The grand opening for Apple’s second retail store in Australia is set for Saturday morning in Sydney, according to an announcement. A celebration is planned, with free t-shirts for the first 1,000 people through the door. The Chatswood Chase opening comes less than a month after that of Australia’s flagship store, which is found elsewhere in Sydney on George Street. A third store is currently under construction in Melbourne.

The Chatsworth location will be a full-service Apple Store, with workshops, a Genius Bar, business services and youth programs.

If your in the area on Saturday go check it out!

[via MacNN]

written by Councillor Ben \\ tags: .Mac, Apple, australia, Chatsworth, sydney

As you may remember from my last post on MobileMe’s launch, I said that I would get a trial and provide a review of the service.  Well I was expecting to get the trial on Thursday, when the switch was made, but as most of you know Apple’s servers were up and down all afternoon.  Well today I was able to set up an account.

The first thing I did was try to come up with hilarious names for the service, like mymomyells AT me dot com, areyoulooking AT me dot com, and so on.  Well I decided that if I decided to keep the service and pay the $99, then i needed a legit name that wouldn’t scare people away.  So the first step in getting the trial is to give your information, so I picked itakepictures@me.com, seeing that I’m an avid photographer and plan on trying the gallery features.  The first major thing that shocked me was that Apple asked for my credit card information so that when the trial ends, they slam you with the bill if you don’t cancel the trial.  Well I decided to cave in and give the information and add an iCal event to remind me a few days ahead to cancel the service if it didn’t suit me.

The first thing that pops up is a video that will explain what MobileMe is and how to use it. Then you are at your inbox for your new address.  On the top left you can see the menu of different services that Mobile Me has to offer: Mail, Contacts, Calender, Photos, iDisk, and Profile.  When you click on the icon you are taken to the respected site.

First, let’s try Contacts. First thing I notice is that it is relatively slow going from site to site, which will hopefully be fixed.  Contacts gives you pretty much the feel of Address Book, so no real excitement, but I have no contacts so maybe that’s why it is not that exciting.

Next we’ll try Calendar. Well I am getting an error message saying that it can’t get calendars from the server, so we will try to move on to the next app.

Let’s give Photos a try! Photos didn’t take as long to load, but I have none uploaded so that could be the reason.  So lets upload a new album to show the world my love of photography.  After creating the album name and permissions, you are shown a green arrow asking you to click it to upload.  The upload process was very speedy compared to the other functions of MobileMe, less than one minute for six 1MB photos.  Here is the first album of many to come, Pictures!  The gallery has not changed from what little I know of the .Mac service.  Along the top menu bar you are allowed to change the permissions, upload more photos to the album, rotate pictures, etc.

The last real part of MobileMe is the iDisk function. You can sync items from your Mac into your iDisk to store for backup or to share with friends.  There isn’t much to say about iDisk, because it kind of explains itself.  Also Account Settings really explains itself, you can change your settings and so on.

My final first impression of the MobileMe service is: Wait a few week before you try this. As you may know, Apple has had server issues all day today.  This is the first time MobileMe is up and running completely, so I assume that everyone is trying the site out, which bogs down the speed.  If Apple makes the site faster, this service is pretty much like .Mac.  I have not been able to try the push function because the 2.0 firmware has not been available for the iPod Touch.  With this review, I plan on doing a final review right before my trial officially ends, hopefully the service will work to its full potential in sixty days.

See you then!

written by Councillor Wes \\ tags: .Mac, MobileMe, Service Review, software review

Members of the .Mac community will be experiencing some technical difficulties Wednesday from 6 p.m. to 12 a.m. Pacific time, because the www.mac.com will be switching to the new MobileMe site.  The subscribers received a message today warning them that they will not be able to access the www.mac.com address but will be able to get emails through the Mail app, iPhones, and iPod Touches.

If you aren’t familiar with the MobileMe platform, let me give you a quick rundown.  MobileMe runs the same e-mail, photo galleries, and web pages as .Mac did.  The better pat of MobileMe is that it can now work as a push service for your iPod Touch, iPhone, Mac computer or even PC.  If you are familiar with the Microsoft Enterprise service, you know that when you receive an e-mail or update a contact or schedule a meeting, that is automatically added to your wireless device or vice versa.  Well MobileMe works the same way, except a lot cheaper and more focused on the average person, while Enterprise is more for the big, bad corporate world.  Essentially, if you update John Doe’s address and picture in your iPhone contacts, that information is sent to, what Apple calls, a “cloud.”  This cloud then transfers that data to all your devices and computers using MobileMe.

I don’t have a .Mac address, but plan on trying out the MobileMe trial that will be released when the official launch of the site goes live.  I will try to give an in-depth review of the features and processes of the site and all the bells and whistles that go along with it.

written by Councillor Wes \\ tags: .Mac, Apple, MobileMe

Happy June everyone! We took a well deserved day off around here at Mactropolis. Thankfully the weather co-operated… just popped back into the office to see what was up and this story caught my eye.

Rumors have been going back and forth this past week about upcoming changes to the .Mac service. One rumor in particular is the potential renaming of the service. It seems that the leading candidate for the .Mac rename is now ‘MobileMe’, with Me.com being the home domain for the service.

Why? Well it seems that the domain name has been registered to the MarkMonitor domain service. MarkMonitor is a leader in enterprise brand protection. Apple and a whole bunch of other Fortune 100 companies have leaned on this service for brand protection in the past. So, with that said, it could be Apple is now sitting on the domain, getting ready for the rename… Or this is just complete hogwash, and some other company has registered the domain and is going to use it for something else.

Interestingly enough, MarkMonitor purchased MacBookAir.net, MacBookAir.org, MacBookAir.us, MacBookAir.info and MacBookAir.biz earlier this year on behalf of Apple.

If you try and hit up www.me.com, you’ll notice a redirect page that guides you to www.snappville.com, a social networking website that used to be called me.com until it changed its name in December of last year. Could it be Apple bought out the domain name and asked them to relocate to a new domain name? And with a ‘grace’ period since last December, a redirect page was put up at Me.com for the time being? Could be. Really hard to know the real answer.

Even more interesting are these 2 points:

1. Apple filed a patent for the MobileMe name back in 2006.
2. The term ‘MobileMe’ has been found in numerious iPhoneSDK files.

Who knows the truth. Lets just wait till the WWDC as I’m sure news on this, the new iPhone and a whole lot more will come to light. Sometimes it’s just fun to speculate isn’t it!?

[via MacRumors]

written by Mr. Mayor \\ tags: .Mac, .Me, MobileMe, WWDC 08

I want to love .Mac, I really do but now that Gmail has IMAP, .Mac has lost one of the best reasons for paying the annual asking price. This didn’t matter so much to me because I thought I’d be using the ‘Back to My Mac‘ feature by now but it has never worked for me, even though I’ve sacrificed my internet security by enabling UPnP on all my routers.

So, I’m left being asked to pay £69 ($138) a year for the ability to sync my Macs and use iDisk storage (thank heavens for the increase to 10GB as 1GB was useless).

As for syncing, I’ve had no problems with it but others have so that makes me uncomfortable in relying on it to maintain all my critical keychains or other settings.

Continue reading »

written by Mike Bradbrook \\ tags: .Mac