Apple's replacement for .Mac - MobileMe has (after a slightly rocky start) now launched and it looks pretty cool. It consists of a number of very polished webapps to do Calendering, Contacts, Email and Photo galleries, but more importantly it uses push technology to make sure that all your information stays up to date on any Macs you use, your iPhone etc. Linked with ActiveSync support, push mail makes MobileMe very cool for business people on the go.
Unfortunately, when I logged in to MobileMe, I found that a lot of the Ajax-y goodness wasn't working for me. In particular many of the icons weren't responding to mouse-clicks (though a right/control-click could be used ok and the desired option could be opened in a new Tab or Window - marginally workable but very annoying). Everything worked ok in Firefox so I eventually tracked the issue down (via a helpful Wikipedia article) to my use of Safari 4 Developer Preview. That left me with a real problem! You see Safari 4 has one killer feature I can't do without - full page zooming, rather than just changing font sizes. For an oldie like me who often needs a larger font size, the old zoom feature was a pain - only the text changed so the whole page layout and design was killed and overlapping boxes and controls often made readability a problem. But Safari 4 zooms the whole page, graphics and all to give an excellent result - layout intact and fonts large enough to read! If it came down to MobileMe vs Safari 4 I knew which would win!
Luckily a quick visit to the Apple Developer Connection revealed a version of Safari 4 Developers Preview with a date from a few days ago and I (correctly) surmised that this might solve the problem. So now things have settled down in the Cullen household, full page zooming intact, new MobileMe apps to check out, and continued lust for the iPhone 3G unabated...
P.S. I'm writing this in MarsEdit, having previously written it (or a nearly similar post) in ecto 3beta only to have it disappear when I tried to change from rich text to HTML mode. Sadly this isn't the first (or even second or third) time this has happened but it was the last time. Ecto development seems to have stalled and I'm leaving.
P.P.S. I then updated the Wikipedia article ;-)