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Take Control of .Mac, Second Edition
Covers Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and iLife '08!
Apple's .Mac service provides oodles of features, but are you making the most of your membership? In this 193-page book by Macintosh expert Joe Kissell, you'll find help with all the features, whether you are just getting started and want to customize your .Mac preferences or you've been using .Mac for years but have never tried to use .Mac's advanced capabilities.
Take note of MobileMe! Apple has announced plans to add major features to the .Mac service and to change its name to MobileMe in July. As such, portions of this title will become slightly dated and/or obsolete. We do plan to update this ebook for MobileMe, but are waiting to use MobileMe before we firm up our plans.
Back to My Mac:This book devotes six pages to Back to My Mac. However, fully documenting this feature would take another book. To that end, we have a whole 'nother book available—Take Control of Back to My Mac. You can buy both ebooks in a bundle via the orange "Buy Both" button to the left.
More Info
Contents & Intro
What's New
FAQ
Along with covering commonly known capabilities like email and iDisk online storage, Take Control of .Mac explains how to use .Mac's many other powerful features: Groups lets you set up mailing lists and members-only Web sites; .Mac Sync helps you coordinate bookmarks, calendars, contacts, keychains, and more among your Macs; Mail lets you read your mac.com account's email in a Web browser; and HomePage lets you make a simple Web site. .Mac also integrates with the whizzy new photo/movie Web Galleries in iLife '08 and Aperture 2, facilitates iCal-based calendar sharing, and serves as a default host for Web sites you make with iWeb.
"Kissell cuts through [the syncing] thicket cleanly, with clear step-by-step instructions, with key caveats included. The book also provides great detail - good for peace of mind..."
—The Cherry Creek News
Read this book to learn the answers to questions such as:
What changed with .Mac's capabilities in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard?
How do I use my .Mac email address in my email program on my Mac?
Should I use Backup to make backups to .Mac, along with Time Machine?
How do I access my iDisk from Windows XP and Vista?
Can I run a private mailing list via .Mac Groups?
How do I add movies and photos to my Web Gallery?
How do I use .Mac to sync my bookmarks and calendar between Macs?
What's the difference between creating Web sites with iWeb and HomePage?
How can I configure my AirPort Extreme so it will work with Back to My Mac?
Book Info
193 pages
Version 2.0
Updated 29-May-08
2.4 MB download
Free sample with Table of Contents, Introduction, Quick Start, and section starts.
About the Author
Joe Kissell has written numerous books about the Macintosh, including many popular Take Control ebooks. He's also Senior Editor of TidBITS, contributes frequently to Macworld, and previously spent ten years in the Mac software industry.
Membership in .Mac gives you access to a suite of online services that both complement and integrate tightly with Mac OS X and iLife. Although .Mac was designed for ease of use, it also has tremendous power—and a few hidden pitfalls. Learn how to make the most of .Mac by reading this book, which goes far beyond Apple's online help to give you detailed instructions, tips, and strategies. This book was written by Joe Kissell, edited by Dan Frakes, and published by TidBITS Publishing Inc.
Introduction
On January 6, 2000—more than a year before the first official release of Mac OS X—Apple announced a suite of Internet services called iTools. At that moment, as Steve Jobs delivered his Macworld Expo keynote address at Moscone Center in San Francisco, I was in the building's basement, manning a booth for a company that was exhibiting at the expo and watching the presentation via QuickTime streaming video. I was excited to learn about iDisk, HomePage, Mac.com Mail, and all the other aspects of iTools. I was delighted that they were Mac-only, and thrilled that they were free!
Steve said that as soon as his speech was done, the world's Mac users could immediately go to the Apple Web site and choose their iTools member names—which were also permanent email addresses in the Mac.com domain. I did just that. I had hoped to snag joe@mac.com, but it was already taken (perhaps by an Apple employee). However, I managed to get another three-character member name—my initials, jwk@mac.com. Like every other red-blooded Mac geek, I've since treasured my little corner of the Mac.com world.
Over time, Apple has made some dramatic changes to iTools. For starters, they renamed the service .Mac, a trendy yet often frustrating moniker—just try using ".Mac" as the beginning of a file or folder name in Mac OS X. They've added numerous capabilities and expanded storage space, while removing a few features that few people used. (Do you remember KidSafe? iReview? I didn't think so.) They've also made .Mac available to Windows users (shocking!)...and eventually, of course, they began charging for it, too. (For a while it was only $49.95 per year; now it's $99.95.)
More recently, with the introduction of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and iLife '08, Apple has extended the tentacles of .Mac into many more parts of the operating system and its applications, giving users and developers new and useful ways to exploit the service.
Of course, it is possible to get most of the features in .Mac from other services and software. However, you'd have to purchase and configure several different products to even approximate the combination of features .Mac offers—and even then, you wouldn't have the extensive integration with Mac OS X and iLife that makes .Mac so useful. For all these reasons, I believe .Mac is still well worth the price.
But I'd be the first person to admit that .Mac isn't perfect. In my humble opinion, perhaps the biggest problem with .Mac—the biggest reason more Mac users don't automatically sign up each year—is its lack of an instruction manual. Oh, sure, you can download a basic "Getting Started" PDF guide, and Apple provides reasonably accurate online help on the .Mac Web site and in the Mac OS X Help program. But where are the real details? The unbiased strategies, tips, and warnings? The direct, task-oriented instructions that don't require endlessly clicking links and squinting at a tiny window?
