As a relative noob to Apple Mac and all the services Apple has to offer I decided to investigate the .Mac offering. The Macbook I have is running Leopard and iLife08 plus a few other Apps to ensure I can continue my Windows to Mac conversion without any pain.

I have signed up for the free .Mac account which gives me about 100meg of web space and upon activation the .Mac offering becomes seamlessly integrated into your desktop and applications. I was very surprised at how easy it is to get immediate benefits from .Mac. I will definitely sign up for the premium service which is 99 $USD and provides 10gig of storage, and 100gig of traffic.

Some of the services that .Mac offers are online photo gallery’s, website hosting, IMAP Mail, Groups, PIM Synchronization, “Back to My Mac” which is basically remote access to one of your Leopard based Mac PC’s, and probably the most useful feature for me is iDisk. iDisk is an internet based storage system that can be accessed and synchronized to your Mac from anywhere on the internet. The integration with the apps is awesome making .Mac almost a requirement to get the best out of you Mac.

I have started to mess around with my online photo gallery and I am pleased that it will allow me to make some full resolution images available to the internet community. The web site offering is a bit limited and works best the iWeb the iWorks web authoring tool. Sure there are equivalent or better offerings to the individual features on .Mac, but for a complete easy to use integrated solution it is hard to go past .Mac.

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