November 21, 2008
Your MobileMe Gallery was designed to live up to the "mobile" in its name. It's easy to upload photos into your online albums from wherever you need to using a browser, and even easier directly from iPhone. Before you can send photos from your iPhone to the web, you need to set up an album in the Gallery web application at me.com. In Gallery, select (or create) an album, click the Adjust Settings button and then check the box to allow adding of photos via email or iPhone.
With that option set, when viewing a photo from the iPhone camera roll you need only touch the Send Photos icon in the lower-left corner, then Send to MobileMe, where you can choose among the MobileMe albums you allow this for. Enter any text you want to appear with the photo in the subject line, and send it. It will then appear on your Gallery album on the web. You can watch this video to see how easy this is.
November 14, 2008
When you start a new message in MobileMe webmail, the button just to the right of the Send button in the toolbar saves the message pane contents in your Drafts folder. It's especially useful when you need to start a long message and then work on it off and on, because it lets you save what you've done so far each time you get interrupted or pause to do something else. Picking up where you left off after you've closed the application is as easy as going to your Drafts folder and reopening the message. By the way, MobileMe webmail automatically saves messages to the Drafts folder every five minutes when you're writing an email. Drafts are kept until you send the message so if you close your browser before finishing a long email and forget to save it first, there is a good chance that a draft will have been saved there for you.
November 5, 2008
There aren't many industry acronyms it helps to know about, but IMAP is one of them. The words the letters stand for, Internet Message Access Protocol, don't exactly cause the heart to leap, but the protocol itself defines a promise that matters a lot to anyone who handles their mail from more than one location. The promise boils down to this: whenever you go to your inbox and other folders, no matter from where, things will be exactly as you last left them, no matter from where. And that's why we use it for MobileMe email accounts.
The protocol puts what's on the cloud (server) in charge. It lets you access your account and work with it locally from a variety of places via different applications. But it insists that the master copy be kept on the server and that all changes be recorded there, so that each new log-in produces the inbox and folder contents you expect to see. In the other standard messaging protocol, POP, the local copy is primary, and when you access your mail it is generally removed from the server after being copied down to your local inbox. If you access your messages from more than one place, life can get confusing--a message you want to read on the road might have already been downloaded to a different computer or a filing change you make at work won't be reflected back at home.
With an IMAP account things just work the way you'd expect from the way they look, so you don't have to think about it. It's got the possibility of "mobile" built into its core. If you haven't set up your computer, iPhone, or iPod touch with your MobileMe IMAP account yet, check out these instructions.
