.Mac iDiskUtility for Windows XP

[MacRumors]

Apple posted (http://www.mac.com/1/idiskutility_download.html) iDisk Utility for Windows XP:


iDisk Utility for Windows XP make sharing files and connecting to Public folders and iDisks easier than ever.

[alset]

This will make it easier for me to share my iDisk from school. Thanks, Apple. This is very necessary.

Dan

[Ocelot]

Will windows users soon be using and purchasing dot mac??

Interesting move...

actually... why XP? why not 2000/XP/NT? would that be so difficult?

my school uses win 2000... hmm

[vniow]

Very nice. Works great too.http://forums.macrumors.com/attachment.php?s=&postid=251585

[howard]

could be a convienent little gateway to attract more windows users

[eric_n_dfw]

Interesting to say the least!

I wish Windows 2000 support was available though.

[railthinner]

Is this the first ever app Apple has produced for Windows?

[vniow]

Originally posted by railthinner
Is this the first ever app Apple has produced for Windows? Never heard of Quicktime?

[Mac til death]

Originally posted by railthinner
Is this the first ever app Apple has produced for Windows?

no

ever heard of quicktime?

(and quicktime wasn't the first)

[timbloom]

Originally posted by railthinner
Is this the first ever app Apple has produced for Windows?
Appleworks has been available for Windows.
Filemaker is also an asset of Apple's.

[MrMacMan]

Originally posted by railthinner
Is this the first ever app Apple has produced for Windows?

Um... not even close...
Sure apple likes making mac-only apps but I believe apple has maken other products I think appleworks (ha) runs on PC. (yeah it does).

I'm sorta-of supprised at this but atleast they didn't give .Mac accounts (trial) to pc.

[timbloom]

Originally posted by MrMacman

I'm sorta-of supprised at this but atleast they didn't give .Mac accounts (trial) to pc.
Well, it was originally meant to be one of those selling points of the mac when it was free, but now it would be reasonable to offer it to windows users, but probably a pain in the arse to support

[MrMacMan]

Quicktime, clarisworks (well didn't become an 'apple' product intill) appleworks.

I am supprised..

[railthinner]

doh. Alright, bury me in banana peels. I completely overlooked Quicktime. I guess I was a bit taken back.

[timbloom]

I personally think that this can be considered a subtle sign of Apple's coming agression in the PC market. Not talking about marklar or anything, but more along the lines of superior software solutions for PC's, something we mac users see as a daily luxury.

[daRAT]

Originally posted by Ocelot
Will windows users soon be using and purchasing dot mac??

Interesting move...

actually... why XP? why not 2000/XP/NT? would that be so difficult?

my school uses win 2000... hmm

If the program works on XP it should work on 2000, download it and give it a try :]

[FattyMembrane]

Originally posted by MrMacman
Quicktime, clarisworks (well didn't become an 'apple' product intill) appleworks.

actually, i believe claris was always a division of apple. anyway, it's interesting to watch the ms vs. apple war begin to heat up. the page 2 rumors note that apple may have purchaced mariner (among others), lending more credibility to a forthcoming office suite. i think that now that itools (pardon me, .mac) is a pay service, apple should offer it to windows users as a taste of our goodies. i think we'll see even more drastic measures in the months ahead as apple and ms go at each others throats. fortunately, apple has the ability to keep things secret until the last minute, while ms has to give away its plans months in advance just so that people will be impressed.

[edesignuk]

The sad thing is, my iDisk actually seems faster on my PC than on my Mac :(

[bbarnhart]

I wish Apple would add a database (MySQL), mailing lists, ftp, etc. These things are needed for me to switch 100% to my .Mac address. I do have a .Mac account and my own domain because I need the pro features.

I have had the occasion to ftp software and files to my domain and then remotely, copy them to another machine out of my office. And, I do use MySQL for ease of maintaining my exciting web page :rolleyes:. And, I use mailing lists to gather 'card' games with my friends.

Hopefully, this is just the first (or second) step down that path.