My goal in writing this book is to provide all those things—to help you take control of every aspect of your .Mac membership and to get as much value out of it as you possibly can. And as Apple continues to modify the .Mac services—which they surely will—I plan to update this book, as well, so that you have the latest information.
Two final notes about software versions and compatibility. First, this book is primarily for users of Leopard. Although I make occasional references to Windows and to earlier versions of Mac OS X, if you're not running Leopard, you'll find that some .Mac features are unavailable and others are different from what I describe here.
Second, because .Mac is so tightly tied to iLife, which itself gets regular overhauls, I've chosen in this edition of Take Control of .Mac to cover only iLife '08, the current version as I write this. If you're still using an older version of iLife, some of the instructions in this book won't quite match up with your software. Because iLife '08 makes such significant improvements to the suite, especially where .Mac is concerned, I suggest upgrading if you can.
If you're still using Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4) or running iLife '06 or earlier, you might find it more helpful to download the previous version of this book, which if you have the PDF-based version of this ebook, is accessible via the Check for Updates link on the cover. But note that the old version is now out of date in certain other respects.
Quick Start
Use this section to get a quick overview of the process to follow in order to Take Control of .Mac. You can read the entire book in the order presented here, or click a blue link to immediately jump to any particular topic. If you are completely new to .Mac, however, I strongly recommend reading Get to Know .Mac first.
Get your bearings:
Learn about the features of .Mac. See Get to Know .Mac especially What Is .Mac? and Major .Mac Features.
Set up your Mac to work with .Mac. Read Set Up the .Mac System Preferences Pane.
Discover how to access your information via the Web in Learn to Navigate the .Mac Web Site.
Send and receive email:
Use your Mac.com email address on the Web or with a desktop email application. Find out how in Access .Mac Mail over the Web and Access .Mac Email Using Apple Mail.
Expand your email capabilities with aliases or email-only accounts. See Use Email Aliases and Add Email-Only Accounts.
Put your data online:
Use .Mac to copy important data to the .Mac servers—for viewing on the Web or for syncing with another computer. Read Keep Your Information in Sync.
Access your data from any Web browser. See Address Book, .Mac Bookmarks, and iCal Calendars.
Back Up Your Files—to an iDisk or another destination.
Share your files, photos, and other information online:
Use iDisk to make important files available online. See Store and Share Files with iDisk.
Share your stuff on the Web—with or without iLife. Read Create and Publish a Web Site and Share Your Media from iLife.
Create a private Web site for sharing messages, schedules, files, and other information with a group of people. See Collaborate Using .Mac Groups.
Access information on another Mac you own, even when it's not on your local network, using Back to My Mac. See Access Your Mac Remotely.
Manage your .Mac membership:
Save Money on Your .Mac Membership, by purchasing it for less than retail price.
.Mac accounts come in a variety of flavors, from the standard account to Family Pack primary and sub-accounts, email-only accounts, trial accounts, and even expired accounts, which still provide a usable .Mac ID for iChat and other services. Understand the options for converting your .Mac account from one type to another, if the need ever arises. See Appendix A: Account Conversion Methods.
This version of Take Control of .Mac has been thoroughly overhauled to reflect all the latest developments in Mac OS X, iLife, and .Mac. Although nearly every page contains at least some changes, the major differences from the previous version are:
Extensive updates throughout the book to reflect changes in features and user interface in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.
Information on new types of data you can sync via .Mac under Leopard—Dashboard widgets, Dock contents, notes, and preferences.
Descriptions of Leopard's revised sync alert interface.
Instructions on publishing new types of calendar data (to do items and attachments).
An explanation of how to connect to your iDisk using Windows Vista.
A discussion of whether Backup and iDisk are still useful for backups given the advent of Time Machine.
Instructions for making Web sites using iWeb '08.
Information on Web Gallery.
Details about using .Mac with other iLife '08 applications and removal of information about iLife '06.
Instructions for using Back to My Mac for remote file and screen sharing.
I'm still using Tiger and/or iLife '06. Is there an earlier edition that I could buy?
This ebook is intended for folks running Leopard and iLife '08. However, if you buy it and download it, you can then access the older version 1.3, which was updated in September 2007 and covers Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger and iLife '06. To access it, open the PDF to page 1, click Check for Updates (upper right of the page), and then look for a download link. We won't be updating the version 1.3 PDF again, and some aspects of the .Mac Web site may change over time, but we believe that you'll still get a lot of mileage out of the older version 1.3.
I can't make Back to My Mac work. Will this ebook help?
Maybe. If you are using an AirPort Extreme or Express and just need to turn on NAT-PMP, this ebook will tell you how. But, if you need to really understand how Back to My Mac works behind the scenes, or if you need help with a tricky router configuration, this isn't the ebook that you want. What you want is Take Control of Back to My Mac, which is currently being prepared by author Glenn Fleishman. We hope to have it out in June. If you buy this ebook, however, you'll be able to get Take Control of Back to My Mac for 50% off.
Joe Kissell has written numerous books about the Macintosh, including many popular Take Control ebooks. He's also Senior Editor of TidBITS, contributes frequently to Macworld, and previously spent ten years in the Mac software industry.