filter most) and I don’t need that pushed to my iPhone.
Overall, unless there is a lot of improvement over the next 60 days, I’m not going to be subscribing. I’ll stick with gmail and Spanning Sync. It doesn’t have the push capability, but it syncs calendar and contacts. I’m also willing to bet Google (or a third party) will be coming out with a similar push capability once Apple opens up push to developers.
Ben
Six keys have always been a problem for me. Two are “useless” keys, Scroll Lock and Caps Lock. Scroll Lock is a through back to the IBM days and was used to cause the up and down arrows to scroll through pages instead of moving up and down one line. It’s an infrequently used key and one that most people never touch. The other “useless” key is Caps Lock. It’s not so much as useless as improperly placed. Normally below the tab and above the shift, it can often be accidentally hit, resulting ins a STRING OF UPPER CASE TEXT until the typist realizes their mistake. My solution for these, using the Thinkpad T41 keyboard (about as perfect a layout for keyboards as I’ve come across) is to remap the Caps Lock to Num Lock and the Caps Lock to the Windows/Apple key.
The other set of keys are Alt/Option, Shift, Control, and the System Key. The Shift key has a pretty simple function, providing the ability to change case on letters or adding different symbols to keyboards without adding additional keys. Shift probably doesn’t need to be changed all that much.
The remaining three keys, Alt, Ctrl and System (Apple/Windows) are used in widely inconsistent manners. For instance, on Windows, Ctrl is is used to copy/cut and paste, both within an application and between applications. This is clearly a system function, so why use Ctrl. Aren’t you controlling the app and not the system at that point? Apple takes a different approach and uses the Apple key to copy/cut and paste, but also uses it to control programs (Apple-S to save), the former being a system function, the latter being program specific. Windows, on the other hand, uses the Windows key sparingly to control the Windows environment, such as showing the desktop or bringing up find. In both OS’s, multiple key combinations can be used to activate different functions, such as Apple-Shift-C to show colors in TextEdit. It’s a very confusing system, especially on OS X where Spaces is controlled using the Ctrl key because the Apple key is over loaded.
So here’s my suggestion.
Do I think this will be done any time soon? No. People have their hot keys memorized. Suddenly changing Ctrl-C to Windows-C would cause a lot of confusion. Apple is especially egregious in this area, overloading the Apple key with multiple combo variations. And have you tried to use Photoshop? It’s the keyboard equivalent to learning Sumerian.
But if someone doesn’t point this out, if someone doesn’t provide a set of guidelines, then nothing will change.
Atheists are often noted as being the only minority that people can still be bigoted against. Actaully, I think there is another, vegans (and to a lesser extent vegetarians). The news is ripe with articles of parents who abuse thier kids with “vegan diets”. People have written op-eds talking about the dangers of veganism on growing children and how it’s cruel to force them to not eat meat. A father was recently convicted of negliget and reckless child abuse because his children were fed an improper diet, which also happened to be vegan. The title of the article is “Dad convicted for feeding kids vegan diet”. The reality is that the father was feeding them an improper diet. Another article points out that the father had “a daily regimen with the children that included prayer, study, chores, exercise and rigid adherence to diet, right down to what liquids they could drink and when.” This isn’t the fault of a vegan diet, it’s the fault of a neglectful parent.
But the title doesn’t grab peoples attention, it doesn’t re-affirm peoples belief that veganism is somehow wrong. Using “Dad convicted for feeding kids vegan diet” grabs more eyes then “Religious father convicted for neglectful parenting”. The truth is this, and all the other vegan parenting convictions, are convictions based on a perception that veganism is somehow a bad diet that should be looked down upon.
I’ve been using Google Apps for Domains for some time now. I use it for email, contacts, and calendaring. My wife has her own gmail account and uses it for it’s calendaring service.
I also use Spanning Sync to synchronize my Apple Address Book and Cal applications to my gmail accounts. I do this because it allows me to sync up my iPhone with my gmail information. It works, but it’s clumsy. Ideally there would me a transparent syncing between my iPhone and my Google apps services. But it doesn’t exist. So now I have to manually connect my iPhone to my Mac to get updated on everything.
So when MobileMe was announced, I was immediately drawn to the seamless syncing between a web 
based application set, my Mac, and my iPhone. I like the ability to edit a contact on my iPhone and have it appear on my Mac automatically.
But I don’t want an @me.com account to be my main account. I’ve had samuraipanda.com for years and have a have used it for my email for the entire time. I don’t want to change it.
So until MobileMe actually comes out, I won’t know if it will allow customized domains for email (which .mac doesn’t currently allow).
There may be a work around.
First I will have to set up my iPhone and mail.app to use MobileMe. Then I will have to configure both to use the gmail smtp servers instead of the MobileMe server for sending mail. This will allow me to send email from my samuraipanda.com account. Finally I will have to forward all email from my gmail account to the me.com account. It’s clumsy, but it might work.
Then again I might not use it at all if it doesn’t prove manageable.