Apple tweaks MobileMe with a few improvements
Users are reaping the benefits of the cloud as Apple recently pushed a few updates to its MobileMe service. A few visual and functional tweaks have been combined with feature updates for iPhone 3.0 and iPhone 3GS.
By Chris Foresman | Last updated July 2, 2009 9:45 AM CT
Print this article
Apple has added a number of tweaks to its MobileMe Web services this week. Mail, Gallery, iDisk, account settings, push contacts and calenders, and Back to My Mac all got improved, and a new version of the MobileMe Control Panel for Windows enables syncing through a proxy.
In Mail, forwarding or replying to an HTML or rich text message with now retain that format instead of converting to plain text—while a number of people probably prefer this behavior, I can imagine there are some who won't be happy with the change. Unread message counts are displayed next to the inbox as well as each separate folder if you have them set up, just like Mail on Mac OS X. There's a tweak for e-mail aliases that on occasion did not show up properly in Mac OS X Mail, and those using iPhone OS 3.0 can search messages on the MobileMe server as well as those stored locally on the phone.
Gallery is updated to handle publishing of videos from an iPhone 3GS. Also, if no albums exist, an album will be created automatically when publishing photos or videos—as long as you have iPhone OS 3.0.
iDisk got an icon tweak—it now uses the same one as the promised, but not yet delivered, iDisk app for iPhone. There's also a fix for displaying the proper completion status when uploading files to the Public folder via a browser, and fixes an issue where some e-mail addresses were not considered valid when setting up a file share.
A couple fixes are now in place for certain account settings, and this section also has a new icon to look more like the iPhone Settings icon. First, a problem setting up certain custom domain names for iWeb site has been fixed. Also, it's now possible to convert expired accounts to Family Pack sub-accounts, and any active account with no upgrades can be converted to Family Pack sub-accounts as well.
For those who have updated to iPhone OS 3.0, there are also a couple useful changes to push contacts and push calendar syncing with your iPhone. The first time you sync your mobile device with MobileMe, there's now an option to merge existing contacts and calendars on the device with those in the cloud. Deleting your MobileMe account or turning off sync will now keep a copy of the the last sync on the device—unless you change sync settings in iTunes. And, iPhone contacts will now maintain ringtone associations when synced via MobileMe.
Back to My Mac has been tweaked so that connections between machines updated to Mac OS X 10.5.7 won't have to sign in to the remote machine using a login and password—MobileMe now handles the authentication. And MobileMe users on Windows, after updating to MobileMe Control Panel for Windows 1.4, can sync settings and data when connecting to the 'Net via a proxy.
In all, none of these are major changes, but it's nice to know Apple's MobileMe team is working hard to keep the system running as smoothly as possible, and taking the time to improve even the little things.