Today Apple sent an email to me, along with countless others extending the “whoops” free period for MobileMe another 60 days.
The email reads …
“We have already made many improvements to MobileMe, but we still have many more to make. To recognize our users’ patience, we are giving every MobileMe subscriber as of today a free 60 day extension. This is in addition to the one month extension most subscribers have already received. We are working very hard to make MobileMe a great service we can all be proud of. We know that MobileMe’s launch has not been our finest hour, and we truly appreciate your patience as we turn this around.”
I know how fashionable it is to trash MobileMe, but I have to admit the service has been pretty stable for me (the first week excepted). I’ve come to rely upon the wireless calendar sync. I think the most encouraging part of this experience is the way Apple has stepped up both with their extension of time credit and their commitment to fix things. Now if Apple would just get a little better at that pesky communication issue.

Ars Technica reports tonight on an internal email at Apple where Steve Jobs admits the MobileMe launch was “not up to Apple standards.” The email reportedly goes on to explain how Apple has learned several lessons from the problems involved with the MobileMe launch. Lets hope these lessons are applied as MobileMe and other Apple based web services are expanded and launched. It’s nice that Steve is internally addressing the MobileMe issues. I still wish they had been more public with their challenges from the beginning for us paying members.
I have to say that while the first week was pretty useless, the expanded over-air syncing has been very useful to me. The web apps also fit nicely into that portion of my day where I’m driving a windows box.

The folks at Apple are masters at keeping us in the dark. And being honest, there is a certain part of me that absolutely loves this. I enjoy the hype leading up to WWDC and Macworld and I love being amazed with the way Apple (in contrast to most of the tech industry) makes few or no promises but always delivers.
All of that being said, silence is sometimes a bad thing. This is especially true with the MobileMess. I get that things went off the rails with this launch but I never got why Apple was so secretive about it. When people are paying for a service and the service breaks, they should be told what is broken and how long it will be until things are fixed. For these reasons I was pleased to see that Apple has lifted the veil (more or less) with respect to MobileMe with a MobileMe status page. While it’s great we can now get the status quickly, I’m still wondering why it took so long.

This morning Apple sent out its “mea culpa” email to MobileMe subscribers concerning the less than stellar transition from .Mac to MobileMe. Standing behind the apology, Apple gave everyone a free 30 day extension of services.
We want to apologize to our loyal customers and express our appreciation for their patience by giving all current subscribers an automatic 30-day extension to their MobileMe subscription free of charge. Your extension will be reflected in your account settings within the next few weeks.
Apple also confirmed my suspicion that Calendar and Address Book syncing was less than instantaneous.
I appreciate Apple stepping up and taking responsibility and providing some value to the customers. My only complaint is the lack of information while they were sorting everything out. A few simple postings explaining the problems and estimated time for fixes would have been appreciated.

The dust is finally settling around MobileMe. I am still scratching my head over the bungled launch of this product but as the servers seem to be recovering, I’m already incorporating the new features into my daily life. Specifically, the push syncing is fantastic. I generally use a MacBook Air as my daily computer. I have a MacBook Pro at home at my desk for all of the heavy lifting like video, photo editing and the likes. I also sync my iPhone to the MacBook Pro. Before MobileMe, that meant when I made an adjustment to an appointment on my Mac, it did not get on my phone until that night when I synced it at home. Now it pushes right through. I already can’t live without this feature. Here are a couple other tips I’ve discovered:

1. Do Not Become a Lemming to Email Notification

Just because you can push email, doesn’t mean you have to become a Pavlovian dog like some of our Blackberry brethren. I’ve left the “push” on for my email but I refuse to jump every time it pings, vibrates, or otherwise announced new mail. Stopping for every email would make it impossible to get anything done. Be the master of your email, don’t let email master you.

2. BusySync Still fills a Role

BusySync still lets you sync your calendars with your family and co-workers. Likewise it allows you to painlessly publish to Google if needed. I had an interesting chat with George Starcher and Katie Floyd over the weekend where we figured out a work-around for MobileMe’s inability to sync subscribed calendars. Specifically, if you subscribe to the calendar at your Google calendar and then sync it down to your iCal with BusySync, you can get it to push. If anyone knows a way to push the birthday calendar, let me know.

3. All Push is not Created Equal

I’ve noticed that while the email pushes nearly immediately, the calendar and address push is a bit slower. For me it is generally 5-15 minutes. This delay doesn’t bother me at all.

4. About that Web Interface…

I really like the look of the web access portal. It looks and feels like an application. I think the UI is heads and shoulders above Google’s offerings but feature poor. There are a lot of options available in Google calendar that are simply not there on MobileMe. Lets hope they continue to improve stability and add features as things calm down.

Apple announced last night that the .Mac service will be going down at 6 PM Pacific on July 9, 2008. The service will remain down for approximately 4 hours or until they have MobileMe in place. This is great news. Thursday morning, I hope to have MobileMe working.
In anticipation of using the new service, I have deactivated the Google sync function in BusySync and will be instead doing it through the MobileMe service. My primary use for the Web calendaring is to view and edit it on my PC at work. That is just the beginning. With iPhone calendar push syncing, it will really streamline things for me. Is anybody else planning on dumping the Google calendar sync for MobileMe?

Am I the only one that thinks about MobileMe every time I have to sync my iPhone to add an appointment? It is funny how this works. I’ve been wire syncing contacts and appointments for a year now without really complaining much. However, since Apple demonstrated the MobileMe service last week, I get peeved every time I have to stop and sync by wire. My appointments are constantly in flux and the wireless immediate syncing I saw last week will be very useful. It is like smelling a delicious pizza only to have the box slammed on your finger and you’re told you can’t eat it for another month. Ugg. While Apple said this will release “early July”, I think that means July 11 but I sure hope I’m wrong. The sooner the better. Am I alone on this?
***Adendum
I thought about this more. If MobileMe requires the iPhone 2.0 software to do its sync magic, doesn’t that mean there is no way on God’s green earth this will come out before July 11?