So, I’ve done it – I’ve finally found a way to do away with Apple’s MobileMe service. For the most part its worked great but I hated paying $100 a year for the service.  I don’t use the email and I rarely use the photo galleries or the website, and I don’t need it to sync my mail since I use IMAP mail servers. What I did use it for was syncing my MacBook Pro with my iMac. MobileMe does this well but it has its quirks. For example, I never got it to sync my keychain, I spent about a week on that. iDisk is great but I did not like having one place for my documents and another place for documents I wanted to sync, that just seems like more work.  So what DID I use? 

  • Bookmarks – these always sync’d just fine and it was nice that cookies and saved passwords also sync’d. 
  • iCal Sync – to sync my MacBook and my iMac
  • Address Book- to sync my MacBook and my iMac
  • iDisk – even though it wasn’t perfect it did work and I used it 
So what did I replace it with?
  • Bookmarks – Foxmarks recently released a plugin for Safari on Mac so now not only can I keep my Safari bookmarks sync’d but Safari is also sync’d with Firefox and Firefox on my work PC too.
  • iCal – now that iCal and Google both support CalDAV I moved everything to my google calendar. My calendars stay in sync and I sill have web access to my calendar
  • Address Book – Since I have an iPod Touch, Address Book will sync with Google. I have no idea why the ipod or iPhone is required but I hear there is a hack to get this to work without the iPod or iPhone
  • iDisk – Here is where I really took a leap. I’m using Live Sync – yes from Microsoft. And guess what its free and works really well. I sync’d my Documents folder as well as all my Photoshop and Lightroom presets. Now all Documents are in one place where they belong and they still stay in sync. One small, caveat, Live Sync will only sync folders with less than 20k documents. That probably wont affect most people but it did me and I had to do a little house cleaning. People that know me know I am not a Microsoft fan but they got this one right. Lets hope it sticks around. As an added bonus, live sync also allows remote access to files you have not sync’d – for those occasional times when you need something from home in a pinch.
What have I given up?
  • Mobile Me galleries – with Flicker, Picassa, Facebook etc, as slick as they are who needs it? I used them when I was using Aperture but now that I use Lightroom its really not that much of a loss.
  • Mail.app preferances sycn – only a minor issue. With mobile me rules and signatures etc also were scyn’d. Oh well . . . 
  • iDisk – I never really used the online storage, I only wanted to sync folders.
After I made all these changes, an unexpected bonus presented itself. Since Google is now my “cloud” of choice and Google has Sync applications for both Blackberry and iPhone/Touch – I no longer need to plugin my blackberry to sync it.  The google sync application does all of this over the air. Very cool since Missing Sync was always hit or miss.
The best thing is all of this was done with free software and free services.