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by Mark Corchin
Some things become accepted norms in computing. If you buy a printer they won't pack it with a USB cable. If you buy a new Mac you need to buy more RAM and if you want to learn how to use a new program you have to buy a manual. I look at the manual Apple packed with my Power Mac 6500 and compare it to the foldout sheet packed with my G-4, and expect that writing and printing got very expensive. Apple's wonderful suite of applications that comprise the .Mac account demand the comfort of the teachings of Chuck Toporek. For a measly $20.00 his book tutors the user on every aspect of the .Mac account including the mac.com email account, what's inside your iDisk, backing up critical data to offsite servers using .Mac's Backup application, building a web page with .Mac HomePage tools, using iSync to synchronize your contacts, calendars, and Safari bookmarks and if you are into it, how to create a weblog with iBlog. Now that Apple has increased the default size for the .Mac account 250 MB, Inside .Mac has become two and a half times more valuable! Some of the more intuitive applications such as Photo Album are described in depth and provide us with a detailed manual to polish and make professional our often quickly-published snapshot collections. . If you are a true "road warrior", living out of a suitcase and computing from a laptop, a .Mac account can be a lifeline to safety and communication, and Inside .Mac a guide to how to get it all to click together. If like me your sojourn to remote locations is infrequent there are still some tricks to help you at home that this book offers. One of the best I found was how to change your mac.com mail account from an IMAP account to a POP account. Using the IMAP is great if you are on the road, but if most of your mail is done from home or office and you want to save the messages to your drive and archive them freeing up space on the .Mac server, then this is one of the helpful guides in the early chapters. . The book is well illustrated, easily read and extremely well organized, indexed and just another example of an excellent offering from the folks at O'Reilly publishing. At 350 pages it provides more information than the casual user might need to manage the .Mac account, but it is a complete reference and the inclusion of application tutorials for Safari, Mail, iSync, Backup and others is a real bonus . On a personal note I've had a .Mac account since it was an iTools account. Chuck Toporek's book has explained in minutes what I struggled to learn on my own in hours. Another excellent addition to the computer reference library. I give it 5 out of 5 apples.
View all our book reviews. Or, view our Software, hardware, and game reviews. [ home | newsletter | past | join | listserve | shareware | directory | links | md9 ] © 2004 by Mark Corchin & MLMUG |
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