Please Apple: Take MobileMeek offline!

[danny_w]

...My point was you're not giving them a chance to get things up and running and you have zero trust. Apple has not jeopardized the security of your files so far have they?

Several people have reported having lost all of their emails so yes, I would say that is jeopardizing the security of my files.

 

[Alrescha]

What part of that had nothing to do with "completing something on time"?

Fixing the screw-up is irrelevant. It's all after the fact.

Projecting an office-cubicle perspective on top of a corporation as you did in your previous post isn't going to be useful. Apple, Inc. picked the dates to deploy MobileMe. No external 'boss' told them their schedule. Apple, Inc. decided that they were ready. Obviously, they were wrong.

The significant aspect to me is that they blew it in the first place, not that they are taking weeks to fix it. Apple knew how many .Mac customers they had. They knew how many resources it took to serve them. They knew the difference between that service and their new service, and should have known what they needed to do to prepare.

Did they blow the calculations? Did they decide to float it and 'see what happened'? You and I will probably never know. And that's just not the important point. The thing is that they blew it, and badly.

Now, I was already a little uncomfortable with the idea of keeping my data on someone else's servers if I don't have to. I'd never give my data to the likes of Microsoft, or Yahoo, or even Google for that matter. I did have a little faith in Apple. This experience just pushed me over the edge, and I'm back to keeping my data where I can see it.

A.

 

[tweaks]

Fixing the screw-up is irrelevant. It's all after the fact.

Projecting an office-cubicle perspective on top of a corporation as you did in your previous post isn't going to be useful. Apple, Inc. picked the dates to deploy MobileMe. No external 'boss' told them their schedule. Apple, Inc. decided that they were ready. Obviously, they were wrong.

The significant aspect to me is that they blew it in the first place, not that they are taking weeks to fix it. Apple knew how many .Mac customers they had. They knew how many resources it took to serve them. They knew the difference between that service and their new service, and should have known what they needed to do to prepare.

Did they blow the calculations? Did they decide to float it and 'see what happened'? You and I will probably never know. And that's just not the important point. The thing is that they blew it, and badly.

Now, I was already a little uncomfortable with the idea of keeping my data on someone else's servers if I don't have to. I'd never give my data to the likes of Microsoft, or Yahoo, or even Google for that matter. I did have a little faith in Apple. This experience just pushed me over the edge, and I'm back to keeping my data where I can see it.

A.

Pen and paper?.............I doubt it.

 

[queshy]

Push actually seems to be working for me now. They've worked out a lot of the issues.

iDisk is slow as hell, though.

 

[Hands0n]

Didn't know there was a MM account that resides on the phone. Where is it?

On your iPhone do the following:
Go to Settings
Touch "Mail, Contacts, Calendars" where you should see at the top of the screen a mini panel titled "Accounts"
Touch the Mobile Me account you created (you did create one, no?) which will have a subtitle "Mail, Contacts, Calendars", and then touch the big red button that says "Delete Account"

That's it, you're done, no more MobileMe account on your iPhone.

To then re-create your Mobile Me account on the iPhone it is back to Settings (on the iPhone).
Touch "Mail, Contacts, Calendars",
Touch "Add Account"
Touch "mobileme" and fill in your account details.
That will put up a fresh setting of MobileMe on the iPhone.

Hot tip - fiddle around with MobileMe settings on your Mac or PC first, get the sync/push working between your desktop and the web app first. Only when all that is working okay should you even consider setting up MobileMe on the iPhone. Also, if you change anything, absolutely anything at all in MobileMe (i.e. adding another Mac, removing one etc ....) then you need to delete and recreate your MobileMe account on the iPhone - if you don't then Push to the iPhone will not work. I have been able to re-create that 100% on demand, it is a bijoux bug.

I'm not around for a couple of weeks now, so good luck with your stuff


Edit:
There is a comprehensive guide to setting up Mobile Me on the Mac and iPhone here. It is no accident that they tell you to set up the iPhone last (although that is not emphasised sufficiently, in my opinion).

But one thing is for certain - very many problems are caused by people not following these guides to the letter. I suspect that, given you have said you have a similar environment to me, you've possibly not worked through the set-up correctly. No harm done, probably , its easy enough to go through it all again. It is frustrating as hell to see it not work as you rightly said. But it can be made to work..

Like I said earlier - its pretty much a case of RTFM, then RTFM again, and follow it to the letter. If it still does not work there is most likely something non-vanilla about your installation and you need to find out what that is. In my case it was a pre-existing set of "dotmac" .plists that needed deleting.

This stuff does work "out of the box" - just not always after a few months of a user having their hands on it

 

[Hands0n]

Fixing the screw-up is irrelevant. It's all after the fact.

Projecting an office-cubicle perspective on top of a corporation as you did in your previous post isn't going to be useful. Apple, Inc. picked the dates to deploy MobileMe. No external 'boss' told them their schedule. Apple, Inc. decided that they were ready. Obviously, they were wrong.

No, obviously they were not wrong at all. It all depends upon your particular perspective and understanding of how Apple, as a lot of other software development shops, operate. I've hinted at this a few times in this and other threads ... To gain an understanding how Apple, and Microsoft for that matter, release what appears to be half-baked software into the wild you need to also know what their development methodology is.

Apple is, like an increasing number of software houses, an Agile shop. There are a number of flavours of Agile, but the core philosophies are the same. One of the foundation principles of Agile is that the release date does not change, but the scope can (and often does). So, while the overall design intentions may cover everything from the soup to the nuts, the actual delivery may well fall somewhat short - as indeed it did with MobileMe. The release date will only be pulled if the development is sufficiently short to put the entire application into jeopardy. However, if it can substantially work, as indeed MobileMe does, even with some shortcoming and functional omissions (i.e. iDisk functionality) the release will go ahead.

It is beyond scope to describe Agile methodology in full here, so I'll be a bit Agile myself and stop my delivery now - you'd all go to sleep way before anyone had finished But if you want to see beyond what appears to be obvious (but isn't) a google of Agile and Agile XP would help. A reasonable starting place would be Wikipedia take on Agile.

The thing to keep in mind in all of this - what you have received on 11 July 2008 is only the first of several releases. Not only of MobileMe itself but of the iPhone V2,0 firmware and even Tiger and Apple's .Mac/MobileMe Preferences panel. Agile demands that, iteratively, these be improved to deliver all of the functionality originally intended.

We must expect to come into contact with Agile development methods in more of the product that we buy. There a bit of a practical revolution on the go.