Mac 101: Dealing without iCards
Apple has posted a nifty tip for Mail users who miss the discontinued iCards feature from .Mac: You can use Mail stationery to create an attractive card-like message with your own photos.
In a post on the Mobile Me blog (hey, it’s not dead!), Apple says “…it’s like the old Make Your Own iCards feature on steroids, and a whole lot easier to use in the bargain.”
For Leopard users, Mail comes with 30 email templates you can customize in lieu of sending an iCard. Personally, I think an email is better than an iCard anyway, what with all the greeting card spam that goes on.
You can use photos that you take with Photo Booth, for example, or pictures from iPhoto. Customize it with a clever note, and away you go.
If you don’t have Leopard or still want to use an online greeting card site, there are plenty to choose from.
(And if you like our series for beginners, Mac 101, there’s much more to learn.)
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Apple Gives MobileMe Customers 60 More Free Days
Apple’s tacking on an addition 60 days to the 30 days it already doled out to MobileMe subscribers, which means you’ve got an entire three months extra to wait out the issues you’ve been having. Apple sent out these emails today to MobileMe subscribers, but if you’re one of the ones with MobileMe mail snags, you might not have gotten it. Well you’ve seen it now! Apple has some qualifications, so click on to see if you’re eligible. [Apple]
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Apple to add iPhone notes syncing to Mail.app?
A loyal reader recently sent in a tip asking us had we seen a dialog in Mail.app. The dialog in question is produced when creating a new note and pressing command + b. You would expect it to be a shortcut for bold, but no … it brings up the above dialog.
The dialog specifies that by converting the note to Rich Text, devices such as the iPhone will not be able to edit it. Could this be a sign that notes syncing between iPhone and Mail.app could be coming in the not so distant future? We can only hope so. Thanks for the tip, Shayan!
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iPhone 101: Jumping to the top of your mail
Mobile Safari has always had a handy feature that i wished Mobile Mail would acquire. Apple must have read my mind, because it’s now available.
If you’re unlucky enough to receive lots of email, you can quickly jump to the top of the list by touching the menu bar (where the time is displayed) as of the iPhone 2.0 software. Ta-dah!
Remember, you can bulk delete mail with greater ease now, too. Both of these improvements are welcome, but it would be even better to be able to mark all messages as read (or unread) just as easily.
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Saying “goodbye” to .Mac
Tonight, we will all say “goodbye” to .Mac, a service that has been a small part of Apple for almost 8 years. iTools, .Mac’s predecessor, was launched on January 5, 2000 at the Macworld Expo in San Francisco and was a free service that included a HomePage, iCards and the much coveted @mac.com e-mail address that is commonplace today (as well as the forgotten ‘KidSafe,’ which was a database of kid friendly websites Apple compiled so you could make sure your children weren’t up to no good on your Mac). As more users came to the service and the cost of bandwidth went up, Apple began charging for the service and called it .Mac.
The name “.Mac” was born at the Macworld Expo in New York on July 17, 2002 and provided several new services including: a beefed up iDisk (with a dizzying 100 megs of space), Backup, and a free copy of Virex. On September 17, 2002, Apple announced that it would discontinue the free iTools service in favor for .Mac.
That brings us to, well, tonight. Apple is scheduled to take down .Mac and replace it with a newer, rebranded service named “MobileMe.” While some scoff at the name, TUAW can’t help but see the other side of the picture: look how far iTools has evolved over the past 8 years. So, join us in saying, “So long old friend, we hardly knew ye.”
Do you have a favorite story to tell about iTools or .Mac? Be sure to mention it in the comments below! Apple is scheduled to take down the .Mac service between 6 p.m. and 12 a.m. pacific time.
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