[aprssig] findU and RSS

[Brian B. Riley]

<raving Mac partisanship>

.Mac is not well understood outside the Mac community. It is more than than
just the Sync mechanism. Its a package, list price $100/year, that can be
found as cheap as $75/year from some retailers. It offers 250 MB of disk
space that can be broken up to disk space and email (IMAP). (I use mine for
all my lists mail and save my domain addresses for personal and business
stuff.) The package also includes a free subscription to a good anti-virus
program (Virex) and substantial discounts on a number of third party apps.

The Sync-ing features are, in my rarely so humble opinion, the biggest
aspect though. Here you have a common platform which Apple named the "iDisk"
and common interface which is used by Apple and a good number third party
vendors to keep data uniform between multiple computers for the same person.
My primary home system is an iMac G5/1.8  and my laptop is a 12" PowerBook
G4/867 which goes everywhere with me (it has 802.11G and Bluetooth paired
with my Motorola 710 giving me Verizon 3G access anywhere I can't get WiFi).
With .Mac in place I no longer have to remember which machine I was on when
I browsed and/or bookmarked some website. It no longer matters which machine
I was on when I entered an address in my address book or a date in my
calendar or a to-do item it all syncs to the iDisk and gets back to the
other machine a soon as it is fired up and reconnected to the net. The big
point here is that  don't have to think about it, it just does it all by
itself. The only conscious action I might have to take is to force the sync
if I just made a change I want to make sure gets synced and I am in a hurry
to shutdown and move on.

Oh yes and I must concur with Steve about the RSS integration into Safari
2.0 in Tiger ... I hade been using the Sage extension to FireFox for RSS. At
the time I thought it was pretty good, but its not even in the same league
with the new Safari/RSS


</raving Mac partisanship>


-- 
Cheers ... 73 de brian, n1bq, underhill center, vermont




On 5/22/05 9:09 PM, "Brad McConahay" <brad at n8qq.com> wrote:

> I wouldn't accuse .Mac of being prohibitively expensive, but I can't see
> directly paying Apple (or Microsoft) to sync anything.  And without that
> service, Safari is basically just like a standalone reader.  Personally, I
> don't want RSS directly integrated with any particular browser ... that's
> the perfect way to limit choice.  I'd like to have a reader work with any
> OS, any browser, and any machine that's connected to the Internet, at any
> time.