Mac OS X Snow Leopard Pocket Guide

Chapter 7. MobileMe

There’s a good chance that you have more than one device connected to the Internet. You might have two Macs, a Mac and a PC, a Mac and an iPhone, or any combination of devices mentioned (plus others). All those devices have a lot of data on them. You have settings, bookmarks, contacts, and more. MobileMe makes the chore of keeping your devices in sync less onerous by taking most of the work out of it for you.

MobileMe is the successor to .Mac, but it hasn’t changed a whole lot. MobileMe is a paid subscription service that gives you some storage space on servers run by Apple (20 GB, although this may change in future) for a personal account that includes email, file storage, and website hosting (there are limits on the monthly data transfer). MobileMe also offers the ability to keep your computers (Macs and, to some extent, Windows-based machines) synced with each other. For a free trial, go to http://www.apple.com/mobileme/ or head to the MobileMe preference pane in System Preferences.

Using MobileMe with your Mac is easy; everything is built right in. But chances are that you don’t exclusively use a Mac, so you’ll want to use MobileMe on your Windows-based machine as well, since you’ve got data you want updated on your Windows machine too, right? You have to go to http://www.apple.com/mobileme/features/pc.html to get MobileMe working on your Windows-based machine. You’ll need to have iTunes installed, then you’ll need to install the MobileMe control panel. Once ...