DejaVu , which you can buy but that also comes packaged with Toast (I think it’s Toast, anyway) is a control pane that is so easy to use as an automated backup that you really have nothing to learn.  Choose the volume to back up, choose where you’re backing it to, and leave it alone.

Re: Domain Name Hosting

“• Add a web-front to Address Book and Calendar (right now you can see them on the web but not easily edit them) ... I’m talking something similar to what they’ve done with Mail which is basically make the application a web-application”

This would be fantastic; I love the capabilities of iCal, and Google Calendar, but I need web-based access to my calendar AND local persistence for times when I am offline. Providing Google Calendar type functionality on .Mac would be a sweet solution…

Re: Time,time,time

[quote author=“WetcoastBob”]The problem is the time it takes to figure out how all this stuff works.  I have a registered web-site with nothing on it and a .mac website but how do I get the dot mac stuff to my web-site?
I also was dismayed to find that “back-up” only works if you have a .mac account.  My plan was to back-up everything to an external hard drive using “back-up”.  There are other ways to do this on an automated basis, but I really do not have time to learn how to use apple script.
I have spent the last 6 months learning some of the ins and outs of OSx and now I am out of time and must do some actual work!

If you’re talking about Apple’s Backup, it does not require backing up to a .Mac account. You can get the program only if you have a .Mac account, but, once you have it, you can back up to an external hard drive. My iMac does that automatically every day.

[quote author=“KitsuneStudios”]The ability to attach a domain name to .mac website

Really, that’s all I need.

Get a domain from GoDaddy and they have a form to let you redirect it to wherever you want. I’ve done it in the past.

I’m not sure what it would take to get me to dump $100/year on .mac — offsite backups alone are worth that much, but you really need a minimum of 5GB (and 10GB would be more like it, you can get that for $30/year!) for music, photos, videos (all the iLife stuff, in other words). But as for the rest of it, Google & Yahoo provide it all for free — photo storage (and some file storage, using gDisk), blogging, email, places to dump video (Google Video, YouTube, GeoCities).

I know some people think .mac is worth $100/year as-is. I don’t. Gimme 10GB of storage and I’d reconsider.

[quote author=“gslusher”]

Sounds like an ad hoc rationale. The improvements you mentioned for iWeb, iMovie, iCal, and Address Book, as desirable as they are, have little or nothing to do with .Mac features. One might also like to have improved image editing in iPhoto. Since one can make photocasts with iPhoto and .Mac, does that mean that any part of iPhoto is, perforce, a feature of .Mac?

Improved photo editing in iPhoto has nothing to do with .Mac. However, improvements in how iPhoto works with .Mac does improve the usability of .Mac for anyone using that feature. So, yes, it is relevant to this discussion.

There is a lot to .mac and a lot more that can be made of it. Syncing is a feature, Photocasting is a feature. They and other things are touted on the box and on the .Mac feature page . They are as much a feature of .Mac as anything else, and as worthy of discussion as transforming .Mac into a kind of virtual desktop available from various computers, phones, and more.