Apple has posted a nifty tip for Mail users who miss the discontinued iCards feature from .Mac: You can use Mail stationery to create an attractive card-like message with your own photos.

In a post on the Mobile Me blog (hey, it's not dead!), Apple says "...it's like the old Make Your Own iCards feature on steroids, and a whole lot easier to use in the bargain."

For Leopard users, Mail comes with 30 email templates you can customize in lieu of sending an iCard. Personally, I think an email is better than an iCard anyway, what with all the greeting card spam that goes on.

You can use photos that you take with Photo Booth, for example, or pictures from iPhoto. Customize it with a clever note, and away you go.

If you don't have Leopard or still want to use an online greeting card site, there are plenty to choose from.

(And if you like our series for beginners, Mac 101, there's much more to learn.)

How big is one percent? If it's a surcharge on your restaurant check, not that much; if it's a point on your mortgage, ow. If it's a chunk of .Mac/MobileMe email account holders who are left hanging for a week without access to their email... well, let's just say that anyone in that select and sorry lot who used a mac.com email address for professional or vital communications is justifiably furious right now.

The good news, if you can say that under the circumstances, is that the outage that started July 18 may be coming to a close. Apple has posted a tech note on the ongoing issues, launched a blog to cover the MobileMe introduction challenges, and provided some additional details about what happened. As of 10 pm PDT last night, the one-percenters should be able to log into MobileMe webmail and retrieve messages from the July 18–25 outage window, though none from before the problem started are available yet. Apple also warns affected users NOT to change MobileMe passwords, aliases or storage allocations until the problem is cleared up, so be alert.

As the problem was triggered by a "serious issue" on one of Apple's mail servers, some messages got dropped in the bit bucket and will never come back (unless you have them cached in a local client like Mail.app, Entourage, Thunderbird or Outlook). Apple's statement:

While the vast majority of your email messages will be fully restored, a small percentage of email messages in the affected accounts have regrettably been lost. This includes approximately 10% of messages received between 5:00 a.m. PDT on July 16 and 10:20 a.m. PDT on July 18. We sincerely apologize for any email messages you may have lost.

Apologies are well and good -- but considering the MobileMe terms of service, that's about all you can expect to see, as Apple isn't liable for lost business or damages due to the outage. If there's a lesson in this, maybe it's that mission-critical users should own their own domains and public-facing email addresses, so that they can redirect incoming mail in a crisis. Depending on a single provider for mail (even ones with a reputation for reliability) can bite you.

Written by Michael Rose. Thanks to everyone who sent this in.

I don't think it will come as a shock to anyone that the MobileMe transition hasn't gone as smoothly as Apple would have liked. A recent update to the .Mac support page (shown above) states, 'The MobileMe transition is underway but is taking longer than expected. Please refer to the official System Status to the right for current information on the availability of MobileMe services. We apologize for any inconvenience.'

Cory was able to sneak into MobileMe and take some pictures, so at least you can check out what you're missing. Here's hoping that this rocky start leads to a much more solid product since, as Mike pointed out, .Mac wasn't exactly a hallmark of uptime itself.

[via GearLive]

Tonight, we will all say "goodbye" to .Mac, a service that has been a small part of Apple for almost 8 years. iTools, .Mac's predecessor, was launched on January 5, 2000 at the Macworld Expo in San Francisco and was a free service that included a HomePage, iCards and the much coveted @mac.com e-mail address that is commonplace today (as well as the forgotten 'KidSafe,' which was a database of kid friendly websites Apple compiled so you could make sure your children weren't up to no good on your Mac). As more users came to the service and the cost of bandwidth went up, Apple began charging for the service and called it .Mac.

The name ".Mac" was born at the Macworld Expo in New York on July 17, 2002 and provided several new services including: a beefed up iDisk (with a dizzying 100 megs of space), Backup, and a free copy of Virex. On September 17, 2002, Apple announced that it would discontinue the free iTools service in favor for .Mac.

That brings us to, well, tonight. Apple is scheduled to take down .Mac and replace it with a newer, rebranded service named "MobileMe." While some scoff at the name, TUAW can't help but see the other side of the picture: look how far iTools has evolved over the past 8 years. So, join us in saying, "So long old friend, we hardly knew ye."

Do you have a favorite story to tell about iTools or .Mac? Be sure to mention it in the comments below! Apple is scheduled to take down the .Mac service between 6 p.m. and 12 a.m. pacific time.

With all the current hype surrounding the imminent release of both the upgrade to Apple's .Mac service, now to be forever known as MobileMe, and Friday's launch of the new, improved iPhone version 2.0, let's not forget that Apple also makes other types of hardware that seems to be selling pretty well these days. In fact, according to a recent article up over at AppleInsider, Apple is apparently poised to ship 2.5 Million Macs in the Spring -- thanks, in some measure, to the poor reception of Microsoft's Windows Vista.

