I’ll admit, I can be an Apple Fanboy at times, using their products religiously as for a while, it seemed that they fit what I wanted to do perfectly. And for the most part this is the case, but now that I’ve freed myself of .mac and have been experimenting with FireFox 2 and getting deeper into Google, I’ve seen a better way to experience the web the Mac.
After dumping .mac, it seems that a whole new world has opened up through what Google has to offer. I, like many others are also in the Google FanBoy camp, but it seems that for me right now, Google is fitting rather well. So here is how I see my life has and will improve over the next bit, without .mac.
When I has my .mac account, I was able to (and still can mind you, should I desire) to check both my work and personal email at the same time using Mail. Well now that I’ve moved my personal email into gmail I don’t need to see both work and play at the same time. If I don’t want to be bothered with work at home, I just don’t fire up Mail. I still think Mail is the best (or at least with the best of breed) mail application out there, but it’s strengths shine especially bright, like any other mail app, when the webmail interface stinks. I happen to like gmail’s interface for the moment, so this keeps a nice separation. I would like to see gmail support more signatures, but that is a minor point. This one change has been very liberating to me (or so it seems) – work stays tucked away at home when I don’t want to see it, and personal elements are only accessed the same way at work. The only intersection is the calendar that is governed by the brutally efficient “Father Time”.
Speaking of time, one of the perks of having a .mac account is syncing bookmarks in Safari and iCal. FireFox and Google Sync do a similar job with the browsers, so this was not a deal breaker. iCal is another syncing app, but it is one that demands you view it in it’s entirely (without going to Dashboard to sneak a peak at your coming events). Now with my calendar being dealt with by Google Calendar, Google Notifier sits happily on my menu bar telling me how many events I have coming in the next few days. This is still a mix of work and play, but what it does is remind me when I need to switch gears. Helping me tease out work from play from everything else.
The other thing that I enjoyed about Safari was it’s RSS reader. I know there are many others out there, but I liked the way that it worked and the syncing helped me out quite a bit. I had tried online readers – Bloglines and the sort and even Google Reader, but before the later got a face lift, none really clicked with me. But now, Google’s Reader seems to be the way to go for RSS feeds, so I have less of a reason to use Safari. I especially like being able to share feeds – so here is my EDIT feed for those who are interested in who I read on a daily basis.
Knowing that Safari is (generally) stable, it’s still going to be my go to browser for banking and other similar transactions, but I think for everything else on the web, I’m going to be using FireFox and Google’s web based apps. This is a load of trust that I’m giving to Google, so hopefully I don’t get burned. But if everything stays the way it is, I’m almost completely free of a site or client based service solution.
Everything is not rosy for Google. I dropped Blogger as I’ve grown out of it and WordPress is just so much better overall. But Google has done for me what it’s trying to do for everyone else. It’s organized my data. Before I had everything wrapped up in a .mac based package that had small amounts of access from the outside via the web. But with Google’s solutions, there are small web based silos that will talk to clients if you want them to but can be accessed as silos should you wish. Being able to do this has seemed to pay off for me.
I don’t know if this is what others have noticed through their own travels and experiments with similar solutions, but I thought it would be a good thing to toss this out for those pondering leaving the comfortable blanket that is .mac and venturing out into the world.
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