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Me Time - My Experience So Far With MobileMe

Apple’s update of their .Mac online presence and syncing software has received numerous critiques since it’s launch earlier this month. People have struggled with the service being up and lost mail. I struggled with getting it to work for a few days until I stumbled across a solution in the forums that even the Apple techs didn’t have me try. Since then things have been pretty smooth with the exception of calendars.

I bought my iPhone last year to help become more organized. One of my favorite features was that I would be able to sync up my home and work calendars. At work we use Exchange on PCs and at home I use a Mac. I found a method of exporting my work calendar daily to Google’s calendar and then subscribing to that calendat with iCal. At first this was a little clunky but better than the other smartphones I had considered and didn’t cost me a dime. When Google released their sync program for Outlook this became much easier as I didn’t need to do the export.

With the launch of MobileMe they pitched that they would “push” my calendar down to my phone from the MobileMe cloud. Problem is that it doesn’t push down my subscribed calendars. There have been many work-arounds people have suggested, but none of them are clean , easy, and free as of yet. Apple does sync these calendars between computers (if you have two Macs for instance), but doesn’t push the events to prevent duplicating.

Why can’t Apple treat the iPhone/iPod Touch like another Mac and sync the subscribed calendars but not the events? Both of these devices have the ability to connect to the internet and retrieve the feed data so MobileMe doesn’t need to push the data down. This avoids the duplication issue and still allows us to have our subscribed calendars. At this point my trial period expires on October 9th, and while I enjoy all the features it does have, I am finding it doesn’t replace my web hosting package (I did think I could do more with iWeb) and without my calendars it doesn’t seem worth the cost.

Which brings me to another issue I only thought of today. Once I signed up for MobileMe all my music and applications I bought through the iTunes store were being logged under my MobileMe user name and not my Apple ID that I had previously established. If I let my MobileMe account expire, will I still be able to use my applications and get my application updates or will Apple no longer recognize the user name? If the application is free it doesn’t matter, its the ones I paid for that I want to make sure work.

UPDATE:

After writing this post, I began digging around my RSS feeds and trying to catch up. I came across a reference to the service Calgoo being free now. Using Calgoo and Google’s Outlook sync I was able to achieve my holy grail of sync. Technically I don’t need the Google product, but I was already using it, so there was no need to change. Google also supports CalDav now, but requires that you be on iCal 3.x which is only available to Leopard owners (I am still running Tiger) and has several known issues.
Calgoo offers a desktop application that creates connectors between calendar services. It works with Google Calendar, Outlook, iCal, 30 Boxes and Sunbird. I set up the application on my Mac at home and connected a new calendar called Work to the feed from Gcal for my synced work calendar. So on a regular basis (every hour) the Google sync grabs my Outlook calendar and puts it on Gcal. Then (also on an hourly basis) Calgoo grabs the feed from Gcal and puts it on my iCal at home. When MobileMe sync runs it updates the web calendar and my iPhone. The caveat is that my Mac has to be running at home in order for me to use Calgoo.
While this solution does work for me, it would still be simpler for Apple to allow the iPhone to fetch calendar feeds like iCal does. And It still hasn’t convinced me to pay for MobileMe yet.