.mac integration

[Yesurbius]

I am curious how many people are a little concerned, or annoyed at how the announcement of the new iLife '06 products focuses quite a bit on .mac publishing, "locking" users into this service. It reminds me of another computer company's tactics.

Right now I pay over the $99/year subscription fees for hosting my own digital life on a provider other than .mac ... I get 10GB of storage, 500GB transfer/mo, SQL, PHP, the works.. It provides me with everything *I* need. If .mac offerred me what I wanted, I would subscribe to their service - probably be willing to pay a bit more as well. But the fact remains that it doesn't.

Here is my basic take on this. The web is full of standards. There is nothing substantially special about .mac - nothing .mac can do that you can't do on another ISP. So why make publishing within the app available only to .mac subscribers?

To me, if the apps had a preferences option where you specify publishing locations (ftp server, webdav, local directory, .mac) and the iLife app used that location seamlessly in the same way that they are now using .mac - it would appeal to everyone; and .mac could market itself based on its own merits. As it stands now, .mac is mostly marketing itself because of the fact the apps dependent on it.

Thoughts?

[limike28]

This is just my guess, but I see Apple doing this for two reasons.

1. It will push some people to sign up for a .mac account.

2. Anytime Apple announces things or rolls out things they seem to do it in a guarded fashion that ensure every feature works as designed. Since they control the .mac area they control the levels of code running on those servers so iWeb/iLife applications work great with them. While it's all open standards stuff I think we have all seen the what happens when there's a slight difference in code.

Hopefully in time they will open it up, and I am sure there will be third party players out there supplying work arounds.

[Yesurbius]

For me, I want it so when I drag a picture into an album, its automatically added to my website database and the image and thumbnails are automatically transferred there.

The closest I have gotten to this has been by writing a somewhat buggy iPhoto plugin that synchronizes photo data between iPhoto and my remote SQL server (on my web provider), then spit thumbnails and images into a folder. Then I'd have to manually upload that folder of images to my remote server. Of course I am a horrible programmer so whenever there is any sort of bump in iPhoto or the export process I crash

I suppose that if .mac had at least a minimum offering compared to commercial Flikr, with ability to search photo comments and filter by keywords, date, etc then I'd consider getting a .mac subscription but since it doesn't I am stuck with 'jury-rigging' it.