The Small Wave.

Next up in my discovery series on Snow Leopard is MobileMe. Apple didn’t talk about it much for this upgrade, but I’m writing about it because I ran into a frustrating snag, and found a great new option.

Bad News First

I keep a local iDisk on both my Macs. I use the data on whichever machine I want, and never worry about it being current because MMe keeps it all in sync. The beauty of this approach to Cloud computing is that I’m not at the whim of the Cloud in terms of whether performance is slow, or if I can even log in at all. Further, since I’m using local data I get great performance, and can use desktop apps with capabilities that exceed Cloud alternatives. Since I launch some apps via documents, I kept a handful of document aliases in the iDisk's Documents folder. These aliases would point to the correct local file no matter which Mac I opened them from. Not any more. On Snow Leopard, if I used an alias on one machine, the other would balk when it tried to sync it. I could override it, but the resulting synced file was garbage text instead of a functioning alias for that machine. It took some experimentation with three different aliases to confirm this was the problem. I could no longer get a good alias for one machine if it worked on the other. To get around this, I deleted the aliases from iDisk and created them locally on each machine. They don’t sync, of course, but they don’t need to. This really isn’t a big deal, but it was frustrating today as I tried to figure out what was going on. Anyway, since I deleted the aliases iDisk syncs have been fine. No more errors and all seems well.

And Now For The Good News

Personally, I think Apple should have shouted from the rooftops that MobileMe iDisk syncing has a new option:

This is great. I don’t get a lot of sync errors, but when I do I can’t think of a single time that I didn’t take the most recent version of the file. From now on, if the sync issue is due to a time discrepancy I won’t even be bothered. I understand the idea behind any discrepancy stopping the process and prompting the user, but I also believe that some of the prompts are overkill. In my opinion, having the option to always use the most recent file is a great addition.