What Is dotMac?

My third week as a Mac user with my loaner MacBook, and I've discovered a truly engrossing part of the experience. It's a service called .mac (often written as "dotMac"). Apple calls dotMac the center of your digital life. When you open a .mac account ($99 annually), you get 1GB of storage on a virtual drive called iDisk and a web address of your very own.

Because publishing to iDisk is pretty much as easy as saving your files to your local drive, you can take everything you do on the Mac and publish it to the Internet. Once published, you can share by inviting as much of the world as you care to invite.

DotMac is tightly integrated with Apple's iLife applications: iPhoto, iMovie, GarageBand, iDVD, and, of course, iTunes. If you're a dotMac subscriber, then each of these applications has a one-button publish to iDisk. From iPhoto or iMovie, for example, you can drag and drop your creations directly onto your iDisk. The suite's publishing application, iWeb, lets you create podcasts or blogs. You can even publish your iTunes music to share with others. You don't have to know anything about HTML or file directories. And, as would be expected, Apple's got some gorgeous templates for doing all of this.

I'm not going to win any awards for my evening of publishing, and I lost my way through the maze of "i" applications more than just a few times, but within two hours I had the beginnings of a dotMac web publishing life. The easiest thing I did was a Photocasting (Apple's way of sharing iPhoto albums or pictures). The toughest thing was an iMovie, since the file formats from my PC life (MPEG4) wouldn't work with iMovie.

Publishing is king of the dotMac world, but there are a number of non-publishing things you can do, too. DotMac is also meant to be your assistant for backups and management of all of your important data. You can place files to share on iDisk (good for moving stuff between computers at home and work) or just share with colleagues. You can also place copies of your files, contacts, and calendars on iDisk or create scheduled backups.

The weakest link may be the mail account included as part of the service. It's simply called "Mail." (It may have been undeserving of the "i" moniker since it's pretty basic.) The good news is that based on iMap standards, the mail remains in constant synch with all of your computers. The bad news is that I find other mail systems much easier to do things like organize email messages.

Funny, I was favorably disposed to dotMac. It's ad free, and takes care of publishing and hosting. If I were going to be doing any sort of personal publishing I'd be there in a heartbeat. But the Mac aficionados out there, the ones who usually have nothing but praise for the Mac, are pretty tough on it. Many think dotMac is overpriced and slow. (It is true that the email program is agonizingly slow.) Some authors offer work-arounds using other free software alternatives; others offer money saving tips to avoid the hefty subscription fee.

If I didn't know better, I'd start to think that I may be diametrically opposed to Mac aficionados in my tastes, but I think—as with all things Mac—it's the sum of the parts that adds up to a rich experience. Sure you can cobble together the same functionality with all sorts of tweaks and downloads, and if the money is an issue it's a great alternative, but anyone who has the urge to publish will be happy with .mac. Stop by my practice page. You know it won't take much to do better!