[iJon]

i guess now we cant say apple didnt realease anything new today.

iJon

[daRAT]

Originally posted by timbloom
I personally think that this can be considered a subtle sign of Apple's coming agression in the PC market. Not talking about marklar or anything, but more along the lines of superior software solutions for PC's, something we mac users see as a daily luxury.

I tend to disagree. While I think Apple is going to "Wintelize" some apps, I doubt thet will go balls to the wall into the PC software market. I think Apple would get crushed by MS and others that feel threatened by the Apple products on Wintel boxes.

I predict that Apple will make nice "niche" apps for the Wintel machines, things that will make sense for pc owners to buy. I wouldn't buy Keynote and drop Powerpoint, or Appleworks and drop Office on my pc's at work, but I would be interested in both for the PC's that do not require FULL MS Office appilcations, as long as the Apple apps save into MS format (doc, xls etc), without ANY conversion problems.

I can see this happening, my first hint Apple existed was because I used Quicktime that came bundled on win95 :]

[iSmell]

Originally posted by timbloom
I personally think that this can be considered a subtle sign of Apple's coming agression in the PC market.

I think this can be considered a boring insignificant yawn of an announcement. Who cares? They're not going to lure an switchers with .Mac (they're lucky just to keep current subscribers) and they should just make everything ftp accessible, then you wouldn't need a special utility for pc or for Linux or OS/2 or whatever else you might want to access you iDisk from.

Call me when they announce PHP, MySQL, and FTP support.




Unimpressed.

[Freg3000]

Originally posted by iJon
i guess now we cant say apple didnt realease anything new today.

iJon
Only I wish that what they released came in 10, 20, and 40 GB versions.... :(

Oh well; it's still something Apple.

[edesignuk]

Just on a side note, for those of you who don't know (I would imagine most of you do), it has been possible to easily access your iDisk from your PC for a long time.
All you had to do was add a "network place" with the address http://idisk.mac.com/YourDotMacUserName and then you would be able to get to everything just the same as with this utility (accept it doesn't actually mount it as a drive with a letter).

[FelixDerKater]

Originally posted by FattyMembrane
actually, i believe claris was always a division of apple. anyway, it's interesting to watch the ms vs. apple war begin to heat up. the page 2 rumors note that apple may have purchaced mariner (among others), lending more credibility to a forthcoming office suite. i think that now that itools (pardon me, .mac) is a pay service, apple should offer it to windows users as a taste of our goodies. i think we'll see even more drastic measures in the months ahead as apple and ms go at each others throats. fortunately, apple has the ability to keep things secret until the last minute, while ms has to give away its plans months in advance just so that people will be impressed.

Yes, Claris was always owned by Apple. The office suite only became ClarisWorks when they spun off Claris. Later they bring them back into Apple, and call ClarisWorks by the name AppleWorks again. For many years, Claris was the only thing profitable thing Apple had. It is probably one of the big reasons Apple was able to stay afloat, even with tremendous losses.

[Archmage]

I mounted my iDisk to the I: drive... makes sense, doesn't it?

1. Open a folder and go to the "Tools" menu and choose "Map Network Drive...".
2. Choose the desired drive letter (I?) from the "Drive" drop-down list.
3. Enter "\\idisk.mac.com\username" without the quotes into the "Folder" drop-down list where "username" is your .Mac username.
4. Choose whether you want to reconnect to your iDisk when you logon to your computer by putting a checkmark in the "Reconnect at logon" checkbox.
5. Click the "Finish" button. Your computer will attempt to connect to your iDisk.
6. You will be prompted for your .Mac username and password. Enter them and click the "OK" button.

Works like a charm!

If you have troubles, you might also try the trouble-shooting techniques for connecting to the Web Folder, such as adding a "?" after your username.

[jettredmont]

Originally posted by edesignuk
Just on a side note, for those of you who don't know (I would imagine most of you do), it has been possible to easily access your iDisk from your PC for a long time.
All you had to do was add a "network place" with the address http://idisk.mac.com/YourDotMacUserName and then you would be able to get to everything just the same as with this utility (accept it doesn't actually mount it as a drive with a letter).

