Securely Share Files Via Your iDisk Public Folder

The beauty of iDisk is that it gives you access to files you may keep on your home Mac from any Web browser at any time you need them. Using the Public folder within iDisk, you can also share these files with others.

Your file-sharing buddies can add your iDisk Public folder to their Finder.

Two things to keep in mind when stashing files in iDisk for your own use or to share with others in your Public folder: You’re limited to a file size of up to 1GB when uploading via me.com using a browser. To upload a file to iDisk, log in to MobileMe at me.com, click the iDisk icon, then click the Upload icon (an up arrow in a small white circle). To save time, you can also mount iDisk on your Desktop and plop files up to 2GB in size there using the Finder. To do this, open System Preferences > MobileMe and click the iDisk tab. At the bottom of the window, turn iDisk Sync on by clicking Start. This is where you can also set a password and manage user privileges for anyone who goes to your Public folder to view or access files. The URL for your Public folder is 
public.me.com/yourmobilemeusername. If you set a password, the username is the 
word public.

They can also get to your Public folder from the Finder by choosing Go > iDisk > Other User’s Public Folder. In the box that appears, they just type your MobileMe username—and, of course, the password, if you’ve protected the folder with one.

Now, to put files into your Public folder, open a new Finder window, and drag files from their location on your Mac’s hard drive to Public on the name of your mounted iDisk “drive.” Voilà—file sharing made relatively simple.

 

Add Photos To MobileMe Galleries From Your iPhone or iPod Touch

Select an album in the Gallery and click the icon that looks like a switch, then check the box that allows you to upload photos via email from your iPhone or iPod touch.

The best thing about this is what a time-saver it can be, particularly if friends and family habitually share their photos with you via email. First you need to set up the albums in your MobileMe Gallery to accept new photos from an iPhone. In MobileMe, click on the Gallery icon. If you want to change the settings on an existing album so it will accept photos sent from your iPhone, select the album and click the Settings icon. In the dialog that appears, check “Adding of photos via email or iPhone,” then click Publish. Now, when you receive a photo via email, or snap a photo on your iPhone that you want to add to a MobileMe gallery, the option to Send To MobileMe appears among the email options that appear when you tap the Send icon at the bottom of the screen.

After a photo has been saved to your Camera Roll, adding it to your MobileMe Gallery is a matter of tapping the Send icon at the bottom of the screen, tapping Send To MobileMe, and choosing the album from the resulting list.

 

Eliminate Duplicate Dock Items and Dashboard Widgets

When you first set up MobileMe syncing on your primary Mac, if you select the option to sync Dashboard Widgets (System Preferences >MobileMe > Sync), you may experience duplication when you go to use another Mac that is synced with the same MobileMe account—particularly if you had duplicate Dashboard widgets installed on both Macs.

The same Dock items on all your Macs—continuity is a beautiful thing.

To set things right, set your Dashboard widgets exactly as you want them on one Mac, sync with MobileMe, then, when syncing your other Macs, allow MobileMe to replace the data on that Mac with data from MobileMe.

The same concept can be applied to Dock items too. We also love the fact that you can sync System Preferences for each MobileMe account, so when you change prefs on one Mac, they’ll apply to your other Macs whenever MobileMe syncs.

 

Change iSync Prefs to Minimize “% change” Pop-ups

Don’t waste your time with inconsequential 5% data-change notifications. Change the percentage in iSync prefs instead.

Depending on which Macs (iPhones, iPod touches, etc.) contain most of your contacts before you start using MobileMe regularly, you may encounter messages when MobileMe syncs warning you that “Syncing with MobileMe will change more than 5% of your Contacts”…or calendars or other data. Rather than worry about this or trying to get to the bottom of exactly what the alerts mean, we prefer instead to change iSync preferences so the number of changes has to reach a higher threshold than 5 percent to trigger an alert. Open /Applications/iSync, choose iSync > Preferences (or just type Command-,) then under Protect Your Data On This Computer, click the Show Data Change Alert in the drop-down to the right from 5% to something higher (we chose 25%).

This way, your Mac will only notify you when more than 5 percent of a certain data type will change as a result of MobileMe syncing.