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Poor boy .Mac alternatives

5thirtyone.com — Whether or not you can make do without the annual subscription service offered by Apple depends wholly on your willingness to nit-pick through the alternatives. The following article will break-down available solutions based on the specific “conveniences” you wish to retain while saving a little money in the long run.

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  • kottkrig, on 10/12/2007, -3/+9The iDisk substitute, box.net, is a godsend. Fantastic tip that i hadn't heard of before.
  • ZebraGang13, on 10/12/2007, -8/+19.mac isnt that good anyways
    • macuser9214, on 10/12/2007, -5/+15aggreed. I don't think it's worth the money personally.
    • sockpuppets, on 10/12/2007, -16/+3you've been onn digg too lonng.
    • tdowling, on 10/12/2007, -2/+9For its target audience it's worth it: people who are technologically literate enough to know how .Mac could benefit them but not quite savvy enough or willing to seek out the free alternatives. Anyone below the line won't bother paying attention because it sounds "too complicated" and anyone above will probably already have other stuff set up.
  • ewcost, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Good info! Thanks
  • avihappy, on 10/12/2007, -12/+5Quicktime and .Mac are things Apple fails at. Macs and iPods are very good!
    • Niten, on 10/12/2007, -3/+6The Quicktime Player is definitely a failure, but if by that you meant the Quicktime framework itself, then I have to respectfully disagree...
    • adc89, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6I have no problem with either...
    • peestandingup, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8Quicktime is awesome because it uses more standards, unlike Windows Media Player. I dont even think WMP will play standard .mp4 videos without an add on. That kinda sucks.

      QT (like iTunes) on a PC sticks to high heaven. On a Mac, its pretty solid.
    • tfaz1, on 10/12/2007, -3/+5Totally disagree about Quicktime. It's fantastic! As for .Mac, I've been a member since year #1. Mostly because as an Apple employee, I got a free account for the first 2 years. I really think it's a good (not great) product for a lot of different Mac users because of it's tight integration with the OS. However, it's about 4X more expensive than it should be. Also, it's pretty long in the tooth compared to the free (or nearly so) services outlined in this story. Apple has me for another 11 months before my current account expires. If they don't remedy the price or offerings, I'm afraid I'll be on my way.
    • akira117, on 10/12/2007, -7/+4You mean Macs and .mac are what they fail at.

      iPod and Quicktime/iTunes are what they are good at.
      (look at the market share for them)
    • LycoLoco, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5"(look at the market share for them)"

      Yeah, we all know how well market share shows how awesome a product is. It took apple 5 (and a half) revisions of the iPod before they got gapless playback, something that CD players have been able to do from the start. Why is this? iTunes is bloated and doesn't allow me to view my music in location format, so I've gotta look at all of them by artist or album or track name, but that gets to be annoying with multiple artist albums. Market share != quality.
  • sppatel, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0The WebDav Connect doesn't work. You're prompted for a uid/pw and authentication fails when using the uid/pw for Box.
  • nobogeys217, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I like the gdisk app that allows you to use the 2 gigs of space you get with gmail. The only thing wrong is that you cant upload folders. it is good for single file documents and photos and music, and its free.

    gdisk link- http://gdisk.sourceforge.net/
  • jtrwallace, on 10/12/2007, -8/+3It's funny to me that I paid for .Mac solely for the e-mail address. I don't care about any of the other features and I don't use them at all. All I wanted was my email address to say @mac.com at the end of it. For me it was worth it.
    • goat2, on 10/12/2007, -13/+4what a stupid piece of *****
    • rusty0101, on 10/12/2007, -5/+3I was going to ask goat2 why she thought the parrent idea was a piece of *****, but I decided I would just bury the comment and block the id.
  • tfaz1, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Is anyone else having trouble with the Box.net WebDav access? I type in user/password only to get looped back to the user/password request with no indication of why.
    • moofer, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2maybe it's not such a great alternative?
    • jaa313, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0use http (not https) + use the email addy that you signed up with. box.net's webdav works, but is very slow.
  • akira117, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Anything like iWeb on the PC side?
    I just would like to try something like that.
    Is it really as easy/fast as one would think?
    (No I will not install OS x86)
    • OdinEye, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1iWeb is quick and simple in terms of providing several templates for quickly putting together websites.

      There are easy to use text sections, and you can drag and drop images into predetermined sections of the templates. If you have a .mac account, you can publish directly to your account in iWeb without any separate ftp software.

      If you want to do additional things - like put ads on your site, or add any additional html stuff (clocks, imaged links to different blog services, etc), then it gets more complicated. There is at least one third party option to add html to your iWeb pages (iWebEnhancer), and it works pretty well at a low cost. As far as ads go, it's a violation of your user agreement to run ads on websites running on a .mac account.
    • porfitron, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0The opensource NVU is not as nice iWeb interface-wise, but allows you to configure direct FTP access (and iWeb only connects to .mac) - basically, with NVU, you click publish/save and your pages go right to the web (much like Dreamweaver, Frontpage, etc). The program is free, so I usually refer it to people who don't know HTML and are looking to publish simple pages at a low cost: http://nvu.com/index.php
    • knight17, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1There are many applications on the PC side also for creating simple sites without knowledge of HTML or other markup languages.One such software is Toweb 1.5 I have used it is simple to make pages with different themes.
      You can find more about it here :

      - http://alieneyes.wordpress.com/2006/12/28/creating-websites-without-any-html-knowledge/

      But there are more software, but this is the only one that has a different interface, everything except this looks like dreamweaver.
  • iomegaboy, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2How about getting your own damn domain and host? I paid $8.88 per year for a domain and $5 per months for 9 gb of web server space.
    • akira117, on 10/12/2007, -14/+3Mac people like easy, over priced and shiny!
      You should have known that......
      (probably get Dugg down, mac fan boys in here)
    • tdowling, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6No akira, you'll get dugg down because that was a dumb-ass comment.
    • bmson, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2@Magnus
      People are willing to pay for products, that are easy to use.

      99% of people don't want to know anything about computers.
      They just want it to work. They use IE (or safari) because it's there.
      .Mac works just fine, yes it costs. But people is willing to pay for something that is yeas and just simply works.

      If you are a software developer, your should think about that. Less is more and you could put a bigger price tag on a product that is "less advanced" but have great user interface.
  • michaelchyles, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Excellent writeup..awesome reference..box.net is truly the perfect substitute for the idisk storage. It runs great, useablility is awesome and the widget for your own web page is great..i am a graphic designer and it is so easy to just lay it on the page and share files to clients. great writeup!
  • lucas911, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2There are some good work-arounds for photocasting but nothing is as easy/fast as photocasting through .mac.
    I hope that some day it'll be like iCal where you can choose to publish in your own server. iLife07 maybe?
  • trashcat, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I wish they'd stop the weird naming systems. dot-something should either a hidden file or is a top level domain, I get confused if everything's not consistent. ;)
  • jmanseau, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I have been using Spymac for the past two years and they have many if not all the features of .mac. Blogging, webpage, photos, webmail and 3 GB of on line storage. Their fee is approximately $25 per year.
  • porfitron, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I love articles like this, since I'm always on a quest to find things opensource/free. I'd like to add that for "photosharing", Picasaweb, from Google, is very Mac-friendly. They give quite a bit of free space, and with their plugin, allow you to upload your albums directly from iPhoto... all for free: http://picasa.google.com/web/mac_tools.html
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