I just received my .Mac renewal notification from Apple. Since I don't consider .Mac value-for-money at £70 per annum I shall not be renewing, and have already found a WebDAV-based workaround for iCal sharing and a direct iPhoto-to-web solution. Independent software developers are obviously responding to a disgruntled .Mac user base, as options for achieving similar functionality without a .Mac account are on the increase.
You can do a lot via Google, or if you like getting your hands dirty hack your own .Mac replacement. Most .Mac users, however, are likely to want "out of the box" solutions. Here are three that I've come across recently.
iSynCal ($US25) allows scheduled synchronisation of iCal calendars between Macs, or between users on the same Mac—without a .Mac account or other WebDAV server (it makes use of standard Apple File Sharing).
iSynCal can be used in demo mode for 15 days
SyncTogether ($US50) from Mark/Space is a peer-to-peer application for synching iCal Tasks and Events, Address Book, Safari bookmarks and more on up to 3 Macs (formerly MySync). The clean interface will be familiar to users of M/S Missing Sync products, and this app is definitely the most comprehensive of the three.
SyncTogether uses plugins & Apple's Sync Services technology (© Mark/Space)
Spanning Sync is still in development (although you can download a beta as of this writing), and promises bidirectional data exchange between iCal and Google Calendar.
The Spanning Sync System Preferences pane (© Spanning Partners)
Update 13.03.07: GCALDaemon is a Java app that syncs between Google Calendar and ICAL-compatible calendars (such as iCal).
Update 17.10.07: The notMac Challenge has been won; the open-source download allows users to replicate .Mac services locally on their own machine, or server. The server is OS neutral, while the client is OS X specific.
0 responses to More ways to avoid .Mac