thoughtstart

MacRumors, AppleInsider, AppleGazette, TUAW and I’m sure others are all hinting at a possible .Mac refresh to be announced at the Apple Media Event today, based on a “scheduled maintenace” outage to coincide with the event.I’m hoping to see at least some of these being announced today:

• Push email for iPhone and Mail.app, hopefully using IMAP IDLE and not whatever proprietary mechanism Yahoo! is using. Considering they’ve announced IMAP IDLE as one of Leopard Server’s upcoming features, this should have a pretty good chance of seeing the light.
• Spam controls in .Mac Mail, ideally through SpamAssassin. Once again, Mac OS X Server 10.4 includes SpamAssassin, so it shouldn’t be such a big deal.
• Live spell checking in .Mac Mail.
• Load Images whitelist in .Mac Mail. Right now, there is only a Load Images button that needs to be clicked every single time with no facility to always load images from a particular sender.
• More than two email addresses per contact in Address Book. Mirror the Address Book fields from OS X and iPhone.
• Do something, anything, with the Bookmarks. That pop-up window is so ’90s.
• Increase the amount of storage offered by default. With Gmail at almost 3GB today and Yahoo! offering unlimited storage, .Mac’s 1GB seems puny especially for something that costs $99.95/yr.
• The calendar widget on .Mac’s home page has been a static calendar ever since I remember it. There isn’t even any indication of days holding events. Google’s Calendar widget is nice and functional, not only showing days with events as links but also having an agenda.
• .Mac Calendar! What calendar? There isn’t even one at .Mac, with the exception of the home page widget that links to a page explaining the benefits of syncing, publishing and subscribing to calendars.
• Refresh the HomePage feature altogether. Last time I tried publishing a photo album on .Mac, it was such an embarrassment compared to Flickr or Picasa that I gave up in less than five minutes.

I’ll keep my fingers crossed.