Daring Fireball is already onto the breadcrumb trail which began last week with Russian-language site Deep Apple discovering some peculiar changes to the "Localizable.strings" resource in Mac OS X 10.5.3.
Specifically, the site noted that strings related to iCal now include a wildcard placeholder for the .Mac name rather than a hardcoding of the name itself. This is changed from Mac OS X 10.5.2, the site added.
/* Label of the .Mac button in iCalâs General preferences. %@ is the new name of Appleâs online service (was .Mac) (remove -XX02) */
Inspired by Deep Apple, another site by the name of Blogging Robots picked up on on trail and discovered that the same wildcard holders had been embedded into the code for both the new versions of Safari and Mail.app.
/* Title of .Mac alert sheet, with .Mac brand name subsituted */ âYou need a %@ account that has syncing enabledâ = âYou need a %@ account that has syncing enabledâ;
/* Title of button used to open the .Mac system preference pane. */ âAOS_SYNC_BUTTON_FORMATâ = â%@â¦â;
/* Descriptive text for .Mac Sync. */ âAOS_SYNC_FORMATâ = âUse %@ to synchronize Accounts, Rules, Notes, Signatures, and Smart Mailboxes.â;
The site added that the three applications appear to be retrieving the .Mac name from a CoreServices system file that could easily be infused with a new service name via a future software update, "and â boom! â all your apps will have the new name."
On-again, off-again rumors have pegged Apple to be working on an overhaul to .Mac that would appear around mid-year. Some tipsters have even gone as far as to suggest the company would tie the service into its 3G iPhone plans, offering a discount on the $99 per-year subscription fee for those customers who purchase both items.
Should that be the case, .Mac would suddenly seem like an odd brand for a service positioned at millions of iPhone wielding Windows users, Daring Fireball notes. As such, the site points to AppleInsider's January 2006 discovery of Apple's "Mobile Me" trademark as a likely candidate for a re-branding.
At the time, it was noted that Apple filed for the Mobile Me mark under four distinct categorizations, the most interesting of which being:
"Telecommunication services; electronic transmission and retrieval of data, images, audio, video and documents, including text, cards, letters, messages, mail, animations, and electronic mail, over local or global communications networks, including the internet, intranets, extranets, television, mobile communication, cellular and satellite networks; electronic transmission of computer software over local or global communications networks, including the internet, intranets, extranets, television, mobile communication, cellular, and satellite networks; electronic mail services; facsimile transmission; web site portal services; providing access to databases and local or global communications networks, including the internet, intranets, extranets, television, mobile communication, cellular, and satellite networks; internet service provider services; message transmission services, namely, electronic transmission of messages; telecommunication services for the dissemination of information by mobile telephone, namely the transmission of data to mobile telephones; mobile telephone communication services."
Meanwhile, the MobileMe.com domain name has been parked for some time under Apple's traditional domain registrar, Mark Monitor. Its records were updated less than two months ago. In itself, that doesn't say much. But the (below) resource photos also recently taken by Blogging Robots from a recent iPhone SDK build make things a bit more interesting:
85 Comments
Am I going to have to change my email address?
After going through AOL then a couple of Comcast addresses (@rr, @home and .net) and now FIOS I figured .mac would be my last stop for a while...
I must admit, frankly, that I always hated the name. It seemed like a rip-off of Microsoft's bizarrely named .NET.
I seem to be in the minority of people who actually say they like the service, but even I think a name change would certainly be a welcome change. Mobile Me is not one of the names I'd choose -- sounds like Dr. Evil's sidekick (or his T-Mobile Sidekick?), even though I think it might give Verne Troyer a chance to return to Apple ads (he was ADORABLE in his ad with Yao Ming!)
Am I going to have to change my email address?
After going through AOL then a couple of Comcast addresses (@rr, @home and .net) and now FIOS I figured .mac would be my last stop for a while...
My .Mac e-mail address ends with @mac.com. There's no .mac in the actual address.
Am I going to have to change my email address?
After going through AOL then a couple of Comcast addresses (@rr, @home and .net) and now FIOS I figured .mac would be my last stop for a while...
Yeah, I used to have an eworld.com address.
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Hope this rumor is true.
Renamed or not, .Mac has long been Apple's least compelling/worst value equation offering.
I used it for a year to host my iWeb site but never found anything else relevant to me -- though the Leo Laporte MacBreak Weekly gang seems to find it a linch pin of their existence.
But for free I can collaborate on docs on Google, coordinate GCal and iCal, and store 5GB of data on various services (including M$'s SkyDrive!!). And host a website for less than a Ben Frank a year.
And someone can correct me, but in a mixed PC/Mac setup like I have, I don't think I can do the real-time sharing that can be done with multiple Macs.
My opinion is that .Mac COULD be a very compelling service, but it needs a real refresh, the latest computing in the cloud tricks, more features, more storage and a lower price (or more clearly added value for the AVERAGE computer user, not just Mac uber-geeks).
PS: At least I got to keep Backup.app for my subscription and use it to back up my key docs to a flash drive I keep off site, while using SuperDuper to clone my entire system on an external drive I keep in another part of the house (soon to be kept in a fire resistant safe).