According to BMO Capital Markets analyst Keith Bachman, Apple's potentially strong quarter, which ends in June, can be attributed to several factors. Among them, user dissatisfaction with Vista. "Thus far, user satisfaction ratings for Vista have been weak, and startup times for Vista have been known to be much slower than the Mac OS X," Bachman said in the article. "Thus, more than 50% of recent customers buying Macs in Apple retail stores are first-time buyers."

In addition, the analyst added that this problem could help Apple's bottom line well into 2009 and could potentially improve the company's current world market share, raising it to 3.9% or higher. This is good news for those of us who remember the time, not so long ago, when most in the press and analysts like Bachman predicted Apple's certain demise. Still, even with this good news, we still need to hope Apple doesn't do something to hurt itself -- like bungle the .Mac to MobileMe transition or run out of shiny new iPhones at 8:30AM on Friday. That would not be a good thing.

Early Tuesday morning, Apple started offering boxed versions of the much awaited MobileMe web service. While buying from Apple costs $99 for the boxed version, Amazon is offering MobileMe for $89.99 (US).

According to Amazon, MobileMe has been on sale since "July 1, 2008," however, they also say "This item will not be released until July 12, 2008."

We did learn last night that MobileMe is scheduled to launch on Wednesday, July 9th around 6 p.m. pacific time.

Stay tuned to TUAW for the latest information regarding the .Mac to MobileMe switch, iPhone 2.0 software, and the iPhone 3G coverage.


Thanks, Jay!

Apple has just updated the .Mac status page with the date/time of the .Mac to MobileMe switch. So, for those of you wondering when Apple might start the switch will not have to wonder any longer. July 9th from 6 p.m. until 12 a.m. PT is the scheduled date and time.

Apple says that during the switch, users will be "unable to access www.mac.com or any .Mac services ... with the exception of .Mac Mail accessed via a desktop application, iPhone, or iPod touch."

According to Apple, "MobileMe will be available as soon as possible during this maintenance window." Be sure to stay tuned to TUAW for the latest on the .Mac to MobileMe switch.


Thanks, Andy and Barry!

The above message has been posted to the .Mac Tips website. As you can see .Mac members are being told to sync their .Mac bookmarks to a computer (Mac or PC) by July 6th because web access to bookmarks is no longer going to be supported in MobileMe (.Mac's replacement). The July 6th date is actually a few days later than the one Apple first gave in this KB article (June 30th). It looks like Apple wants to give all .Mac members as much time as possible to get their bookmarks in order.

Does this mean we'll see the official launch of MobileMe on the 6th? Probably not, since Apple has stated that MobileMe will be available on July 11, but then again Me.com email is already being properly routed so this might all be part of a soft launch (as they say in the biz).

Thanks to everyone who sent this in.

Macrumors.com is reporting that for some .Mac users, using a me.com email address seems to be working. For instance, if your .Mac account name is username, sending an email to username@me.com works the same as sending one to username@mac.com.

Your mileage may vary -- as of 8:35 PM EDT on Saturday, June 28, 2008, it wasn't working for me.

Update: About four hours later, it's working for me.

[via MacRumors.com]

.Mac web services were "temporarily unavailable" for a time this morning, and things are still a little shaky. No explanation was given for the outage.

Mail was working when tested, but iDisk access through afp:// still appears to be shut off (at 10:50 a.m. ET). Homepages and access to iDisk public folders seem to be OK, too. We'll keep tabs on this, and let you know when the service is back up and running. Check back soon!

Update (11:20 a.m. ET): Web access seems to be up and running, but iDisk via afp:// is still down.

Update (1:45 p.m. ET): iDisk access is back up, but I'm not sure when that happened. One computer is still unable to connect, and the other computer connects just fine.

Thanks to everyone who sent this in!

Joining in on the conversation about tonight's .Mac outage, reader Chad sent us a link to a page he discovered on .Mac. He said that while trying to access his .Mac service on his iPhone, he was redirected to a MobileMe browser requirements page. One of the suspicious things on the page is the fact that "calendar" is spelled wrong (i.e. "calender"). You can see a screen grab of the page after the break.

Canada has many things going for it: maple trees everywhere, single-payer health care system and a one-of-a-kind Apple page. One of our readers just tipped us about an error on the MobileMe signup completion page for Canada. Apparently, Apple's designers left in some placeholder text on the signup "thank you" page. While Apple does (yes, they really do) make some mistakes, leaving greeked text on a webpage isn't usually one of them. [If you're saying "that looks like Latin, not Greek," see here. -Ed.]

You can see the Freudian slip by visiting Apple's Canadian MobileMe signup completion page.

We've gotten several reports this morning that sections of the .Mac service, including web galleries, webmail and the www.mac.com page, are offline today. Email to the .Mac domain appears to be flowing but there's no ETA on restoration of the services and no clear picture of exactly what is affected.

This is not entirely a surprising development considering the wholesale migration of .Mac to MobileMe, but it's a little discouraging. Perhaps we should all send "get well soon" iCards... oh, wait, nevermind.

Thanks to everyone who sent this in.