Or, of course, you could have used "Tools|Map Network Drive" to map that to a drive letter, just as the utility does.

I'm severely underwhelmed by the utility. I've never bothered using the iDisk Utility on my Mac, but I thought that at the very least it allowed you to easily see how much space you had left on the disk, etc. Granted, I can see how much free space is left on my particular iDisk server (2.5GB of space, according to Windows), but that's just using Windows Explorer, not the Utility. All it does is connect, for those unable to type "http://idisk.mac.com/myusername" and then give "myusername" and "mypassword" in the Windows built-in dialogs. Heck, at least with the "map network drive" option my username is remembered and I just have to type in the password every time I reconnect!

Granted, it makes things one little insignificant smidgen easier (other than having to re-type my username every time), but not nearly enough to justify a download!

[morlium]

I don't think many people knew about the "Map Network Drive" option, esp. switchers. This is a good little niche app.

Plus, it's nice to see ".Mac Utilities" in my "start" menu!

[Longey Nowze]

it's too slow and I have braodband! it took me an hour to upload 8MB and then at the end i got an error! i've been trying for with no luck! am I doing something wrong? someone told me this is cuz of webdav, he said if they've used FTP it would've been much better... I don't know can anyone help?

OH! did anyone notice this
February 25, 2003

All .Mac web-based services will be down for maintenance from 1:00 am to 2:00 am PST on March 1, 2003. This will affect the .Mac website and the .Mac related features of our client applications (like iPhoto, Mac Slides Publisher, Backup, iCal and iSync).



iDisk, client-based Mail (IMAP and POP) will be unaffected. Published HomePages will will still be available, but they will not display counters and password protected and FileSharing pages will be unavailable.

it was posted on the .mac support site, it's just for an hour, do think they're going to have something new? I an hour doesn't seem to be enough time to add a new feature but what do I know? lol... I just hope they fix up iDisk

thank you
MaT

[AidenShaw]

Originally posted by daRAT
If the program works on XP it should work on 2000, download it and give it a try :]

Well, not always.

Each new version of NT has additional features (APIs) which were not present in previous versions. This is usually forward compatible (you can move an older program to a newer system), but not backward compatible (a new program written using the new APIs won't work on an older version without the APIs).

I've written a number of small disk and filesystem utilities, and know that XP has some public APIs for disk and file functions that you have to use DDK or undocumented interfaces to do under NT/W2K.

While it can be a lot simpler in places to use the XP APIs, most commercial vendors write to the W2K APIs for portability (or do run-time checks and use the XP APIs on XP, and the older tricks on other versions).

Maybe Apple wants you to upgrade to XP?

[cshapiro]

My school has a very strengent policy on using the computers. We cannot install aplications or modify any settings. (EVEN THE SCREEN RESOLUTION!)
I wish apple would make it so that I could downlod the files off of iDisk from the website, so that I could use it for school.
Works on my home PC, but why would I need it to, since I already got a mac and a network?

[alset]

I am really shocked by how many people consider this a move by Apple into the PC market. While I don't dispute that they are likely to make such advances, this is obviously not one of them. No PC user will likely have any interest in a .Mac account. This release is for the benefit of existing .Mac users.

With this release, it's easier to load my iDisk from a PC. That's the whole point. Half the barrier between me and my documents has been terminated. All that remains is for Apple to improve support for OS 9. As a sound student, I attend a school that still relies heavily on 9 for apps like DP and PT. Though these are falling in line with X, the school will not upgrade until the apps have been tested for a while. Thus, OS 9 is a formidable foe in the quest to quickly launch my iDisk.

Thanks to Apple for removing half the hassle.

Dan

[NSObject]

Maybe it's kind of: get PC users used to Apple Products, think of the OS X on Intel rumors... Apple is heading to the PC Users there must be a reason for this.

greets

[MacCoaster]

Mounting iDisk on Windows has always been possible, yes, thanks to WebDAV. That's what iDisk is basically.

Any OS with WebDAV support can mount iDisk, even Linux.